What’s cooking – Chiftelute Marinate

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In Romania, Chiftelute Marinate is something your mom or grandma would make for you. The moment when they shove you out of the kitchen with a secret smile on their faces, you know they’re going to surprise you with something really nice,” she says, while peeling the potatoes and reaching over the counter for a mysterious package of spices.

See, this is a secret ingredient. Basically it contains salt, pepper, dry tomatoes and paprika. It makes the potatoes, our side dish, taste rich. Unlike the Dutch version….” she says, making a yucky-face as we both laughed.

Chiftelute Marinate is a blend of different cuisines, very much influenced by Romania’s neighbours – the Hungarians, Turkish and Greeks. However, Chiftelute Marinate has its own character,” Ioana says, adding the final touch to the tomato sauce. “You’ll find out when you have a taste of the whole dish later.”

Chiftelute Marinate isn’t as heavy as Sarmale – another traditional Romanian dish of cabbage rolls with minced meat filling – but the feeling of these two dishes is quite similar. It really reminds me of home. I miss our traditional three-course meals, which usually start with soup, followed by a main course and end with dessert.”

During my second or third round of Chiftelute Marinate, I patted my stomach with satisfaction, while also remarking on the saltiness of the dish. Ioana’s face lit up: “Ha! Now you notice the most important thing in Romanian cuisine – salt! In Romanian tradition, we offer salt and bread to our guests, as a symbol of ‘Welcome in our homes’. The Romans conquered the ancient territory of present day Romania for our salt mines. Salt was difficult to find back then and it was very expensive. The Roman soldiers were also paid with salts, and therefore the origin of the words ‘soldier’ and ‘salary’ is salt – a person paid in salt. I just can’t imagine a dish without enough salt!”

And so we raised our glasses in cheers to salt and our new friendship, over Romania’s Chiftelute Marinate, which translated as a simple, salty and hearty welcome.

For those who’d like to welcome friends over with a warm Romanian Chiftelute Marinate according to Ioana Bour’s recipe, just go to www.delta.tudelft.nl for the online version of this article and follow the simple step-by-step instructions. And of course don’t forget the salts.

Chiftelute Marinate

Ingredients:

– 2 onions

– 3-4 garlic cloves

– 500g minced meat

– 2 eggs

– one teaspoon of flour

– salt, black pepper and peppercorns

– parsley

– 2-3 bay leaves

– 100g tomato puree

The meatballs: cut the garlic and one onion into small pieces and mix them with minced meat, eggs and flour. Salt and pepper could be added according to individual taste. Make meatballs from this mixture, with flour. Now they are ready to be fried.

The sauce: take the other onion, cut it into small pieces and fry it with a spoonful of oil. Add the tomato sauce, the bay leaves, the peppercorns and 1/2 glass of water. One teaspoon of flour can also be added. Wait till the sauce is well-mixed, add the meatballs and leave the pot with small fire until the meatballs became soft. 

The dish can be served with boiled potatoes, mashed potatoes or rice. Pofta buna! (‘Enjoy your lunch’)

“Gary Lightbody of the band Snow Patrol hit the nail on the head when he sang “…let’s waste time, chasing cars, around our heads…”. And while he’ll always gain acclaim for that lyric, we surely long beat him to the punch on the embodiment of that phrase. ‘We’ here being the operative term used to describe an organization so secret it puts the secret police to shame, so vast it must turn the pope green with envy. Yes, membership in the student association of couch-potatoes, malingerers, posers and layabouts is the reason we arrived at that conclusion way before Lightbody ever set pen to lyrics. As a member of that all-inclusive, hidden-in-plain-sight association, chasing cars is but one of the many ways we layabouts earn our stripes as bona-fide members. Delft student associations are of course notoriously exclusive, so to become a new member I had to learn to live like a member, and for a (former) busy-body like myself, this was a tall order, much like Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Mt. Everest, only less daunting and not so cold and probably hardly comparable but, well never mind. Sacrifices had to be made for the association’s greater good! So first to go was the sunrise: despite its fame as one of the most beautiful sights on earth and the new promises it offers to all and sundry, the sunrise was dropped, for how could I dare lay claim to be a loyal association member if I awakened as early as the birds and worms? Yes, bizarre it would be, so the sunrise and I parted ways.
Of course I also always loved an early breakfast, but the word ‘early’ also had to be deleted from my vocabulary, and thus this meal was pushed back deeper into the day, which was already well into its development, having run right past adolescence and on to adulthood.
Brunch, yes, brunch, a concept surely invented by one of our associations’ founding members, is the basic order of the day, as I head to the kitchen to cook and honour the dictates of our association: ‘Sleep and eat then sleep some more’! Whatever that is in Latin should be the student associations’ motto!
Brunch and the midday nap now done, time to sit on the balcony and get down to malingering perfection, wasting time, chasing cars, looking around. And then I spotted him, an amazing, awesome sight of sheer elegance and remarkable time-wasting capacity, a poser chameleon who clearly grasped the true spirit of our association of couch-potatoes and layabouts, as he very, very slowly attempted to cross the balcony.
‘Good day, friend,’ I said.
‘Crossing my balcony I see’, I added after a time.
Our association’s newest member wasn’t much for conversation, but his great crossing took a long, long time to complete, and by then the day had happily crossed mid-life and was fast-tracking toward old age. A good time to go back to sleep.”

Francis Ndonga, from Kenya, is a second-year BSc student studying aerospace engineering. He can be contacted at: fdude85@gmail.com