Bucuria: Moldova's Legendary Candy Maker
Few factories can claim in their company history to have produced two prime ministers. Bucuria can: Vasile Tarlev left the director's office in 2001 to head the Moldovan government, and Pavel Filip, who took over as director after him, made it to the prime minister's chair fifteen years later. In a country where cabinets change faster than recipes, that's a decent record for one chocolate factory. Bucuria (pronounced boo-koo-REE-ah) is Moldova's largest confectionery maker: a Chișinău factory whose name means joy and whose candies, chocolates and caramels have been part of Moldovan cuisine since 1946. A box of chocolates with the oval logo is also one of the Moldovan food souvenirs I recommend.
From Barracks to Bonbons: How Bucuria Began
Bucuria isn't Chișinău's oldest confectionery, though - it's a successor, not a founding father. Interwar Bessarabia had as many as forty-nine confectionery workshops, and ten of them made their living purely from candy; among the best known were Savva Garaguli's workshop, founded in 1924, and Nuhim Rozenberg's little candy factory from 1933. The war ground this small world down: in 1944 the remaining workshops were merged into the state-run Confectionery Factory No. 1, and two years later the government of Soviet Moldavia decided that a new factory would go up on the site of former barracks, with a capacity of twenty tons of sweets a day. Its machines came from German war reparations, and not even the company's own sources agree on the exact founding date - the only certainty is "1946".
At first, though, it wasn't purely a candy factory: it soon took on pasta, then cookies, and its official name ended up as the prosaic "confectionery and macaroni factory". It wasn't until 1962 that the authorities added the name Bucuria, joy - and at the same time the factory tidied up its product line: the pasta was dropped, the cookies moved to Bălți and only the sweets stayed in Chișinău. So it got a name meaning joy only once it had got rid of the macaroni. In Russian the name isn't translated, just transliterated: Букурия.
Sour Cherries in Fondant, Grapes with Their Seeds and Meteorit Brittle
The most productive chapter came in 1977, when Bucuria was given the status of a research and experimental enterprise and began systematically processing what Soviet planning called non-traditional raw materials: fruit and berries from Moldova's orchards. Most of today's classics date from that era. Vișină în ciocolată is a pitted sour cherry steeped in alcohol, set in fondant and coated in chocolate - a distant cousin of Mon Chéri from Italy, except that instead of liquid liqueur, the cherry is wrapped in a sugary paste. Struguri în ciocolată go a step further: whole alcohol-soaked grapes, seeds and all, which crunch unexpectedly beneath the chocolate dome. The wrapper, meanwhile, announces "produs de post", a product for fasting days - the label generously overlooks the two percent alcohol inside.
The Meteorit brittle - according to locals, the brand's best-loved candy - is a cluster of roasted peanuts bound with honey and coated in chocolate. Chișinăul de seară, Evening Chișinău, are prunes with raisins under chocolate; dried fruit in chocolate is found all over the post-Soviet world, but in Moldova it has put down particularly deep roots - the Coșuleț baskets riff on it with prunes, cherries and, more recently, oranges (and if you want to taste what a Moldovan prune can do without chocolate, try the festive prunes stuffed with walnuts, simmered in wine). And then there's Lapte de pasăre, bird's milk: a fluffy foam of egg whites and thickened milk, which Bucuria also sells in a Tort version that, despite the name, isn't a cake but a box of chocolates with three-layer pieces cut to look like one.
The gift range consists of boxes of chocolates with regional names: Moldova, Vatra Moldovei, Dorința, Nostalgie or the liqueur-filled Livada Moldovei Regală, where sour cherries, plums and grapes all meet under one lid. The rest of the shelves belong to everyday treats - dragées in bags, fruit drops in round tins, jellies, caramels and Artek wafers with fillings from halva to cappuccino, plus the Tort de firmă wafer cake in a chocolate coating. It's the same ritual as the box of chocolates we used to bring grandma back home in Czechia - only here you pick it from an entire wall.
The Youngest of the Soviet Chocolate Factories
In the family of the great Eastern chocolate makers, Bucuria is the baby. Moscow's Krasny Oktyabr traces its lineage back to 1849, the Kyiv factory - today's Roshen - to 1886 and Minsk's Kommunarka to 1905; all of them stand on pre-revolutionary foundations, whereas Bucuria is a purely Soviet creation. Much of the repertoire is shared, too. Bird's milk was registered as a trademark in 1936 by the Warsaw confectioner Jan Wedel - in Polish cuisine it's still known as ptasie mleczko - and three decades later a Soviet food industry minister tasted it on his travels and had the recipe redeveloped back home. Artek wafers, in turn, are named after the Young Pioneer camp in Crimea and were baked elsewhere in the Soviet Union too. Moldova only made its own mark on this family through its fruit - especially grapes in chocolate, a typically Moldovan idea from a wine-growing country.
In the 1980s the factory was churning out more than forty thousand tons of confectionery a year, and its fruit was grown by its own association of ten state farms. Bucuria candies were luxury goods back then: the writer Maria Pilchin recalls that, because of a shortage of packaging, they were sold wrapped in gray paper or newspaper and traveled as a rare gift on the Prietenia - Friendship - train from Chișinău to Bucharest. After 1990, Bessarabian students started bringing them to their classmates in Romania by the bagful. The student contraband grew into a proper trade: today the candies are sold in Romania by online shops and stores specializing in Bessarabian goods, and there were even kiosks right inside Bucharest metro stations, where they were sold one piece at a time. For the Moldovan diaspora they're the taste of home; for Romanians, a discovery that arrived in backpacks.
A Sweet Powerhouse with a Few Catches
The factory only just survived the collapse of the Soviet Union - in the worst years it kept a mere 56 kinds of candy going - and spent the whole of the 1990s digging its way out. Today, by its own figures, it accounts for roughly seventy percent of Moldova's candy production, makes more than two hundred products, exports to countries from Romania to Canada and has seventeen branded stores in Chișinău alone; it spends around a hundred million lei a year on domestic ingredients - sugar, honey, plums, flour and walnuts.
This Moldovan calling card has its less picture-postcard side, though: a Russian company has long held the majority of the shares, and some of the newer candies, such as the Nunta range, are made under contract by a Turkish firm because the Chișinău factory can't find enough workers. If you want to be sure your candy really comes from Chișinău, stick to the classics - Meteorit and Evening Chișinău are still made at home. The range keeps shifting, too: the official catalog doesn't yet list chocolate bars with flavors like salted roasted corn, lemon with pepper or ginger with blackberry.
Beneath the Fondată în 1946 Logo
I walked into the Bucuria flagship store on Ștefan cel Mare Boulevard in Chișinău (see Where to Eat in Chișinău) mainly for the spectacle: above the shelves glows a red oval reading "Fondată în 1946", beneath it a saleswoman in a red apron straightens the boxes of chocolates, and on the bottom shelf, somewhat unexpectedly, stand bottles of KVINT divin all the way from Tiraspol. I didn't buy anything. I'd already picked up Coșuleț baskets with prunes and cherries at the Nr.1 supermarket, as I describe in my article What to Bring Back from Moldova; they taste exactly the way they look - under a thick layer of chocolate, the prune holds an earthy sweetness and the candied cherry a juicier, slightly tart center. So in the store I settled for comparing price tags: the brand's own shop sells at practically the same prices as the supermarket, with no souvenir markup whatsoever. Same candies, same money.
