Lovers of new tastes and those who want to rediscover old-time summer flavours are invited on Thursday to a culinary journey in the orchard of a guesthouse in Timisoara, as part of the „Banatica Culinary Readings” project, write Agerpres.

The third episode of the project is a unique opportunity to explore local gastronomic traditions and learn directly from the best in the field, says Caius Mersa, coordinator of the Culinaria Banatica project.

Culinary anthropologist Caius Mersa told AGERPRES that the project as a whole wants to put order in the Romanian cuisine of Banat, which, in his opinion, is the first fusion cuisine in Europe.

One of Mersa’s favourite traditional Banat desserts is floating island, which is cooked using three versions of the meringue, the French, Swiss and Italian.

„I consider Pastorel and Sanda Marin to be the founders of the Romanian cuisine. The Ile Flottante, the ancestor of the Romanian floating island, is missing from that cookbook that our mothers and grandmothers used, because 500 recipes from Sanda Marin’s cookbook were cut off. Now a complete edition has been reprinted. I had a 1945 edition and saw that 500 recipes were missing, exactly those that gave the basis of what we knew how to do. We must put our kitchen in order. (… ). Regarding spices, the restaurants must still have a limit. And let’s think about coffee, which is not traditionally Romanian, but is served everywhere. It is the same with the spices. A large part of the spices, the seeds that we ate here in the first half of the last millennium, are in the nomenclature of Romanian weeds and many of them are fashionable,” said Mersa.

The present edition of the event is themed ” Memories of dishes from the summers of old,” and expected to attend it are Diana Mihut, research assistant at the Department of Romanian Studies of the University of Vest Timisoara (UVT) and Otilia Hedesan, director of the Centre for Heritage and Cultural Anthropology Research at UVT, who will share stories and memories related to the dishes that delighted the taste buds in the summers of their childhood.

The event is part of the national cultural program „Timisoara – European Capital of Culture 2023” and is financed under the GROW programme run by the Project Centre of the City of Timisoara.