Salt Spring chef Haan Palcu-Chang publishes Romanian cookbook built on grandmother's recipes

His grandmother Aurelia grew up in the village of Haghig, and her recipes now fill Haan Palcu-Chang's debut cookbook, Recipes from a Transylvanian Village. The book includes sarmalute in foi de vita (stuffed vine leaves), chiftele marinate (tomato-braised meatballs) and prajitura cu crema de vanilie (vanilla cream pastry), and it is available online and in stores.

Palcu-Chang cooked the dishes for his grandmother over and over, adjusting them until they matched the flavours she remembered from childhood. Some attempts worked on the first try, others needed retakes. He said the family's recipe notes were sporadic and not much help, and that the dishes were not necessarily part of his grandmother's own repertoire.

Born to a Romanian mother and a Taiwanese father, Palcu-Chang grew up with two culinary traditions. He built his reputation in kitchens in Paris, Copenhagen, Singapore, Toronto and Vancouver, then stepped away from restaurant work and moved with his family to Salt Spring Island. He was a finalist on Season 11 of Top Chef Canada and the chef behind Favorites Thai BBQ, which Toronto Life named its Best New Restaurant. His online following tops 250,000 people.

"Romanian cuisine is a really, really underappreciated and underrepresented cuisine, in restaurants and cookbooks, but it's a cuisine really deep in tradition and vast in diversity," Palcu-Chang said. "We want to get people thinking about it and then trying it."

He also expects readers with no Romanian background to find much in the book. "I think there's a lot of recipes in here that people who aren't Romanian, who don't have any connection to Transylvania, are going to find interesting," he said.