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A conversation with three thousand recipes.

Write to SAVOR in plain language. It will reply with recipes from the corpus, citations to the manuscript, and the occasional aside from the cooks, scholars, and translators who know them.

Session 04F·2026 Started 13:42 EET 3 letters · 11 recipes
You 13:42

Christmas Eve in a Transylvanian village, no meat, something my grandmother might have made. Bonus points for cabbage.

SAVOR 13:42

Dear cook, — Christmas Eve fasts hard in the Romanian tradition, so I've held back anything with meat or dairy. From the corpus I'm reading you four candidates from Transylvania, interwar period, all marked de post. The cabbage is well-represented.

i.
Sarmale de post cu varză murată Involtini di Quaresima al cavolo fermentato
Fermented cabbage rolls filled with rice, mushrooms, walnuts, and dill — slow-simmered with smoked plum brine. The form your grandmother would recognise.
0.91
ms.b3.f47
cluj · 1934
ii.
Plăcintă cu varză și ciuperci Sfoglia ripiena di cavolo e funghi
A thin pie of cabbage softened in oil with porcini, parsley, black pepper. Folded and baked, served warm in slices.
0.87
ms.b1.f12
sibiu · 1928
iii.
Salată de varză murată cu mere și nucă Insalata di cavolo, mela e noci
A side that earns its place: brined cabbage thinly cut, sweet apple, walnuts, sunflower oil — the cold, sharp counterweight to anything warm and starchy.
0.84
ms.b3.f51
cluj · 1934
iv.
Bob fiert cu sos de hrean Fave lessate con salsa al rafano
Boiled broad beans with horseradish — the older, less-photographed face of Romanian fasting cookery. Almost vanished from contemporary tables.
0.79
ms.b2.f08
turda · 1931

A note: the second is the most flexible — you can shift the filling to conopidă și usturoi if cabbage feels overdone by the third course. The fourth is the historian's pick. If you'd like, I can pull the whole 1934 Cluj manuscript's Christmas-Eve menu, which happens to be intact.

your corpus, faithfully SAVOR filtered: post · transilvania · ≤ 1945
◇   ◇   ◇
You 13:46

The plăcintă — is there an Italian counterpart? I'm thinking about how to set them side by side at a dinner.

SAVOR 13:47

A good question. The cabbage-and-mushroom plăcintă sits very close, in the embedding space, to two Italian sfoglia from the Artusi corpus and one from the Romagnola tradition. The shared vocabulary is cabbage leaven dough slow-bake. Distances are cross-lingual cosine, LaBSE.

i.
Erbazzone di Reggio Plăcintă cu verdețuri, în stil Reggio
A flat sfoglia of chard, onion, garlic, pancetta — Artusi's recipe 196 with its modern Reggiana revisions. Drop the pancetta for a Lenten reading.
0.83
artusi · 196
emilia
ii.
Torta di cavolo verza Plăcintă cu varză creață
A rustic torta from the Romagna hills — savoy cabbage long-stewed with onion, encased in a thick-rolled pasta sfoglia. The closest formal cousin to your plăcintă.
0.81
ca-suppl · 14
romagna
iii.
Crescentina ripiena Lipie umplută cu varză
A small fried-dough pocket; not a sfoglia exactly, but if you want a one-bite version on a long table, this is the form.
0.76
artusi · 222
bologna

For a paired dinner I'd serve the Erbazzone alongside the Romanian plăcintă cu varză și ciuperci: same form, same season, two languages and two centuries apart. Casa Artusi has photographs of the Erbazzone in its archive — I can attach the IIIF link to your reading list if useful.

cross-lingual · LaBSE · cosine SAVOR filtered: erbazzone-cluster · ≤ 1900
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