It’s a gloomy Saturday morning in Chișinău, the capital of Moldova, and the streets are damp from an early rain. But a small park is booming with life. It’s traditional market day, and vendors bustle around carrying baskets of fresh fruits, pickled vegetables, artisanal jams, and local wines, setting up their stalls for the early risers. Among the colorful canopies, one booth’s wares catch the eye: dark, spongy cakes, their surfaces dotted with delicate craters. This stand belongs to Mariana Zabrian, and her specialty is babă neagră, a dessert steeped in Moldova’s northern rural traditions but now fading from tables across the country.
Zabrian, a healthcare professional turned entrepreneur, started baking babă neagră four years ago when she was pregnant. “I had intense cravings for something sweet but healthy,” she remembers. “Nothing I found in the stores satisfied me, and then I remembered my grandmother’s babă neagră.” The memories of her grandmother baking this traditional cake, with its spongy texture and delicate sweetness, flooded back. But, to her dismay, she couldn’t find babă neagră in any store or bakery. It had also disappeared from many households, even from her childhood home.
Determined to taste it again, Zabrian visited her mother in Voloave, a village in Moldova’s northern region, where she grew up and still lives. Together, they set out to find her grandmother’s recipe, scouring old handwritten notebooks and carte de rețete—traditional family recipe books where women recorded their culinary secrets—hoping to discover the instructions that had been shared through generations. “We found the recipe handwritten in an old book, and we baked it together,” she says, her eyes lighting up as she recalls the moment they finally sampled it. “It tasted just as I remembered, and I knew then that I had to bring this tradition back to life.”
Babă neagră, meaning “black old woman,” is a dense, moist dessert. Not quite a cake, not quite a toffee pudding, it has a dark, caramelized color and porous texture that belies its simple ingredients: sugar, fermented milk, eggs, flour, oil, baking soda, and vodka or brandy. Queen of the table from the 19th to the early 20th centuries, it was served on important occasions such as holidays, weddings, christenings, and community gatherings. “There was no festivity without babă neagră,” says Zabrian.
Zabrian has been a witness to the profound changes that have shaped Moldova in recent decades. A struggling economy, long-term unemployment, and the rising cost of living following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 have been driving Moldovans out of the country in droves to seek better opportunities abroad. As a result, many cultural practices, including the country’s gastronomic heritage, are at risk of fading into oblivion. Traditions like babă neagră, which once brought communities and families together, are becoming increasingly rare, often remembered only by older generations.
Zabrian wanted to reverse this trend, and her version of babă neagră stays true to its rustic origins. She sources all of her ingredients from local homesteads and family-owned farms around her village, using only natural, unprocessed dairy products. “The flavors are richer this way,” she says. To respond to modern health concerns, Zabrian has made some minimal changes to reduce the amount of sugar and oil in the recipe. “My customers appreciate that it’s a dessert they can feel good about eating,” she says.
She bakes the cake in a traditional wood-fired oven back in her village. “It takes two and a half hours just to heat the oven, then the cake needs to bake for a full ten hours without the oven door being opened,” she explains. “The long, slow cooking process is what gives babă neagră its unique texture.”
Also contributing to the cake’s texture is a precise combination of baking soda, sugar, and vodka or brandy (often cognac), which then produce the small bubbles that make babă neagră light and spongy. But the most peculiar thing about the cake is its color transformation during baking. Despite using mostly pale ingredients, it turns a deep brown color as it bakes. “The secret is in the interaction between ingredients over time and the caramelization of the sugar,” says Zabrian.
But baking babă neagră isn’t just a technical process for Zabrian: “Every time I bake this cake, I think of my grandmother. It connects me to my ancestors, to my roots, and to our traditions.”
In Moldova’s shifting landscape, Zabrian sees babă neagră as a reminder of the importance of preserving cultural knowledge. After her first batch was a success, she began selling the cake at local markets. “People were immediately drawn to it,” she says. “My customers tell me that babă neagră reminds them of their childhood, of their time growing up in the villages. Through my grandmother’s recipe, babă neagră is making its way back into the homes and hearts of people, and I want to keep sharing it with the younger generations.”
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Article by:Source: Natalia Jidovanu
