Born to a Romanian mother and Taiwanese father, Haan Palcu-Chang grew up straddling two culinary worlds. After building his name in kitchens across Paris, Copenhagen, Singapore, Toronto, and Vancouver, he stepped away from the restaurant industry and relocated with his family to Salt Spring Island.
He was a Top Chef Canada Season 11 finalist and the chef behind Favorites Thai BBQ’s Toronto Life Best New Restaurant win.
Alongside the accolades and moves, he cooked up an online following of more than 250,000 people who tune in for his food content.
Now his debut cookbook, Recipes from a Transylvanian Village, shares his story about two homelands on one plate.
The story of heritage, reinvention, and a chef who refuses to be boxed into one tradition marks Palcu-Chang’s first full-length published work.
“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,” he said. “We want to get people thinking about it and then trying it.”
Getting there meant a series of meals crafted for his Romanian grandmother to taste, savour and ideally reminisce on. The goal was to inspire nostalgia, hitting the exact flavour profile of her childhood.
“Romanian food was part of my life, but these recipes were not necessarily part of my grandmother’s repertoire,” he said of piecing them together from matriarchal memories while leaning on his skills as a chef. “Recipe books aren’t usually very informative, they’re filled with very sporadic measurements and things that aren’t super helpful.”
It meant getting grandma to taste the things a million times “until I hit the memory receptors.”
Sometimes he knocked it out of the park, others took some retakes. But the end result is Recipes from a Transylvanian Village, celebrating his Romanian grandmother Aurelia’s stories from her small village of Haghig. It centres on her recipes: sarmalute in for de vita (stuffed vine leaves), chiftele marinate (tomato-braised meatballs) and prajitura cremsnit (vanilla cream pastry).
“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.
Recipes from a Transylvanian Village is available online and in stores.
About the Author: Christine van Reeuwyk
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Dining and Cooking