Alex Drace-Francis's The Making of Mămăligă offers a richly textured and fresh approach to the history of eighteenth–nineteenth century Romania through the lens of maize and the Romanian “national” dish mămăligă (boiled cornmeal). Much more than a food history, The Making of Mămăligă is a holistic commodity history that reveals the overlapping “imperial tectonics” of the three empires that dominated east central Europe—the Russian, Ottoman, Habsburg—with Romania uniquely situated at the confluence of all three. If scholars have long understood Romania to be at the “crossroads of empire,” maize production, consumption, and exchange—and the multiple forms and meanings of mămăligă—offer a new way to imagine what that meant on the ground. Namely, commodity exchange and regional food systems underpinned complex trans-imperial interactions, perhaps especially in regions (like Romania) that changed hands multiple times and had culturally connected populations on both sides of the border.
The Making of Mămăligă is a quick read, lively, readable, and rich in detail, with an impressive array of archival and print sources in Romanian, Hungarian, German, French, and more. We hear from princes, chroniclers, travelers, legislative bodies, and literary/cultural figures about the place and meaning of maize and mămăligă in Romanian history from the seventeenth-early twentieth centuries. Drace-Francis's exhaustive research reveals that maize—a New World crop—appears in the Romanian lands in the seventeenth century, becoming more prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If seventeenth century authorities disdained or even limited its cultivation, the floodgates opened in the following centuries as boyars, monasteries, peasants, and larger estates shifted to maize cultivation as an efficient way to feed people, but also export grain for profit. Among other things, Maize played a role in the historically important peasant revolts of this period: 1821, 1888, and most notably 1907 (during which maize was often burned in protest). As Drace-Francis intriguingly argues, such uprisings were a product of the shift to “colonial” (cash crop) cereal production and export that forced peasants into almost “slave” labor conditions. This “colonial” aspect of the crop's (or in general, grain) cultivation was not simply a result of the “imperial logics” of the three empires that dominated this region. On the contrary, it was more pronounced in the period of autonomy and independence (after 1864–1878) and hence connected with enhanced capitalist relations and trade with the west.
Such arguments are compelling and raise many questions, which could benefit from more fleshing out in the text. So too, could the rich discussion of the forms and meanings of mămăligă itself, which is only developed in the rather short 7th and 8th chapters. There we begin to see the recipes, when and where mămăligă emerged and how it evolved in its various forms. We also learn of the importance of mămăligă as metaphor: that is as a marker of “Romanianness,” backwardness, or otherness in representations of European travelers or in literature from Romanian elites themselves. This section is full of rich material that could benefit from more analysis that taps into the larger questions of food history and food studies. In particular, how and when did mămăligă become coded as national, when did it become part of a Romanian national cuisine? Some of this is hinted at in the book's conclusion, which points to other work on mămăligă in the twentieth century; a period, the author notes, that would require another book. This may be true, but the reader is left wishing for at least a glimpse of what is to come. A bigger question that is felt unasked and unanswered is why did Romanians—and at least some adjacent areas—take to mămăligă or maize consumption so readily, when it was far rarer in Bulgaria and other Slavic surrounding regions. There corn tended to remain a fodder crop, as other grains, like wheat, were more central to the diet.
Still the book answers as many questions as it raises, offering a fascinating and creative approach to Romanian history. It brings Romania to the table of food history, contributing a major piece of scholarship to growing work in this field. Among other things the book develops its own tongue-twisting vocabulary for thinking about mămăligă: for example, “mămăligologist,” “mămăligological,” “mămăligolophobia,” “mămăligotopia,” and “mămăligocentric.” Indeed, Alex Drace-Francis requires us all to be a little mămăligocentric, at least while reading his book. In so doing, he invites us to rethink Romanian and east European history through a transimperial, mămăligological lens that is decidedly productive.
