Salatǎ Otrientalǎ

A recipe for a rich and appetizing salad from Irina Georgescu's new cookbook, Danube

A salad to lift the spirits. Illustration by Daniela Bracco

Benvenuti! Welcome to this bonus edition of Buona Domenica. This newsletter remains on an abbreviated schedule while I work on my latest cookbook. This means fewer posts—but just for a few more weeks. Today’s issue features a recipe for paid subscribers.

LET’S MAKE PASTA! A friendly reminder that I am teaching several online pasta-making workshops in collaboration with 177 Milk Street in February, March, and April:

February 27: ULTRA-REGIONAL HANDMADE PASTA: Spaghetti alla Chitarra with Abruzzese-Style Ragù (Price: $69.95)

March 13, March 27, April 10: INTENSIVE: ITALY’S REGIONAL STUFFED PASTAS with Domenica Marchetti (Price for all 3 classes: $249.95)

• March 13: Ricotta Cheese Ravioli in Tomato Sauce

• March 27: Agnolotti del Plin with Butter and Sage

• April 10: Cappelletti in Brodo

• Plus, all the skills & tool recommendations you need to confidently make countless other stuffed pastas at home.

DISCOUNT: Use the code PASTAPARTY at checkout for a 15% discount on the workshop or the three-class series (or both!).

On to the newsletter…

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Cari amici,

I’m stopping by to say a quick hello and to share with you a recipe from

Irina Georgescu

’s new cookbook, Danube: Recipes and Stories from Eastern Europe.

The book follows the path of the Danube river where it flows between Romania, Serbia, and Bulgaria. It is filled with stories and recipes from the people of these diverse riverland communities, with a focus on how the river itself is reflected in their distinctive cuisines.

“The soft hills and vast plains in the south, nourished by many rivers that flow into the Danube, are perfect for growing wheat, including barley, burghul and maize,” Irina writes in the introduction. “…It’s also a vegetable-grower’s land, from small gardens at the back of every house to large areas dedicated to greens, leaves and legumes. The rivers give us freshwater fish, the carp and trout we are so fond of and cook with so much pleasure.”

Irina, who writes the newsletter Notes from Irina’s Kitchen here on Substack, is a UK-based Romanian author who weaves her Eastern European heritage into her work.

Like her two previous two books, Carpathia: Food from the Heart of Romania; and TAVA: Eastern European Baking and Desserts from Romania and Beyond, her latest, Danube, is much more than a cookbook. It’s a history book, a geography lesson, a tour of a place with a complex past, a beautifully photographed love letter.

I’m going to stop here because next Sunday I’ll be posting a Q & A with Irina all about Danube, and I don’t want to get ahead of myself. For today, I’m offering a “sneak peek” recipe from the book for Salatǎ Orientalǎ, a rich and appetizing potato and egg salad with olives. It reminds me of my aunt Gilda’s Insalata di Riso (rice salad), one of my all-time favorite dishes (and one which I have somehow neglected to share in my newsletter—an oversight that I will remedy at some point).

It’s a salad that would be welcome in any season, but on a particularly dreary and cold January day (I think you know what day I’m talking about), prepping the ingredients—thinly sliced radishes and cucumber, red onion, fresh dill, boiled potatoes and hard-cooked eggs—felt like a tonic, and assembling the colorful salad on a pretty platter lifted me out of the doldrums. If you need a pick-me-up, too, I highly recommend it.

What are you cooking to brighten these winter days?

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RECIPE: Salatǎ Orientalǎ | Potato and Egg Salad with Olives

Here’s what Irina writes in her headnote accompanying the recipe: “When we say ‘salad’ in Romania, we mean a whole category of dishes made with fresh or cooked ingredients, sliced, diced or mashed. So anything can be a salad, including dips and spreads. We have a long tradition of serving salads as part of the starters, in-between dishes and as side dishes. Historically, salads made up almost a quarter of the menu in inns, urban restaurants, and on royal tables. This recipe is one of the most popular potato salads in Romania, and no matter the rest of the ingredients, it needs to have olives.”