Harbuz Murat: Barrel-Fermented Watermelon
Vegetables go into the fermenting barrel. Cucumbers, cabbage, tomatoes - half the continent agrees on that, no exceptions. Except one. Harbuz murat, in standard Romanian pepene verde murat, is a whole watermelon fermented in salty brine - a winter staple of Moldovan cuisine in which the symbol of summer ends up in a barrel among the pickles. I wanted to taste it more than anything else in Moldova. That's partly why I can tell you almost everything about it - except how it tastes to me.
What Harbuz Means and Who Else Salts Watermelons
In Moldova the word harbuz means watermelon, and it came into Romanian from Ukrainian; it goes all the way back to the Persian xarboze. Along the way, though, the meanings drifted apart, so today it's a false friend: the Ukrainian harbuz means pumpkin (watermelon is kavun), while the Russian and Polish arbuz mean exactly what the Moldovan word does. No country can claim the dish itself: people ferment watermelons all across the steppes of the southeast - in Romanian Moldavia beyond the Prut, in southern Ukraine and along the Russian Don, where even Sholokhov's Grigory Melekhov asks at a family dinner whether there are any salted watermelons. In Romania it's known mainly in the Romanian region of Moldavia, where watermelons go by the same name - harbuji; in Turkish cuisine it's mostly just the rind that gets pickled, in vinegar, much as in the American South.
How the Watermelon Gets Into the Barrel and When to Open It
Not just any watermelon goes into the barrel. The ones chosen are small, firm, not quite ripe fruit around seven or eight centimeters across - a ripe beauty would collapse in on itself in the brine. They're usually pricked with a needle so the brine can get inside, then layered with dill, garlic, horseradish and sour cherry twigs, whose tannins keep the flesh firm. It's the same craft we know back home in Czechia from full-sour pickles in the cellar, except that a whole watermelon goes in instead of a cucumber, and instead of a few days the wait is one to two months. Valeriu Cojușna, who sells his own pickled watermelons at Chișinău's Piața Centrală market, puts up about a ton of them a year and talks about storing them like a winemaker: a watermelon, he says, loves depth, and the cellar should be at least four meters deep. Every part gets eaten, flesh and rind alike. And the taste? Romanian descriptions promise saltiness first, then sourness, and underneath it all a memory of summer sweetness; Russian recipes add a gentle fizz from the fermentation.
Finished harbuz murat belongs on the winter table: cold, with meat, with potatoes, or - as one Romanian cook remembers from her childhood - with cold mămăligă; an ethnographic archive even lists it as a dish for fasting days. But it runs on a strict calendar: it's pickled in autumn, matures for one to two months and keeps in the cellar until spring. If you want the real barrel-fermented thing, head to Moldova in winter or early spring - in autumn the new batch is still quietly doing its work. Ukrainian blogger Eva Korshik found out how seriously watermelon is taken here: when she admitted before her wedding to a Moldovan that she didn't like harbuz murat, the groom's sister's only comment was "Don't marry her." The wedding went ahead anyway.
Curiosity Number One
I'd picked out harbuz murat before I even flew out and promoted it to curiosity number one of the whole trip. But the menus in Chișinău left me high and dry - murături were on them, but not a single watermelon by name. Our paths crossed just once, in a shop among the refrigerated counters: a VIS-brand jar from Soroca - cut pieces with the rind still on, but sterilized in a sour brine, which makes it more of a marinated cousin of the fermented original; even so, its ingredients listed sour cherry and horseradish leaves, garlic and pepper, just as if it had come from the barrel. It cost 45.60 MDL (2.20 EUR). I took a photo of the label, left the jar on the shelf - and no other chance came along. Luckily, the calendar gave me an excuse: at the turn of September and October, the real harbuz murat was only just going into the barrels, somewhere in the dark, four meters down. So curiosity number one hasn't expired. It's just been rescheduled: a Moldovan winter and an open barrel.
