The Cultural Cuisines and Influences Behind Dracula

Transylvania has a rich and complex history. Situated in the centre of Eastern Europe, it is a crossroads of cultures, of Hungarian, Romanian, Saxon (German), and Székely heritage, with Turkish and Slavic influences over the centuries. The result, through the lens of food, is a blend of cuisines that creates a fascinating melting pot.

However, Bram Stoker never visited Transylvania. Instead, he researched the region by borrowing books from the London Library and underlining passages that caught his imagination. Because Stoker never travelled to the region himself, the Transylvania of Dracula is a literary construct, a landscape stitched together, inspired by the writings of others.

Among his most heavily used sources were Emily Gerard’s The Land Beyond the Forest and Transylvanian Superstitions, A.F. Crosse’s Round About the Carpathians, and Charles Boner’s Transylvania: Its Products and Its People. His sources were not historians or cultural scholars, but travellers and memoirists who recorded what they saw (or thought they saw) through their own 19th-century Western lens. Their works blend observation with personal interpretation, often exoticizing what was unfamiliar or foreign to them. From Gerard, he drew details of local customs and dishes such as mămăligă. From Crosse, he borrowed the description for robber’s steak and even the plum brandy Slivovitz; and from Boner, he absorbed descriptions of rural life and mountain landscapes. The result is a Transylvania created by Stoker, loosely based on fact, but filtered through layers of imagination, travel writing and Gothic mood.