By 1850 maize already ruled the fields of Moldavia. What the village ate afterwards was weighed only a handful of times

Your county: pick where your family came from

The map shows the 32 counties of the Kingdom in 1879–1913. Click a county or pick it from the list: you see what was sown there in 1892 and what was written about the table there, or about the nearest table described.

Millet did not vanish at once: it stayed on the plain

The oldest field figures in this research are from 1850, for Putna and Dorohoi. Millet then held 1.4% and 3.9% of the land sown with maize or millet. In the 1870s millet held 6–7% of the land sown with maize or millet. In 1903 it was 4%. From 1904 to 1915 it sits at 1–4%, with one exception, 1907 (6%).

In 1892 millet was a crop of the south-eastern plain. In Constanța it covered more land than maize (31,449 ha against 24,694 ha), in Ialomița 26%, and in Tulcea, Ilfov and Brăila between 15% and 22%. In 19 of the 32 counties it was below 1%.

Area does not say what was eaten. In 1892 wheat covered 1,496,072 ha, nearly as much as maize (1,822,443 ha), but the table does not say how much of it stayed in the village.

For the time of Constantin Brâncoveanu (1688–1714) there is no field or plate figure here. The oldest checked records are from 1742: 18 Moldavian monasteries received “bread” in merțe. At Putna the source names wheat, mălai and păpușoi (maize), at Neamț wheat and mălai, in the other 16 only “bread” (S113, a 1962 article after a 1915 edition). Maize therefore appears as early as 1742, and by 1850 it ruled the fields of Moldavia. The data do not show when it arrived.

The bread that displaced maize: Osoi, 1933–1935

The doctors of Tomești chose 22 families in Osoi, Iași county, 20 of them with at least one pellagra case, and logged daily what went into the pot. Between 8 April and 21 June 1934 the study handed out bread. Maize fell from 74% to 25% of calories, while the total stayed nearly the same: 3,941 kcal in period I, 3,995 in period IV.

• I · 74.3%Christmas fast
  30 Nov–24 Dec 1933
  3,941 kcal
• II · 68.8%Christmas and Carnival
  25 Dec 1933–18 Feb 1934
  3,657 kcal
• III · 74.9%Lent
  19 Feb–28 Mar 1934
  3,886 kcal
• IV · 25.4%Easter and after
  8 Apr–3 Jun 1934
  3,995 kcal
• V · 30.2%St Peter’s fast
  4–21 Jun 1934
  4,090 kcal
• VI · 66.6%autumn and winter
  Nov 1934–Feb 1935
  3,445 kcal

Maize flour: 762 g per unit per day in period I, 276 g in IV. Black bread: 43 g in I, 745 g in IV and 760 g in V. Sugar stayed small: between 1.3 and 9.7 g a day.

What does not follow: that bread cured or prevented pellagra, or that the whole village ate this way. The families were chosen by doctors, received bread for taking part, and the calories are the authors’ calculations per consumption unit.

28 years earlier: Arsura and Epureni, 1906

In a village in Fălciu, Nicolae Lupu counted 40 families, 150 adult equivalents, over a whole year: 1,000 g of maize flour a day, alongside 800 g of sour soup (borș) and 250 g of wine. At Epureni, in the same county, he observed five families of 19 adults directly for two winter days. Lupu himself warns that families may have exaggerated, and the list adds up to 2,588 g, not the 2,558 g he gives as the total.

S34, pp. 221–224 (pages checked against the scan). Grams per adult equivalent per day; the methods differ from Osoi’s, so the figures are not comparable gram for gram.

A week of meals in Bârsești

In late summer 1938 a team of students logged, in three households in northern Vrancea, what was eaten in the morning, at lunch and in the evening, seven days running. Polenta appears in 40 of the 63 meals; 15 say “nothing”, all in the morning. The families knew they would be visited and cooked better than usual.

• Springweed sour soup (nettle, amaranth, orache) or beans soured with green fruit
• Summergreen bean pods
• Autumndried beans; baked or boiled pumpkin
• Winterpork and fat when available; boiled dried fruit; boiled pumpkin; maize meal

The seasons above are the author’s generalisation, without quantities. For the first printed day the source gives 1939, but the weekdays fit 1938; 1938 is an inference, not a check. Dishes are translated from the printed Romanian; “jumări” (cracklings or fried scraps) is left as the source writes it. S163, pp. 149–152. Polenta and maize meal are highlighted.

Pellagra: what the figures show and what they do not

Pellagra appears when the diet is dominated by maize and niacin (vitamin B3) is lacking; doctors of the time already tied it to polenta. The surviving figures cannot show that link: they are cases reported by doctors, with no population to set them against.

• 38 / 1,126pellagra patients among those treated at the hospital at Nemțu between June 1877 and January 1878 (S159)
• 7,531 → 17,912cases registered in the Kingdom, 1895 and 1896. The jump coincides with a change in how cases were counted in 1896 (S32)
• 2,246cases and 55 deaths reported in 1940 in Neamț county, across 58 localities (S75)

Cases reported in 1940, by locality, Neamț county

• Calu Iapa186
• Podoleni117
• Petricani103
• General Averescu94
• Păstrăveni89
• Dumbrava Roșie81
• Zănești74
• Ștefan-cel-Mare73
• Cândești60
• Români59
• Roznov58
• Crăcăoai57
• Vânătorii Neamțului57
• Bodeștii-Precista56
• Războeni56
• Dragomirești50
• Costișa50
• Mărgineni47
• Rediu45
• Țibucani43
• Hangu36
• Dochia36
• Piatra-Neamț36
• Bălțătești34
• Vasile Conta34
• Târgu-Neamț34
• Ghigoiești32
• Pipirig31
• Girov31
• Bârgăoani31
• Tazlău29
• Filioara28
• Slobozia28
• Dobreni27
• Răucești27
• Bălănești27
• Borlești27
• Călugăreni26
• Grumăzești26
• Negrești25
• Gârcina21
• Galu20
• Buhuși20
• Buhalnița19
• Bicaz18
• Pângarați13
• Căciulești12
• Ciahlău11
• Tarcău10
• Farcașa9
• Borca8
• Bistricioara6
• Bistrița6
• Tașca5
• Vaduri5
• Mădei2
• Broșteni1
• Crucea—

1 localities print a dash instead of a figure; a dash does not mean zero. The list includes towns. The original register, each locality’s population and the diagnostic criterion are missing, so the figures cannot be compared between localities or with the maize sown. S75, pp. 111–114.

What cannot be claimed

• A particular ancestor’s menu. No source ties a present-day family to a plate of that time.
• The year maize overtook millet. The oldest area figures are from 1850, when the change had already happened.
• A calorie table by decade. There are seven plates with calorie shares, between 1931 and 1938, plus grams logged in 1906 and in the 1930s.
• That nothing survives between 1742 and 1849. Only that nothing was checked against a scan here. There are leads: 1837 tax registers from Ialomița and estate accounts of 1817–1828, read only as indexed text.
• Maize as the sole cause of pellagra, from the figures here. The cases are reported, with no population to set them against.
• Brâncoveanu’s time. The court accounts of 1694–1704 exist, but were not read for this page.
• Sunflower oil on the plate. Sunflower area rose from 672 ha in 1910 to 200,000 ha in 1938, according to a 2014 scientific article (S11). The Osoi table lists only “untdelemn” (oil), between 0.4 and 10 g a day, without saying from what.
• Zero. A dash in a printed table means the figure is missing. The 1911 table for millet does not match its own totals and was left out.
• Monastery accounts as peasant meals. The 1742 and 1849–1850 accounts belong to institutions.

Map: REGIS county polygons for 1879–1913, a modern reconstruction (CC BY 4.0), simplified. The distances in “Your county” run from the polygon’s centre to the record’s point, rounded to 10 km. Hollow dots are county or region centres, not villages. The figures come from printed tables and may carry their errors; the scans are not republished here. The place search uses GeoNames positions: falling inside a historical polygon is a map fact, not proof about that village.