RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND CULINARY IDENTITY MARKERS IN FOREIGN TRAVELLERS’ ACCOUNTS ON THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES
RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND CULINARY IDENTITY MARKERS IN FOREIGN TRAVELLERS’ ACCOUNTS ON THE ROMANIAN PRINCIPALITIES

Summary/Abstract: The relationship between food, religion and spirituality has always displayed various complex and sensitive facets. This paper focuses on the connection between religion,spirituality, and culinary identity mirrored in some foreign travellers’ accounts on the Romanian Principalities in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The voyageurs’ impressions reveal several hypostases of food consumption, rules and taboos involved in the main religious holidays (Christmas and Easter), as well as in the rites of passage accompanying weddings and funerals. Drawing on criticism in food studies (especially culinary history and anthropology), and geocritical literary studies, the analysis emphasizes the ways in which certain food items (such as bread, wine, coliva) become Romanian culinary identity markers. The specificity of these landmarks of Romanian taste is given by the overlapping religious and archaic substrates circumscribed to a particular territory.

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