la Vie Sirene volume 2 issue 3 - BOHEMIANS

Goulash – Gypsy Comfort Food from FoodGypsy Exploring my Roma roots with some good Gypsy comfort food, hearty Romanian Style Goulash. A rich beef and tomato stew heavy with Paprika, it’s slow food to warm your soul as nights get longer and the chill of fall fills your days.

It is in my nature to wander, if I’m in one place for too long I will shift residents or I move the furnisher, the change of seasons always makes me restless. My maternal Grandmother used to say it was in my blood, inherited from her mother, a beautiful Roma woman who married an Austrian man and immigrated to western Canada in the boom of the nineteen twenties.

As a child my Grandmother, Jessie, learned to cook at her mother’s knee the cuisine of her nomadic heritage; cuisine that bridged Russia, Romania, Hungary and Germany. Peasant food, many of her specialties were dishes that were the mainstays of the lower working class. Produce that stored well or was preserved in glass jars, cured meats that could last in through long cold winters. Borscht, cabbage rolls, sauerkraut, goulash. Later, when tragedy struck the family and both she lost both parents, Jessie was adopted by a woman who called her a ‘filthy Gypsy’ and she learned hunger for the first time.

In a life salted by tragedy and the great depression, she like many woman of her time, learned to stretch every resource. She made clothing out of flour sacks and lined her children’s shoes with newspaper in winter. Never was food wasted, never did a single bite go unappreciated. Once a week she baked bread in a wood fired oven and on Sundays it was pie, even into the 1980′s she considered her ‘new fangled electric stove’ inferior in every way.

I wish I had that big cast iron stove now; with it’s overhead warming oven, flat top and water heater, gleaming with chrome trim. I see it in my mind’s eye when I think of her teaching me how to properly fill the firebox on cold, damp mornings, her slippered feet and wool socks, wrapped in a worn chenille robe, her auburn hair in curlers.

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