Vegetarian recipes from Romania

Romanian cooking leans on maize rather than wheat bread, on dried beans and peas, on sunflower oil, and on three aromatics that turn up everywhere: onion, dill and savory. Mamaliga, cornmeal cooked in salted water and stirred at length, stands in for bread at the table and goes with nearly everything. Summer vegetables are not only eaten fresh: they are charred over flame, peeled and chopped, as in Romanian aubergine salad, where the burnt skin gives the smokiness an oven never produces.

The calendar explains the rest. Orthodox fasting periods bar meat, milk and eggs for close to half the year, and every common dish has its lean version. So what keeps is put into jars: zacusca of roasted peppers and aubergine is made in quantity each autumn, fasole batuta beats white beans into a purée crowned with browned onion, and mushroom sarmale swap the pork filling for rice, mushrooms and fermented cabbage leaves.