The ten year success story of Taste of Romania

My first book, Taste of Romania, Its Cookery and Glimpses of Its History, Folklore, Art, Literature, and Poetry was published as a hardcover book in 1997, and has been selling successfully for the past ten years. An expanded edition was issued in 1999, and three other reprints were run since then.

Ten years have passed since its publication. It is with great pride and joy that I look back at the success this book has enjoyed, and want to thank all of those readers who took a chance in buying a copy for themselves or as a gift.

Following are a few memorable flashbacks:

On May 6th 1997, shortly after publication of Taste of Romania, a book-signing event was held at the prestigious Rizzoli Bookstore in New York City. The chef of the Romanian Ambassador to the United Nations prepared a variety of Romanian dishes for the occasion, and Romanian wine was served to the crowd which showed up for the event.

In the following weeks, a book-signing event at the residence of the Romanian Ambassador in Washington DC drew a large number of distinguished guests, and proceeds from the sale of books went to a Romanian-American charity.

On October 1st, 1997, a book-signing event was held at James Thin, the well-know Scottish booksellers in Edinburgh (which have since been taken over by Blackwell Bookstores)

Among the many favorable reviews of Taste of Romania, the most precious for me appeared in the prestigious gastronomy magazine Saveur, It was written by Colman Andrews, Editor of the magazine. The recipe which he chose to include with the article is of Mititei (Small Ground Beef Sausages), one of the most popular of Romanian dishes.

Below are excerpts from the article as well as the recipe.

"ON MY FIRST night in Bucharest, in 1972, a Romanian history professor I’d known at UCLA took me to the local university club, where we dined on cold marinated carp...and the delicious little sausages known as mititei (“the wee ones”) and talked politics...Nicolae Klepper’s recipes make a (good) case for his nation’s cuisine. Few American cooks are likely to essay his lamb “haggis” (a garlic-spiked ‘pâté’ of sheep offal baked in a lamb paunch – traditional at Easter time in Romania), but dishes like a creamy cauliflower soup, sour cream-enriched mămăligă (the Romanian polenta), lamb stewed with sauerkraut juice and scallions, and mititei (exactly like the ones I tasted long ago in Bucharest) are simple and appealing.
Romanian cooking, notes Klepper, has Turkish influences...but also contributions from the Romans, the Gypsies (who brought with them their skills of grilling meat over charcoal), the Greeks, Russians, Germans, and Hungarians...I don’t know what food is like in Romania today, but Klepper paints a pretty picture of his native country’s culinary possibilities".

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