The ecological base is a vast renewable fund of resources that provides space for fields, food for gathering, fodder for cattle, and habitat for wild game. The base gives everything but costs nothing. It needs only to be taken care of within its own dynamics.
—Steven Stoll, Ramp Hollow
On Monday, the Father came to us and said, it’s time to go collect the plums. He loaded us into his rattle-trap “farmer’s car” (as he called it) with rusty fenders and doors that didn’t open from the inside. We drove a few minutes to the village church where he performed Orthodox services every Sunday. Before putting us to work he took us inside, and when he opened the door to the small nave I couldn’t help but gasp out loud.
Hidden inside the church’s humble exterior was a breathtaking fresco where the 200-year old mural—which had been painstakingly rescued from generations of soot laid by the wood fires that still today heat the homes of Transilvania—blended seamlessly into new work by a regional painter commissioned to complete the rest of the interior in the original style.
I have come to expect this kind of surprise beauty sneaking up on me everywhere here. Matching the riot of colors inside the church, the yard was a wild tangle of tilting gravestones and wildflowers underneath a fruited canopy of plum branches.
Jack, Sadie and I had expected to be carefully picking the fruit by hand, but the Father brought a single ladder and a long stick to the trunk of the nearest tree. He climbed up into the branches and began beating them with the stick, causing a cascade of ripe fruit to fall to the ground.
A handful of relatives arrived just as we did, and we followed their lead, picking the plums off the ground and tossing them into buckets. Those buckets were emptied into large plastic sacks which were then loaded into the trunk of the car to be taken back to the farm.
The plums were so thick on the ground that it was impossible not to step on nearly as many as I picked up. It felt strange to be so careless, to toss plums that were half squashed, bruised, and split open into the same bucket with ones that were pristine. There was no concern for sanitary measures. But of course, it occurred to me, why should there be? This fruit would soon be turned into something that had served as hand sanitizer during the pandemic.
In fact, the only fruit that wasn’t welcome in the bucket was that which was too firm, whose sugars had not yet fully developed. At one point the Father plucked a perfect, unblemished, but ever-so-slightly underripe plum out of my bucket, bit into it, shook his head and tossed it away. He was looking for sweetness over cosmetic perfection.
He then picked one up off the ground and handed it to me. I bit into it and gasped as I had done when I first stepped into the church. It was perhaps the sweetest thing I had ever tasted straight from nature, as though the fruit had already turned to jam before falling from the tree. This plum only had a couple of hours left before beginning to succumb to the natural magic of fermentation. In other words, it could not be used for anything else.
This is the transmutation of țuică. In the villages, plums are not being siphoned away from the food supply in order to make hooch. These are plums that otherwise would become fertilizer for the grass and the trees, or food for the bear and deer hungry for the caloric boost and quick buzz that comes from eating fruit left too long on the ground. They are damaged and dirty, plucked from the leaves already beginning to rot. They are far beyond use for eating fresh or baking, or even for other forms of preservation. And yet, we gathered 400 kilos of them, which in a few weeks will be transformed into 40 liters of țuică.
In this transformation, we see the paucity of many political-economic understandings of value. I’ve been presented with gifts of țuică by many who never touch a drop of alcohol themselves, teetotalers who faithfully gather the fruit, set it to ferment, and haul it to the distillery every fall. What is the “use value” of țuică to one who abstains from drinking? What is the “exchange value” if it is traded, not for money, but for the purpose of social connection, favor, and tradition? Without getting too much into the thorny theoretical territory of the moral economy, many scholars have recognized that peasant subsistence blurs the lines between social and material exchange, that physical and cultural reproduction are difficult if not impossible to disentangle.
But if we allow ourselves a more creative and expansive idea of “value”, where we do not have to assign țuică to one tier of an impossible taxonomy, we arrive back at an old idea. Value, in a very human sense, is meaning. And we make meaning through our labor. Here, the complexity of what țuică comes to mean in Romanian society begins with that which is freely given from the ecological base, to which our human efforts are diligently applied.
The plums from the churchyard may be free for the priest to gather, but the title of my earlier post isn’t exactly true, either. It may be free in the money-economy sense, but in the labor economy, it certainly is not. It’s actually a significant amount of work, one task in a steadily flowing stream that never seems to end. When we returned from the churchyard, the Father sat with us for a few minutes, and then around 6 PM announced that he was off to the forest to cut firewood for the coming winter. We didn’t see him again until after dark.
So why, when tasks of basic subsistence are never-ending, are shoulders turned to the laborious hand-work of making țuică? What is it about the significance of this act, the material and symbolic heft of the finished product, that drives us to these rituals? That is the fundamental question of this project, and I will be exploring the many complex answers here. Until then…
I think it would be interesting in a future post to focus on how tuica making knowledge and skills are passed along through generations. As more young people leave rural areas and in fact leave Romania period for economic opportunities elsewhere in Western Europe or other places, how is the role of hooch changing as a mode of social reproduction and informal economic livelihood? I hope you take up this question!
And....I love this Substack. You’ve got a great thing going here!!