The creative workshop behind The Book of Perilous Dishes (Mâța Vinerii) is steeped in the culinary imagination of Romanian folklore and mythology. But it also draws from medieval treatises on botany, zoology, and medicine. Most importantly, it reflects my own lived experience—rooted in the magical world of my childhood home in Comoșteni, where every dish carried a spell, a secret, and a story. Spices, spirits, and rituals all shape the novel’s atmosphere. I talked about all this and more in an interview for Neem Tree Press:
👉 Q&A with Doina Ruști – Neem Tree Press
There are 21 culinary and magical recipes in my novel. They originate in old recipe books, folklore books, written and unwritten traditions of the Romanians. Among the common spells used in my house was one linked to our bread, kneaded in the evening, peppered with chicory and mash foam cakes (instead of yeast), left to rise, and the next day spread on a round tray. From here on out, the ritual started. We would take the velvetleaf (Abutilon theophrasti) bolls, which adorned the dough with unforgettable shapes – lucky stars. We would add horseradish leaves on the edge and mix everything together with an egg yolk. Then we placed it in the oven and waited until it formed a delicious crust. Without this large bread, about the size of a cartwheel, life had no meaning. This is Crumilla cum animis (bread with many souls), a bread I mentioned in my novel, which infects you with generosity, and makes some people poor.
But of course, there are many myths that have been absorbed by the novel, without preserving the folkloric form – they turned into structural elements of the world to which they belong.
