Tag Archives: Teodor Flonta

Teodor Flonta~Memories of Easter in Transylvania

19 Apr

On Facebook today my friend, Teodor Flonta shared  his childhood Easter traditions growing up in Romania during a Communist regime. With his gracious permission, I am sharing them with you~Onisha Ellis

From Teodor

 

HAPPY EASTER! 
to all my friends from around the world with #Tasmanian eggs coloured with onion skin, just as my Mama used to do long time ago when I was a little boy in #Transylvania! You can read an excerpt from ‘A Luminous Future’ about my Easter there.

Mama borrowed an old Bible from Piţurca, the only one in the whole village, and started reading to me in the evening. On Thursday night, we would creep into the church, terrified that we would be seen and reported to Comrade Petroi. The church was dimly lit. We would sit on the cold and hard floor in front of the altar, jumping at any slight flicker of the shadows. Father Iordan said that we were like the early Christians, who had to practise their religion in secret. At the end, we would leave only after checking that nobody was on the road. This went on until Easter Thursday, when we were allowed to hammer on the toaca until sunset, to announce the death of Christ. The toaca was a 20cm wide board on a 2m pole in the church courtyard. After sunset, neither hammering on the toaca nor the ringing of bells was allowed until Sunday, the day of the Resurrection.


On Easter Sunday women placed little baskets full of coloured hard-boiled eggs and cross-shaped loaves of white bread in front of the altar for the blessing. The children, dressed in white shirts, took the first Communion in front of the congregation. However, the spectacle we were waiting for was to come later in the church courtyard during the frenzied egg-cracking competition. We wrapped one hand across our egg, exposing only the pointy end, and hit each other’s eggs hard. If your egg cracked, you lost your egg.

“Mircea, I bet I can take away your eggs,” I challenged him outside the church.


He gave me a push and responded, “Try this, smarty.”


I tried and lost.


“You want to try another one?” he asked.


I suspected he was so confident because there was something fishy about his egg. So I accepted the challenge, pulling out from my pocket my special egg. I hit hard and a funny, thick sound, not at all like the sound of an egg cracking, was the result.

What did you do, stupid? You have a wooden egg,” said Mircea.


I ran away laughing.


“And yours is filled with pitch. I could hear it,” I said.

 

Transylvanian born Teodor Flonta is a retired academic, author of ‘A Luminous Future’ – a memoir about life under Communism in the 1950s and 60s – and of multilingual proverb dictionaries and apps (available on iTunes and Google). He lives in Tasmania, Australia, with his wife, Ariella, surrounded by beautiful grandchildren.

 

You can find Teodor’s books on:  AMAZON   BARNES AND NOBLE

 

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Sour Cabbage

24 May

On the Porch

Onisha Ellis

I titled my blog Old Things R New because I want to learn the old ways of growing and preserving foods as well as  growing and using medicinal herbs. Recently I read “A Luminous Future” by Teodor Flonta. The book is set in the late 1940’s through the early 1960’s in Romania. I was fascinated with the foods he ate during that time, in particular, sour cabbage. In “A Luminous Future”, Teodor’s mother would ask him to get a sour cabbage out of the barrel for dinner. I love learning about different methods of food preservation and since Teodor is on twitter I was able to ask questions and he graciously answered.

            “Sour cabbage: take a whole cabbage, cut out the stem, get in the middle of it where the stem was and clean very well the white matter – you obtain a hole like a cone – fill that hole with coarse salt and place the cabbages on the bottom of a barrel next to each other, then you add other layers of cabbages on top until you fill the barrel. Then you add a handful of pepper whole grain, some horseradish, the root, and cover the cabbages with water. Then you place a plank or a lid on top of the barrel and on top of the lid you place a rock or something heavy to keep the cabbages pressed. That’s it. After 2-3 months your sour cabbage is ready. Among the cabbages you can put carrots, green tomatoes, turnips and they’ll be sour too and are quite good in winter. So, the juices the cabbage release and the water, plus the horseradish and pepper do the trick… you don’t need anything else to preserve them in.”

Of course, my next question was how do you eat it? Do you eat it cold or cook it?

“The cabbage can be eaten raw, as it comes from the barrel, like pickles. Or you can add a bit of oil and pepper like you do with salads. Ariella (wife) uses cumin seeds also and no pepper. Then you can fry it with mince meat or ribs or pieces of pork meat… first fry onions until translucent, add the cabbage, 2-3 bay leaves, 10-12 pepper grains, the meat and let it simmer for 40 minutes or so. It is delicious.”

I love the idea of going to a barrel and grabbing out a spicy cabbage so I am looking around for a small barrel. Thank you, Teodor for sharing your knowledge. Teodor and I also discussed preserving meat by larding. I am sure I will be writing about that in the coming weeks. “A Luminous Future” is a wonderful non-fiction novel and I highly recommend it.

If anyone has any tips for preserving or medicinal herbs, I would love to hear from you.

 

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