The Making of Mămăligă
Transimperial Recipes for a Romanian National Dish
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Central European University Press
Published:15th Sep '22
Should be back in stock very soon
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£20.95(9789633866245)
Mămăligă, maize porridge or polenta, is a universally consumed dish in Romania and a prominent national symbol. But its unusual history has rarely been told. Alex Drace-Francis surveys the arrival and spread of maize cultivation in Romanian lands from Ottoman times to the eve of the First World War, and also the image of mămăligă in art and popular culture. Drawing on a rich array of sources and with many new findings, Drace-Francis shows how the making of mămăligă has been shaped by global economic forces and overlapping imperial systems of war and trade.
The story of maize and mămăligă provides an accessible way to revisit many key questions of Romanian and broader regional history. More generally, the book links the history of production, consumption, and representation. Analyses of recipes, literary and popular depictions, and key vocabulary complete the work.
"A richly textured and fresh approach to the history of eighteenth–nineteenth century Romania through the lens of maize and the Romanian “national” dish mămăligă (boiled cornmeal). Much more than a food history, The Making of Mămăligă is a holistic commodity history that reveals the overlapping “imperial tectonics” of the three empires that dominated east central Europe—the Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg—with Romania uniquely situated at the confluence of all three."
-- Mary Neuburger * Slavic ReviISBN: 9789633865835
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 474g
226 pages