Dill time, time for clatite

It's dill time, which means it's clatite time. I've been eating it as often as possible. Apparently lots of other folks like the dish, because my post about it gets more hits than most of my other posts.

There are no sufficient words to describe the delicious combination of flavors produced by fresh dill, cottage cheese, and a good dough.

Clatite - Romanian pancakes with cottage cheese & fresh dill...and stories

I met Seana Stoia in spring of 1972, when I took a road trip from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Aberdeen, South Dakota with Mike, my then-fiancé. Mike was Seana's grandson. Over the next two-plus decades, until her death at age 94, I learned her life story from her - and I learned to make some of her favorite Romanian dishes.

My adapted recipe for clatite is at the end of an account of Seana's remarkable life. (Clatite is pronounced Cla-TEE-teh.) Clatite are Romanian pancakes. Seana made them savory, with cottage cheese and fresh dill, as I do. My version is a little more "healthy" than hers, avoiding deep-frying. I just spent a week eating clatite because fresh dill is available NOW.

Seana's story

Seana Stoia was born Seana Biliboca in Dragus (Dra-GOOSH) in the Transylvania mountains in Hungary - now Romania - in spring of 1900. (You pronounce Seana as "See-ANNA.") She was an ethnic Romanian who was never told her birth date; she picked May 9 as the day.

Parasciva (Para-SEE-va), Seana's mother, was the second wife of John Biliboca. The couple had buffalo for pulling the plow and for milk. Paraseva would run when John came home drunk. He beat her.

One day when Seana was nine, she and her mother were outside hanging clothes when suddenly they saw a certain bird (I think it was a blackbird; my husband thinks it was a stork). 

Parasciva started crying and asked Seana to forgive her; the bird was a sign to the mother that she would soon die. And it was true - Parasciva died within weeks. She was 50 when she suffered a stroke, on Seana's 10th birthday.

Seana was pulled out of grade school and went to live with her older brother, where she did the work of a grown woman for her brother's wife. She knew that if she stayed in Dragus, she would continue living the life of a slave. The tradition at that time was that any woman who married went to live in her husband's family home and became a servant to her husband's mother. That was not the life for Seana Biliboca.

On October 2, 1920, Seana was 20 years old, and she and her cousin left Dragus. They traveled by train from Romania to France. The two young women had tickets, but climbed to the top of the train car because they were afraid of being raped by the soldiers who filled the train. They lay on top of the car and held on, soot from the smokestack blowing into their faces. They ended their land journey at Le Havre, France, where they boarded the ship Niagara. It took nine days to sail to New York. Seana's brother, George Biliboca, had long settled in a Romanian neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio, and had sent Seana the ticket for her passage.