Words: Adriana Sohodoleanu
Illustration: Doina Titanu
March 2024
As March arrived, Oana Vasiliu was struck, for the first time, by the fact that her grandparents were gone. And it wasn’t just because they had stopped calling, but rather because they were no longer asking about her baked mucenici. For the cultural journalist, these beloved Romanian pastries carry a taste of nostalgia.
She’s not alone in that sentiment. In fact, these ritualistic sweets with a recent surge of fame are a way for many religious Romanians to reflect on the past. Every year on March 9, we commemorate through this food the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste – a group of Christian soldiers killed near the city of Sebaste, in Lesser Armenia, centuries ago, for confessing their faith. To remember those who died, we often consume these pastries accompanied by 40 drinks (or 44, depending on the region.) The type of drinks can vary, from wine to brandy. And the mucenici’s cooking methods and styles tell different stories depending on who you ask, with the main question being: boiled (like a soup) or baked?
Romania constantly surprises us with its regional differences. We eat them baked in Moldova, boiled in Muntenia and Dobrogea, or not at all in Banat. In some counties, they are called mucenici/măcinici; in others, brădoși, brăduleți, brândușei, sfinți, sfințișori, sânți, the last three being variations of the Romanian word for ‘saints.’ The eight-shaped dough is prevalent in both the baked and boiled versions, but the size differs dramatically – the baked ones are usually as big as your palm, while the boiled ones are so small that two or three fit nicely on a spoon.
Since this day usually falls during Lent, they should be made of yeasted bread dough, baked and glazed with honey syrup and cracked walnuts, or a simple flour and water dough boiled in a sweet syrup perfumed with lots of cinnamon. However, just like the ritualistic Christmas pig slaughtering, which is thoroughly enjoyed during fasting, the baked mucenici are often made with an enriched type of bread, explicitly using cozonac dough, the Romanian brioche.
Mirela Cata, innovation manager at Ana Pan, a bakery in Bucharest, remembers the boiled mucenici as the sweet soup of her childhood, along with the bagels baked and offered alongside them. Yet she does not recall the complimentary drinks and attributes it to the restraints of the Communist regime. On the contrary, for Daniel Ion, owner of Casa del Pan, another bakery in the capital, the so-called Martyrs’ Day was a much-awaited occasion in which people shared homemade mucenici with both their neighbors and extended family, joking about and enjoying the 40 drinks. Growing up with the soup version, he came to love the baked one more.
Marius Tudosiei, owner of Bacania Veche, an old-style Romanian deli in Bucharest, observes that “the perception we have about festive foods is interesting: sometimes we have the impression that others are doing it wrong […] that they don’t know how to do it, that they should come to us to learn.’’ Indeed, when it comes to eating, people often choose with their heart, and this organ stays mostly anchored in their childhood. For Marius, that means native Moldova with its “braided, baked, almost like a cake dough smothered in honey syrup with honey and walnut coarsely ground or crushed under a rolling pin.” To him that makes the boiled soup “an interesting dessert but only a dessert.
Valentina Ion, the owner of the artisanal bakery Grain Trip, fondly remembers the mucenici soup from her upbringing. She describes a dough spread thinly, from which her mother or grandmother would cut small eights in the traditional shape. She watched with wonder and yearning as the dough followed its rhythm, becoming the coveted soup. Others with a more romantic view talk about the dusty table and ghostly pale eight-shaped figures. Precision-bound bakers emphasize the perfect amount of pressure needed to create a flawless doughy eight.
I could write that I remember my mom or myself cutting out those little eights repeatedly until the cows came home and the table filled with tens of tiny infinities, and our arms grew numb. But those are not my memories. When it comes to mucenici, I am more focused on the result than the process. All I can remember are the cold, flavorful spoons of sweet, thick, nutty soup I fed myself one after another until my stomach could take no more.
Revisiting Traditions
Oana grew up in Moldova and remembers seeing the Muntenian sweet soup for the first time when she moved to Bucharest. She asked (and dazzled) the shop’s assistant for information. Iasmina Resid, my former student, now a pastry chef at Angeline pastry shop, grew up in Bucharest and spent her childhood holidays in Banat – she never had the Moldavian mucenici until they became fashionable a few years ago.
The fact that many more people are not aware of these regional variations is a sign of their upbringing in a time when social media was not yet born. But just like their older brother, the cozonac (a Christmas cake), and their Easter sister pasca (a cheese cake), mucenicii have recently grown in popularity. Facebook, Instagram, and Google are now filled to the brim with mucenici recipes, including eyebrow-raising descriptions to cook them: with rose, pistachio, lemon, and caramel or chocolate.
Revisiting traditional recipes is cool and enriches the array of options with, most of the time, delicious new styles. Plus, it has the advantage of keeping the tradition alive in some form (let’s not forget that any tradition was an innovation at the beginning).
Talking about old recipes, Valentina admits that change and novelty happen whether we embrace it or not. “A young buyer will search for a contemporary product [with a traditional feel to it], but it would be a waste not to exploit the opportunity of giving old traditions a new twist,” she argues. Yet she adds: “As long as it is a well thought innovation, not for posterity’s sake or profit.”
For Iasmina, revisiting food traditions is an opportunity to leave her mark and improve older recipes with new ingredients and techniques. Mirela, not only a more senior chef but also a pastry instructor, considers the revisited mucenici as a trendy niche.
Believing in the power of stories and in the memory of taste, Oana shares Iasmina’s view to exert creativity, but given the short window of traditional availability for this dessert, she prefers eating the version she grew up with, untouched. Her grandparents cooked at home – her grandfather followed recipes strictly from his childhood; her grandmother got inspiration from magazines. Her mother had always been curious to try new things. That may partially explain Oana’s favorable attitude toward novelty. “Innovation is welcome as long as the client accepts it,” she says. Marketing consultant Linda Willy believes that generations are changing, including the modification of their references, so ritualistic foods can also be integrated into adapted versions.
I do not have a problem with revisiting them either – it is fun and challenging to devise alternative ways of doing something, perhaps, and hopefully, even better than your mother. Traditions are known to be shapeshifters, yet they have become heavily commodified lately, raising questions of belonging and identity.
Don’t Lent Your Money (They Say)
Innovation means mucenici covered or filled with chocolate (it could even be Nutella!) and served with whipped cream, crème pâtissiere, raspberry syrup, or fresh strawberries. They can be sprinkled with sugar vermicelli, pumpkin seeds, or pistachio; treated pretty much like a Belgian waffle. But, whereas the gauffre de Liège was born out of Prince-Bishop’s appetite for sugary treats, March 9 is a religious celebration in Romania.
The 40 Martyrs of Sebaste commemorated on this day were Roman Christian soldiers tortured to death for their faith in 320 AD by order of Emperor Licinus, the same one who, together with Constantine, had issued an edict granting toleration to the Christians seven years before. Indeed, emperors can be moody.
The soldiers resisted temptations. They endured stone beating, drowning in a frozen lake, and were ultimately left to die with their legs crushed, their bodies cremated, and their ashes thrown in it. Miracles were reported that night – the lake melted, and 40 shining garlands descended upon the victims. Relics were spread throughout the land, and their veneration cult began. This developed alongside older pagan beliefs and practices related to the cult of the departed: offerings to the gods and the belief that the beginning of spring was a special time, making possible the return of spirits among the living.
Housewives clean the houses, make fires to cleanse the yard, and sprinkle holy water over family members and cattle for protection. Some people engage in divinatory practices, others in a bit of drunkenness (a sure thing if the 40 drinks custom is strictly observed). People believe that if it rains on March 9, then Easter will also be rainy; if there is thunder, the following summer will bring rich crops; they know a long autumn lies ahead if the temperature falls below zero the night before the Martyrs’ celebrations. Furthermore, to increase household resources, on mucenici day, no money should be lent.
From Snakes to Lakes
The mucenici themselves have a ritualistic space, time and purpose. There are set rules – old books say they must be taken to church for blessing, before their offering and consumption. The main ingredients – wheat, honey, and walnuts – are among the sacred ones, each with a plethora of meanings and symbols behind them.
The dough is woven into specific shapes, each with meaning. In Moldova, the eight-shape represents a stylized human figure, not the mathematical sign for infinity. In some places, it is believed that eight is the number of days the soldiers spent in prison. Some link the S-shape to the snake motif, which stands for temporal transformation (the Earth shedding its winter skin to make room for the spring one), ancestral perennity, regeneration, and fertility.
In the region of Oltenia, villages in the Olt, Argeș, and Teleorman counties bake a clearly anthropomorphic shape – it has a head with eyes and nose and mouth, belly button, hands, and legs, and it is called brădoși or brândușei. However, Western Oltenia villages simplify the whole thing down to a round flatbread upon which 40 stamps are made with a pipe. The Southern-boiled version holds the watery syrup as a reminder of the lake the martyrs were thrown into. The late Radu Anton Roman, the beloved culinary journalist, mentioned a coin being placed randomly in one mucenic in some areas (just like the Catholic Epiphany gateaux du roi.)
Since the festivity is attached to Orthodoxy, we share it with other Orthodox peoples, such as the Ukrainians and the Russians. Ukrainian mothers and grandmothers bake zhavoronki, yeasted dough larks as heralds of spring and symbols of the martyr soldiers. Children toss the doughy birds into the air to symbolically welcome spring and bring luck to farmers. In Russia, the Martyrs’ Day precedes maslenitsa, the butter week leading up to Lent fasting and reminds us of the Mardi Gras celebrations.
So there you have it, paganism and religion one after the other, a cavalcade of fact and myth, meanings, practices, and beliefs from times past. Habits and beliefs that can get lost when mucenici shine brightly in shops’ windows from January to May, dressed in cosmopolitan attire hard to distinguish from other contemporary desserts. Chocolate, pecan nuts, tonka, and cream make them modern and international. Identity will not get scared of a pair of pink sprinkles, but time might get to its core – being around for a couple of months leads to dulling the eye and palate. As they say, sometimes less is more.
Why Does It Bother Me So Much?
As a social science budding researcher, concepts such as consumerism, aestheticization, desacralization, hipsterization, and commodification come to mind when considering mucenici’s newfound popularity. For a while, year after year, I monitored social media for reactions to this seemingly tiny phenomenon, just another expression of our times. I wondered why no one seemed to see the dangers of losing our stories and identity.
Tiberiu Cazacioc, a Slow Food fellow and expert in sustainable agriculture and UE food quality protection schemes, wrote that taking a dish out of its context “commodifies, banalizes, and standardizes; .it levels and kills cultural and social traditions.” Furthermore, anthropologist Florin Dumitrescu published his PhD thesis about the “supermarketization of the ritualic involvement,” making it all easier to understand and contextualize.
Mucenici, like cozonac, coliva (Romanian “death” cake), and pasca, were once homemade foods. They are now available in supermarkets, restaurants, and sometimes even in street food stalls. One explanation for this leap is the fact that people no longer cook that much at home. This means professional chefs come to save the day, in classic or modern dress. Their offer is sometimes marketed or curated as a repository of tradition, together with the associated rituals and emotions.
Oana thinks that the 10-year-long history of revisiting Romanian cuisine has elevated ritualistic food, making it as suitable as traditional lay food — and inducing nationalism and authenticity. But she notes a lack of storytelling surrounding them when they are used beyond their traditional context.
Daniel believes that overly exceeding the traditional timeframe of some foods leads to the loss of tradition and eventually the pleasure of tasting them. He’ll have mucenici two weeks prior to March 9 and one week after. Mirela puts them on the menu for about a month before and takes them out in mid-March. Zexe Brasserie starts selling them, boiled and baked, three days before the festive day, so people have time to stock up, says owner Ana Consulea.
At Grain Trip, Valentina launches them exactly on March 9 and keeps them all month; it’s her personal choice. “People ask about them being made outside the season, but I just think they’d lose their appeal, we do the same with cozonac for Christmas and pasca for Easter,” she says. “It is not necessarily wrong for products with a ritual character to be prepared during the rest of the year as well [..] it is important for preserving traditions and products with Romanian specificity that they are promoted in the most intelligently. But this can mean different things depending on the bakery/restaurant and the audience that each one has. The more people talk about traditional products and the more we try to carry on traditions through well-made products, the better.”
The solution? Mirela has one: the already existent lay versions that are very close to the real thing – cheesecake for pasca and Polish bagels for mucenici.
Chocolate, pistachio, and spice make everything nice, and I am not one to say no to trying them (and retrying them for confirmation). What really bothers me is their desensitizing effect. Ritualic foods ahead of or long after their due date lack any emotional load. I put my trust in these traditions to keep us grounded in a more globalized world.
In a market brimming with neon-coloured industrial products, I need my mucenici to keep their humble paysan clothes, to stay simple and start being baked or boiled on March 9, continuing the long line of grandmothers who baked and grandfathers who either cracked open walnuts or drank the 40 glasses. This might be seen as hate, but it is actually love. As a society, we live in the most permissive time ever; we remove and reinterpret daily what we no longer like or use in its classical form, and that liberty is amazing. However, I find it reassuring that some things happen the same way year after year, maybe even century after century (I know a mucenici recipe from 1883).
For sure, there’s no offer without demand. Bakers and other mucenici makers give their clients what they want and, in the process, enjoy robust sales. I just hope we do not lose the appetite due to overstimulation and kill a tradition in the process.
So, baked or boiled?
I liked Valentina’s answer – do we really have to choose?
Each recipe has its charm if it’s well prepared. The industrial versions focus primarily on quantity/price, not taste, making the memory of our grandmothers’ cooking a hefty one. Valentina grew up in Muntenia and loves the boiled ones “a little more.” Influential food blogger Laura Laurentiu lives in the mucenici-free land of Banat and recently adopted the Moldavian style.
As for me, my true king of the North remains the boiled, chewy cinnamon ones, although my Muntenian mother also bakes some delicious brioche for my Moldavian father.
I haven’t baked or boiled any mucenici yet – I am lucky to have my mom around, and just like Oana, I know there will come a time when March 9 will make my heart tender.