Memories with the aroma of grandmother’s cakes

Memories often come to my memory through smell… fresh, clean, almond-essence smell, although at that time I don’t know if I had tasted fresh almonds, the smell of a cake of cones, jam, home-made chocolate with walnuts and raisins and the most pregnant, enveloping, intoxicating, diaphanous, weaving my story today, smell of vanilla sugar.

And it’s as if mornings are never the same again, with the aroma of linden tea and fresh skewers, cooked in the weather and kept warm in the stove oven, discreetly powdered, just enough to make you want more.

If there was one common and defining element of my family, with a long tradition, I could easily say that it is hospitality. I was raised in a house forever full of guests, relatives close or more distant, richer or poorer, existing or future friends, the “protipendada” of the Domnești city, the mayors of the past and most frequently, the flock of children from the street, starting from the hardest hit, the Grigoreanu family, four brothers left without a mother whom the grandmother used to care for like a bell, to the cousins ​​and neighbors across the street, starting from the “draw” and ending with Emi lu’ Taica Os.

Each of them had a place at our table, not necessarily overlapping, preserving to some extent the category and time of day, like a sequence from the yard of Iancu Urmatecu’s house by Ion Marin Sadoveanu in “End of the Century in Bucharest”, in our yard but be equally respectful and feast on the best dishes. At our place, in Vasilescu family, the saying “our guest, our master” was somehow valid, and I passionately believed that this was valid everywhere, with a stupor realizing as an adult, that hospitality is not valid in all houses, that this is an art, and first of all you have to do it with pleasure, with love, to feel.

Memories with grandma and cooking are not like in commercials or in movies, clichés, but taken directly from reality. There was no time for trials, in the country time is precious, everything was practice: observe, remember, apply! The advice came with the rebuke and the inevitable “fix your hair”, “wash your hands”, “put on your apron”, things that follow me even today. I felt since I was little that I had something special next to me and I put it into practice. People who cross our threshold feel the hospitality, warmth and dedication from the first moment. And the practice, from an early age, leaves its mark. I cook with passion the bun’s recipes, but also macarons or paris brest, and the results are just right when you put your heart into it. From my grandmother I learned that I have to know how to do, so that I can ask or evaluate correctly.

My baggage of memories keeps stories with my grandmother one after the other, the order of which I no longer know very well. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to figure out what your oldest memory is. I always try but I only manage to remember experiences long thought lost in nothingness. Thus, I remembered how, on the eve of winter, she would bring us crushed apples and must from barrels and treat us one by one, the three cousins ​​and accompanied by the flock of children, with homemade chocolate, cornucopias, lies and all sorts of cookies. It’s a memory like any other for you. But for me, who visualizes this memory and still feels the taste of the food and the warmth of her hands, the smell of burning wood, the crackling of the stove, the cold that entered the room when the door opened and chased us to the top of the bed.…stick to the kilim evoked by my brother, it’s like reliving those moments and at the same time, I realize that time cannot be turned back, but it can be reinterpreted and transposed into the reality of our days through the CAEZU project.

If you know you’re doing something superlative, why shouldn’t others enjoy it too? The small and seemingly insignificant things you do, say and pass on are the most important, because they have the gift of staying with us for a very long time…I have no idea how long. Maybe until the end. Or maybe even after… Exactly like my grandmother’s message, which will now go further than her.

What a post to say: I’m lucky. We had the strongest woman as a grandmother, a fighter, a heroine, a housewife, a real head of the family, a mother for us and for those who needed it! And as a reward for her unceasing efforts, we offer her as a tribute, a gift received, which we owe to pass on… the CAEZU guest house, a piece of her, of us and of all those from the past who have left its mark on us.