The Cultural Terroir of Romanian Ciorbă

How a Bowl of Soup Tells Us About Romanian Beliefs

Ciorbă sparks lengthy debates even among Romanians. So what would a tourist think if it took three hours to explain it? The best way to discover the first part of the answer is by eating it. Food is the most direct way into a culture because it speaks to the senses.

Cooking is more accessible—and more democratic—than almost any other form of cultural expression.

Before we consider our cuisine, there are a few people who made Romania famous, and I’d like to talk about them briefly.

We have a world-famous sculptor, Constantin Brâncuși. You may have seen a recent TV ad with Nicole Kidman in front of one of Brancusi’s 1913 bronze sculptures, Danaïde. The clip was paid for by Christie’s ahead of the auction, where it sold for $107.6 million. To appreciate Brâncuși, you usually need some interest in modern art.

We also have a famous composer, George Enescu, and an internationally attended and acclaimed festival with the same name. Yet you are unlikely to know either unless classical music is already your world.

Yes, we have an internationally renowned philosopher and historian of religion, Mircea Eliade, known for his groundbreaking theories on myth and symbolism.

Also, another modern philosopher, Emil Cioran, was more cynical than the Cynics themselves, who coined the term in Ancient Greece. But you need an appetite for philosophy to be aware of them.

Chances are, you are more familiar with the gymnast Nadia Comăneci than with the other names.

If you watched the Olympics in the 60s and 70s, especially the canoe racing events, you might have seen Ivan Patzaichin winning four Olympic gold medals for Romania. Both Nadia and Ivan are national heros, but Ivan stayed in Romania and in his later years, promoted the Danube Delta as a unique destination for ecotourism. (We’ll visit his village on our Delta culinary tour next year)

Now ask yourself: what are you more likely to do first after reading this? Read Cioran? Attend the George Enescu Festival? Learn about Brâncuși? Or go into the kitchen, make a pot of ciorbă, and say: “This is delicious, interesting, Romanian, and I love it.”

I know which I would do first.

And not because it is more practical than needing a PhD in Arts and Philosophy before learning something positive about Romania, but because it is more culturally accessible.

This is the kind of cultural change cooking can ignite.

Cultural Terroir

The people above are Romania’s cultural icons on the world stage, yet many had a complicated relationship with the country itself. Brâncuși left Romania and never returned to live there. Eliade, Enescu and Cioran built their careers abroad. We, as a nation, don’t take hints like these. We still embrace these icons with the unwavering optimism of an unrequited romance: even if you keep your distance, we’ll love you anyway.

Yet all of them drew inspiration from Romanian folklore, rural culture, artistic flair, mythology and ways of seeing the world. They explored our view of the universe that surrounds us, its complexity and the acute sense that we are only a small, fleeting part of it. They looked at the so-called fatalism of Romanian people: “Why even try?’ attitude. The habit of expecting disappointment before success and of preparing for failure. Last but certainly not least, the persistent belief, shared by many Romanians, that everything foreign must be and IS better than what is ours.

This is also the story of ciorbă: a pot where all of the above beliefs and attitudes simmer together.

Ciorbă is ancient: a way of cooking that connects us to our ancestors. It is traditional: it reflects centuries of fasting and feasting shaped by the rhythms of agriculture and religion. It is a composite rather than a pristine culinary expression. It speaks of resilience rather than celebrating triumphs. And, above all, it is sour. And it bears a foreign name.

As you can see, ciorbă has more cultural terroir than the ingredients that make it; there is more Romanian DNA in it than in the word Romania.

We love it in the same way we treat so much that is truly ours: we overlook it, take it for granted, try to change it, and only seem to notice its value once it has disappeared altogether.

Looking Beyond The Surface

Yet, as is often the case with our country, which can be difficult to understand at first, ciorbă is a misleading foreign name.

If you understand food, you’ll be intrigued to find Persian, Mongolian and Turkic dishes this far west, in Romania. The cuisine of the steppe survived here above all in soup. Central Asian shurpa was an unthickened broth cooked in a kazan cauldron—a word still used in Romanian today.

Dried yoghurt, qurut, was used to add more flavour. At a time when Islamic cuisine spread like wildfire across Eurasia, bread soaked in broth became tharid, the Prophet’s soup. Later, the Ottoman çorba was thickened with pulses or rice, reflecting the staples of Islamic cooking.

Yet, Romanian ciorbă remained unthickened. It remained commonly soured with sour cream, fermented wheat bran (borș), or vinegar, preserving echoes of the steppe cultures before Islamic influences. Its souring techniques reveal both ancient Mediterranean (Romans, who ruled over these lands for centuries, loved vinegar) and steppe traditions. Both the cauldron and the dried yoghurt connect it to the nomadic life of the pastoralists, a concept I keep returning to when I talk about Romanian cuisine. (More here)

A Human Trait

Perhaps nothing is more fundamentally human than cooking with fire and water. For the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, boiling marked a profound cultural transformation: unlike roasting over a direct flame, it preserved the integrity of ingredients by mediating them through water and the vessel that contained it.

This was not something brought to Romanians by empires. Boiling meat in water didn’t belong to one conquering army—it is the common inheritance of settled peoples everywhere.

Boiling was also associated with slow, domestic cooking, traditionally overseen by women. In this sense, it came to signify private space and home.

The nourishment and comfort we find in soup today still carry a distinctly maternal feeling.

Ciorbă And The Nationalisation Of Our Cuisine

Although there are regional names for this broth, ciorbă as a term describing a whole category of soups was propelled to stardom by the nationalisation of our cuisine under the Communist regime. The word Ciorbă substituted all other regional names and appeared in books, on menus and in our homes.

Now, the word comes back to haunt us. It’s a whole dilemma: is the dish ours if it has a foreign name? How can we justify it? Should we go back to regional names? Who has the recipes?

Recovering Our Heritage

Luckily, this work began at home, not in the diaspora. In Romania, culinary ethnographer Mircea Groza has spent years documenting zeamă recipes from his native Sălaj County and the neighbouring areas of Transylvania. Zeamă and Acritură are other words we use for soup. It describes a broth, and the variety of recipes is remarkable. Groza has also preserved the language, writing the book in his sweet native Sălaj accent. Yet most recipes share one defining element: sourness.

Writers and journalists such as Cosmin Dragomir have also championed Romanian gastronomy. Dragomir even founded a publishing house to challenge mainstream publishers' long-standing disregard of food culture. There is still much to uncover, and ciorbă has finally entered the cultural conversation. It’s in the zeitgeist.

We are learning to value what is ours.

Sour Power

Nothing in life changes without a struggle, without something pushing us to improve, to become better. In culinary terms, that struggle is often a matter of contrast.

Sourness is one of the most powerful tools in cooking.

It cuts through richness, wakes up tired flavours, balances sweetness, and lightens a dish that might otherwise feel heavy. A splash of acidity can make everything else taste more vivid. It refreshes the palate. I appreciate it so much that I even wrote a piece for the Washington Post about it.

It is also one of the oldest flavours humans learned to trust.

Much of its acidity comes from nature itself: fermented dairy, the probiotic brine of sauerkraut or gherkins, the alchemy of fermented grains, the tartness of unripe fruit, the sharpness of vinegar and even the sour, lactic flavours of cheese.

These are flavours born of preservation and seasonality.

In a ciorbă, they all find a place, each lending the soup its own character.

Romanians love ciorbă, and therefore I included it in my books. Whole chapters of ciorbă. I’ve been including them in my writing, my interviews and cookery demos.

Let’s start with my absolute favourite:

Ciorbă de tarhon cu coaste de porc afumate - Tarragon Soup with Smoked Pork Ribs. Recipe here.

Zeamă de păstăi - Runner Bean Zeamă. Recipe here.

Follow this pattern and try with courgettes: Ciorbă de dovlecei.

Ciorbă de dovleac. Pumpkin Ciorbă. Recipe here.

More inspiration:

Ciorbă de cartofi - Potato Ciorbă with Sour Cream and Pickled Chillis.

Ciorbă de fasole boabe - White Bean Ciorbă with Sausages. Recipe in my book, Carpathia. One of the most popular ciorbe in Romania. It’s served with pickled red onions.

Ciorbă de perișoare. Meatball Ciorbă with Lovage. Recipe in my book Carpathia.

Ciorbă de cuie. Vitamin Ciorbă made with cheese, spring onions and a poached egg. Recipe in my book, Danube.

Ciorbă de raci. Stuffed Pepper Ciorbă, a recipe from my grandfather's ancestral lands in Oltenia. Recipe in my book, Danube.

Ciorbă de varză murată. Sauerkraut Ciorbă. Recipe in my book, Carpathia.

Ciorbă de pește - Fish Soup. Recipe in my book, Danube.

Ciorbă de salată - Lettuce Ciorbă

Recipe:

Ingredients

Serve 4

1 large brown onion

1 medium size carrot

1.5L good vegetable or chicken stock

1 large Romaine lettuce

3 large eggs for an omelette

200g creme fraiche or Greek yoghurt or sour cream

2 standard bunches of spring onions, including green tops if possible

5 tbsp white wine vinegar

Oil for frying

Method:

Heat the oil in a deep pan and cook the vegetables over a medium heat until caramelised. Add the stock and simmer for 10 minutes. Meanwhile, make an omelette by heating a tablespoon of oil in a frying pan, then cook the 2 beaten eggs for a minute on each side. Season and set aside to cool. When cool enough to handle, slice into long strips. Place the yoghurt in a bowl. Add the shredded lettuce and vinegar to the broth, bring to the boil, then remove from the heat immediately. Carefully transfer some of the hot broth to the yoghurt, a little at a time, until the mixture is hot. Pour it back into the pan and stir gently but well. Adjust the seasoning and add the spring onions, dill and sliced omelette. Serve warm or cold. It doesn’t reheat well.

Culinary Tours

This is one element of our cuisine I’m adamant about whenever I travel through Romania with groups on culinary tours: every single day, there must be ciorbă or zeamă. (There is one room left on this year’s tour, see here)

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A Bowl Worth Crossing The World For

We won’t get any of the endless parade of creamed soups that seem to be gaining more and more ground on restaurant menus. They have their place, but there is very little heritage in them.

If there is one dish that can carry the identity of Romanian cuisine, it is ciorbă.

And a ciorbă well made can easily be the reason an American tourist travels for 24 hours—connected flights, trains and country roads—to reach a village in Transylvania.

I wish every traditional restaurant in Romania asked itself this question: would my menu justify such a journey?