I was starting to get used to the idea that Romania was the land of my ancestors. Those little pies and big secrets were mine to claim. The steady stream of frozen dinners, phony family history, and Stalinist propaganda I was fed as a child was not proper preparation for my new ethnic identity. I’d visited Sunnyside, the closest thing Queens had to a Little Romania several times before I could bring myself to set foot in a restaurant. It was a minefield I didn’t know how to cross.

My plan was to start my day at what Google Maps called a “Turkish bakery cafe.” A chalkboard menu listed their bureakas (sic). Was this a Turkish word? Not according to Google Translate. Instead, it listed it as Romanian for sponge cake. It hit me like a ton of bricks; it had to be Romanian – nobody else kept their ethnic or gastronomic background so secret.

I still wasn’t sure – my Turkish and Albanian spelling skills were both worse than nonexistent, but I had a real talent for bluffing. “What language is it spelled in?” The woman behind the counter shrugged and whatever tiny bit of decorum I possessed went out the window. My bureakas weren’t “sponge cake,” they were mild, oily, filled filo dough triangles. Sadly, they weren’t up to the Nita’s little pie standard.

After considering my words carefully, I asked the woman behind the counter point blank if she was Romanian. She turned on a dime and said “Yes and I’m proud of it!”

****

Danubius Restaurant didn’t hide anything. As its website boasted, it served Romanian cuisine and its menu was in Romanian. I went in and was a bit surprised to hear a disco soundtrack. Certainly, nobody here looked like they were going to dance. The crowd was mostly seventy-plus and scraggly. To me, they looked like they had just left their wilderness log cabins to get supplies in town. Where did they find the cash for a splurge like this one? Lunch here was at least twenty-five or thirty bucks and this made me wonder.

It seemed easy enough; a salad and a bowl of soup for my first meal. The weather disagreed. I was frozen to the core and couldn’t bring myself to go for the salad. I needed something – preferably without alcohol – to warm me up and the soup did it. My people give you the chance to eat healthy, but they don’t require it. Indeed, nobody there on my first visit was taking them up on the offer. No salad; everybody had the soup.

Ciorba de fasole cu afumatura was the soup I choose. It was said to have beans and smoked meat and it did. I couldn’t help notice a similarity with Italian. Fasole vs fagioli for beans and afumatura vs afiumicato for smoked. I was served an orange broth with chopped pieces of bacon, great northern beans, the most fresh dill I’d ever seen in one serving of anything, and bits of the very same orange stuff I saw in a Taiwanese soup a few months earlier; almost certainly carrot. On the side was a whole, raw hot green pepper. This was a shock. Was I supposed to eat it? Was my love of chili heat inherited?

After a few tastes, the broth revealed itself as some mixture of meat and paprika. I made a note and dedicated myself to future research. This soup wasn’t something I’d had before, but every ingredient I could pick out was easy to find. I could make it at home without too much grief.

The other customers almost certainly came here from Romania. Were they Soviet era refugees? Or immigrants looking for a good job? Nobody was going to tell me. Actually by putting this all down on paper, I was betraying them in a small way; announcing where my ancestors were from, but not how or why they came. The secrets were still secrets.

My alternative to the fresh and green was scoops of cooked cornmeal covered with crumbled feta, and huge splotches of sour cream, topped with a fried egg. The menu called it mamaliga cu branza si smantana in Romanian and polenta in English. I didn’t want to break the news to them, but the word “polenta” was Italian. At my local Pennsylvania supermarket, it was cornmeal mush.

This fried egg topping thing got to me. A few miles away in the New World Mall, I was looking at them with a bit of disgust, at Danubis, I wolfed mine right down. It was the perfect topping for my dairy farm orgy; a great example of the food that makes Queens a worthwhile trip from anywhere.

Did I recognize anything from childhood? The sour cream! I hadn’t eaten it in decades, but this was it exactly. Grandma would put it on sliced bananas and sprinkle sugar on top. At some point, American grandmas started using yogurt instead of sour cream. Soon afterward, yogurt had conquered the entire world and sour cream remained only as an esoteric ingredient used for recreating antique recipes or a condiment for baked potatoes.

After eating a bowl of bean and bacon soup and a heap of corn and dairy, I could no longer claim to feel cold. They say a person can’t distinguish between cold and pain and this lunch proved it. Not only did it warm me up, it extinguished every ache in my body. Why would anybody take fentanyl when they could eat this? Meals like these were my therapist. Eating them, remembering them, and recreating them helped me put the bits and pieces of my own existence together.