Christmas culinary ceremonies start with flat cakes and knotted-shaped breads. The common bread rises to the rank of a spiritual messenger being festively knitted and adorned and therefore, becoming a venerated symbol. Privileged by the tradition and, of course, being minutely baked, the knotted-shaped bread is charged with the emotion, the hope of renovation and the joy of holidays. As a salted piece of bread that is offered to the guests (a well known custom in Romania even in the pertaining to State etiquette meetings), the Christmas knotted-shaped bread and the flat one carry by themselves messages of good will, improvement and happiness.
Christmas knotted-shaped breads (Colaci de Craciun or Craciunei), considered sacred food are made of leaven and had at ritual feasts, given to the waits and to the spirits of the dead people as a funeral repast. They can be circle, horseshoe or star-shaped standing for the Sun, the Moon and the stars, doll and figure-shaped standing for the body of Indo-European and Christian divinity, filled-circle shaped without any hole in the middle standing for the Neolithic geomorphologic divinity and sacred animal and bird-shaped (bull and hoopoe shaped).
Depending on the shapes, names or decorative patterns, on the moments of giving, of keeping and the ritual context of using them, Christmas knotted-shaped breads stand for the sacrifice of the wheat spirits, the sacrifice of the divinity that dies and revives together with time, at the New Year’s Eve, the job, the age, sex and social statute of the one that offers or receives the knotted-shaped breads, the end of the agrarian and pastoral activities and the prediction of harvests.
The baking, good wishes, receiving, tearing and using knotted shaped bread are ceremonial moments of deep spiritual feelings, loaded by many practices and prehistoric beliefs. Baking Christmas knotted-shaped bread is one of the most stable and respected Romanian customs.
After we leaven bread by hands, tearing it into pieces that are turned into finger-thick strips out of which the cracknels are knotted - the ones made out of one strip, the ones made of 2 strips and the ones made of two knotted strips surrounded by another strip. They will be given to the waits, relatives and they will adorn the Christmas Eve dishes or they will be given as funeral repast.
The flat cakes are considered sacred food and they stand for the wheat spirits. They are usually baked in the South and East of Romania. Resembling the azymes, they have a very simple composition: wheaten flour mixed with salted and warm water without using any ferments. The dough is pulled into little pastes by hands or by stirring stick and, then, it is baked on the kitchen range of the stove or, solemnly, on the red-hot ploughshare.
The first flat cake of a year that a Romanian cooks is named turta-vacii (the cow flat cake). It is baked on the Epiphany and not till then, when it is given together with the bran to the cow in order to eat them, thinking that the cow is going to have a lot of milk during the year.
