Romanian Stuffed Cabbage: The Sarmale Awards

Sarmale at Varzarie, Cluj

We just returned from a quick trip south to Transylvania, where, I am happy to admit, I ate stuffed cabbage - sarmale in Romanian - every day. Stuffed cabbage is the soul food of East Europe, the apex cuisine of everything east of Austria. Every nook and corner of the Balkans and Carpathians has its own unique, localized version, little logs of meat or veg mixed with grains and rolled inside a cabbage leaf, stewed, and served by a doting grandma in a flowery head kerchief. All are praised as the epitome of local cuisine, proudly stated as the "national dish." Go to Poland: try our Gołąbki. Visiting Hungary? Tőltőtt Káposzta! Serbia - sarma! But after spending decades eating around southeast Europe, the award for best stuffed cabbage goes to... may I have the envelope, please... Romania! 

Rodica Tuli's summer sarmale in Mociu, Transylvania

Sarmale is the go-to food for nearly every family gathering or dinner event in Romania, at least if it held indoors and doesn't involve an animal roasting on a spit. Families usually have a home made batch frozen and ready to serve for whenever visitors drop in. Romanians take their stuffed cabbage seriously. There are lots of local variants. Sarmale usually consist of a stuffing of meat and rice wrapped with a whole cabbage leaf, but then the taxonomy begins to branch out. Vegetarian sarmale are made for Orthodox lent and fast days, called "sarmale de post" which swap out the meat for combinations of mushrooms and carrots. The cabbage leaf can be either fresh - and soured with either vinegar or borș, a sour soup stock made from wheat bran (easily purchased in powder form from any supermarket.) 

Rodica's winter sarmale with smoked pork

The souring agent is the thing that sets most Romanian and Hungarian stuffed cabbage apart from the so-called "cabbage rolls" you can get at ethnic church dinners in the USA, which are usually made with fresh cabbage leaf. You need to have whole heads of cabbage given the sauerkraut treatment in big buckets. When I still lived in the USA I used to make my own using 20 gallon plastic cement buckets. As directed by my Macedonian buddy Emil's Mom, you have to cut out the bottom core of the cabbage, fill it full of coarse salt and let it sit overnight before immersing the heads in a bucket of salted water, where they will sit for about a month to ripen and become sauerkraut. Meanwhile, Macedonian friends would stop by to ask for bottles of the pickling juice - nearly everybody in the Balkans swears by sauerkraut juice as the most effective cure for hangovers, usually backed up by gravely pseudoscientific theories involving ions and magnetic fields.

Sarmale and stuffed peppers in perfect harmony

Next, depending on your religious beliefs, you prepare the stuffing, which will ecumenically include pre-soaked rice. Then you roll them up, something you need to spend years learning from your Balkan grandma and practicing on a weekly basis until adulthood. You place the sarmale inside a huge pot separated by layers of sauerkraut and - if not following a religious fast - chunks of smoked pig you would have hanging in your pantry from an innocent porker you dispatched in your back yard a few months ago. If you are Jewish, smoked goose will do just fine if you can find a smoked goose leg. I can easily obtain this ridiculously overpriced ingredient, but then I live in the last real Jewish neighborhood in East Europe. Cover with broth and stew for about two hours. Serve with a bowl of sour cream, preferably made from water buffalo milk.

Don't forget the smoked pork!

Hungarians tend to roll their cabbages rather big, and also use more meat in relation to the rice in the stuffing. Romanian sarmale are smaller - two-bite wonders that you can really pile on your plate. Prodigiuos eaters of sarmale are noted in family histories. The great Gypsy fiddler Bela Kodoba from Palatca was famous for his record of eating 38 sarmale in one sitting, an accomplishment still mentioned in his village two decades after his passing. Gypsies in Transylvania also make a form of sarmale with corn meal stuffing - sarmale de păsat - which inspired a dance tune that came to be played at virtually all Gypsy weddings.

Dobruja style stuffed grape leaves

Like a lot of classic Balkan cooking, sarmale have origins in the Ottoman Empire, at least linguistically. Turks prepare lahana dolma from cabbage as well as from the better known grape leaves. I once had stuffed grape leaf sarmale in Maramureș cooked by a woman whose husband was from the Dobruja region along the Black Sea, an area of pronounced Turkish influence. These were made with beef, making them halal for  Muslim consumption, although I am pretty sure there are no Muslims in Maramureș. 

Sarmale with mamaliga at the Varzarie in Cluj

You can get sarmale in nearly any Romanian restaurant, but if you ever visit Cluj - the central city of Transylvania - make a point to visit the Varzarie at Bulevardul Eroililor 35-37, in downtown Cluj. In business since the 1960s, the Varzarie (translates out to something like the "cabbagerie") specializes in stuffed cabbage and in varză de Cluj, a deconstructed dish consisting of the parts of a stuffed cabbage formed into a loaf. That's a pretty unappetizing description but believe me, you will want more. 

Look Ma, no paprika! 

If you are in Hungary stuffed cabbage is less of a restaurant dish than a home style Sunday lunch. Due to arcane Hungarian health laws, food has to be sold on the same day that it is prepared, making it difficult for restaurants to prepare labor intensive dishes like stuffed cabbage that are usually made in large quantities and left overnight to mature before serving the next day. Hungarian stuffed cabbage also tends to be seasoned with lots of paprika, and sometimes tomato sauce, something you don't often see in Transylvania. If you can't find tőltőtt káposzta on the menu, you probably can find székely káposzta, which is pork stewed in sauerkraut, something of a deconstructed stuffed cabbage but still a pretty good runner up for the flavor profile. 

 székely káposzta

You can usually find tőltőtt káposzta in Budapest at proletarian lunch counters called étkezde or classic Magyar eateries like the Pozsonyi Kisvendéglő, and I believe the Pleh Csarda out on Kolozsvar utca serves them, although why would you go all the way out there if not to order the gigantic fried pork cutlet? The surest guarantee to eat tőltőtt káposzta is to stay late at a Hungarian wedding: usually after midnight the late night meal gets wheeled out which is usually a Volkswagen sized food cart full of stuffed cabbage. 

Romanians are so invested in sarmale that there is now Sarmale Delivery stuffed cabbage in Cluj - suggested for events such as weddings, birthdays and funerals!  Not only that, there is a facebook group dedicated to sarmale. One friend in Cluj tells me that there is a European wide network of Romanian home cooks that will deliver sarmale to Romanian truck drivers stuck on the highways of Western Europe on weekends without sarmale. No Transylvanian can imagine life without a plate of sarmale. I certainly can't.