Food Romanians like to eat, and they eat a lot with a great diversity. Recipes bear the same influences as the rest of Romanian culture: from Roman times there still exists the simple pie called placintă. The Turks brought meatballs (fried mititei or perișoare in a soup called ciorbă); from the Greeks there
is the musaca
(moussaka); from the Bulgarians, a wide variety of vegetable dishes like zacuscă; from the Austrians there is the sniţel (schnitzel) and covrigi (hot pretzels); from the Hungarians, their ornate pastries etc.
Sarmale
The really traditional foods are tocaniţă or salata de vinete (eggplant salad). Wine is the main alcoholic drink and has a tradition of over two millennia. Romania is currently the world's ninth largest wine producer and exports have increased in recent years. Moreover, Romania is the world's second largest grower of plums, and almost all of the plums become either the famous ţuică (a once-refined plum brandy) or pălincă (twice-or-more-refined plum brandy). One of the most common meals is the mamaligă, a common meal mush. Pork is the main meat used in Romanian cuisine, but also beef is consumed and a good lamb or fish dish is never to be refused. In conjunction with special events or periods, different recipes are prepared. During Christmas, traditionally every family slaughters a pig and cooks it using a wide variety of traditional recipes like sarmale - tradditional Romanian cabbage rolls with meat that are always during Christmas, as well as other occasions or for no occasion at all; cârnaţi- a kind of long sausages with meat; caltaboși - sausages made with liver and other intestines; piftie a jelly made from parts like the feet, the head and ears; and also tochitură(a kind of stew) is served along with mamaligă and wine ("so that the pork can swim") and as dessert the traditional cozonac (sweet bread with nuts or lokum). Lamb is traditional for Easter: the main dishes are roast lamb and drob - a cooked mix of all, meat and fresh vegetables, served with pască (pie made with cottage cheese) as a sweetener.
Events 1st of March = Mărţişor is the traditional celebration of the beginning of the spring. The day’s name is the diminutive of March and thus means something like “little” or “dear March”. It is a symbol of spring, “a good luck charm” in English and a “portebonheur” in French. The white and red thread of the amulet (a coin, money cowrie) which parents customarily tied around their 7