BUDA BITES

This blog has been pretty neglected over the past few months. But that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been writing. In fact, I have too much interesting stuff on my plate right now, which has left no time for paying attention to this poor blog.

I have been contributing to Chew.hu on and off for awhile now, but over the past two months I have been writing for the site on a more regular basis. I have been working on helping to creating a database of Hungarian recipes for the site, and the “Treasury of Hungarian Recipes” already has more than 60 recipes in it. My main task so far has been translating the recipes from old Hungarian cookbooks, which is challenging, but is actually more fun than it sounds. After I got the hang of it, and learned all of the important words, phrases, and measurements, translating the recipes went surprisingly smoothly. I have also been contributing to Chew’s new “Encyclopedia of Hungarian Food and Drink“, cooking some of the recipes that I translated, and snapping photos for the site. Now chew.hu is much more than just a food blog. It’s an essential resource for keeping up with the Hungarian food and wine scenes, and digging into the details of Hungarian eating and drinking. Check it out!

Last week I finally saw the advance copies of Food Wine Budapest, and I still don’t think that it has really hit me that all of my work has resulted in an actual book. But I have two (rather thick) copies of the book sitting on my desk to remind me. The publisher has started planning which editors to send the book to, and we’ve been discussing ideas about marketing and publicity. It’s all pretty exciting.

I’ve also been busy with freelance articles (and I just got a commission from my all-time favorite food magazine). And, in other exciting news, I am now working on a new book. I don’t want to talk about what the book will be about yet (I’m not far enough into it to feel comfortable with that), but I will say that it is not food-related. But it is about Budapest, and the research will be just as much fun as the research for Food Wine Budapest was, but in a very different way.

Since I’ve been living in Budapest I’ve been eating more pork than I ever have before in my life. And the pork here is great. It’s definitely the meat of choice, and meat from the Mangalica pig–a heritage breed that nearly died out during the Communist-era–is the choicest kind of pork. We happened to be in Városliget (City Park) this weekend when a Mangalica festival was happening. See what I wrote about it on Chew.hu.

Robyn Lee over at Serious Eats posted this funny old Hungarian sausage commercial. If you’re really interested, check Lee’s post for the lyrics.

And, here’s another for sour cream:

If you’re out drinking, don’t even think about getting behind the wheel in Hungary. According to the new rules, any amount of alcohol is too much, and your license can be immediately seized if there’s any evidence that you’ve had even a drop. While there’s no reason to drive in Budapest anyway since the public transportation system here is so excellent, this can put a damper on going to wine tastings in the countryside. So, plan carefully! If you really do need to drive somewhere, luckily, there are lots of drink-and-drive taxi services (sofőrsegély) in Hungary. Here’s the drill: they will send a driver to pick you up (usually it takes at least 30 minutes to arrive, at least in Budapest) and then drive you home in your own car.

Some companies in Budapest include the following–if you’re in the countryside, ask around and you’ll probably find one (and let me know if you find any good ones):

• After (Tel.: 06-30/600-6003)
• Alkony (Tel.: 06-20/940-4040)
• Argo (Tel.: 06-20/961-4675)
• AWD (Tel.: 06-30/331-3310)
• Ittasofőr (Tel.: 06-30/250-2000)
• Korona (Tel.: 06-20/999-397
• Sofőrsegély (Tel.: 06-20/950-5505)
• Vénusz női sofőrszolgálat (Tel.: 06-20/253-9899)

Our two year-old daughter has been eating solids since she was five months old and has gone through many dramatic food phases since then. In the beginning she loved plain yogurt, and sometimes ate two, or even three, at one sitting. And she hated milk. The one time that her aunt tried to feed her a spoonful of jarred baby food she spit it out. We never saw the need to buy commercial baby food when we could just make our own “real” food for her. In her first months of eating she was an obsessive eater, and when she was around one we had to start removing the food from the table, because she would just keep eating and eating. She has calmed down a bit, eats normal portions, and still has lots of foods that she really loves.

I suspect that if we were living in America her food preferences might be a little different. We go to a lot of restaurants, and thankfully there are none of those horrible kids menus here featuring French fries, hot dogs, and fried chicken nuggets. Hungarians, it seems, are a lot more relaxed about feeding their children. She eats the same things that we do, and she has been doing so ever since she started eating solids. So far there’s nothing that she really dislikes or severely objects to. But she does have lots of preferences, and a few passions. She loves foods with strong flavors and pronounced spices, and she’s a big meat eater. It’s fascinating to watch her budding food likes, dislikes, and habits. I wonder how much of it reflects her parents habits and preferences?

She goes to nursery school a few days every week, and the food that she is served there actually looks quite good. The menu is posted weekly and the children have things like coffee (more like milk flavored with coffee) or tea with buttered rolls for breakfast. For their tíz órai (ten o’clock snack) there’s juice. It’s all very civilized.* For lunch, the meal usually starts with a soup (which the children amazingly eat nicely by themselves) and often contains some sort of főzelék (a mushy vegetable preparation). Sometimes there’s turkey or chicken breast, and dessert is usually fruit. Sometimes there’s even arany galuska (a tasty yeast-raised dessert), and on those days I wish I were eating lunch at the little tables with the children. The only memories I have of school lunches were greenish tinted hamburgers, coke from the vending machine, and awful steak and cheese sandwiches. Needless to say, I almost always brought my own.

Here are some of A.’s current favorites:

She loves fatty spicy sausage (kolbász) and asks for it almost daily. This she probably gets from her Hungarian side. One thing that I am not happy that she likes is virsli (the Hungarian hot dog), which she occasionally eats at school.

Scrambled eggs or pancakes are a few of her favorite meals, and not just at breakfast. She likes big fluffy American style pancakes with maple syrup just as much as she likes the thin, stuffed Hungarian palacsinta.

She loves paprika so much that I now think it is some paprika gene in Hungarians. She sprinkles it on her eggs, but she probably likes it just as much for color as for the flavor. She knows, too, that she should stay away from the hot stuff.

We tend to cook pizza a lot, and A. loves to reach up to the counter and nibble on chunks of raw pizza dough, which she may like more than the pizza itself. She does the same thing with raw cookie and pie dough.

There’s a bakery on the corner of our block and everyday on the walk home from nursery school A. insists on stopping to buy pogacsa (Hungarian savory biscuits) from the “pogacsa néni” inside. She also loves kifli (crescent shaped bread rolls), but that’s probably mainly because her favorite character in her favorite Hungarian book eats kiflis for breakfast.

She absolutely loves túró rudis. But who doesn’t?

She likes plain yogurt better than the flavored kinds. And she loves sour cream, which if it’s on the table, she almost always ends up eating straight from the container with a spoon. In Hungary, sometimes you’ll see people eating a carton of sour cream and a bread roll for lunch, which might be in A.’s future.

She’s big on drinks and her favorites are sparkling mineral water, milk, and orange juice.

She also likes lots of things that you wouldn’t suspect a kid to like (and which many adults don’t even like), such as anchovies, pickles, olives, pate, smoked salmon, goat cheese, and lemons (she likes to suck on them).

Her new favorite fruit is kiwi, which she is often served for dessert at nursery school. Just yesterday she ate three whole kiwis.

* At the nursery school, which is a public one, the children even go to a salt room twice a week for salt therapy, which is supposed to be good for the lungs.

Now is the time for 2008 trend and destination forecasts, and it seems that everyone is putting them out. One interesting one from the relatively new International Culinary Tourism Association cites Hungary (along with neighboring Slovakia) as one of the top “10 Culinary Destinations to watch for 2008″. This is what the list says:

Hungary & Slovakia - Hungarian wines are relatively unknown and most would agree, underrated. Slovakian wines are completely unknown outside the region. Both can be best enjoyed with the hearty and flavorful local cuisines.

The other hot culinary destinations according to the list are: Singapore, Ontario, Barbados, Louisiana, Mexico, Western Cape (South Africa), Argentina, New Zealand, and Sweden. According to many tourism sources, culinary tourism is one of the hottest growing niche sectors. Naturally, I agree that Hungary deserves its place on that list.

If you’re in a place where the BBC’s Olive magazine is available, my article “48 Hours in Budapest” was published in the January issue. In Budapest, it’s available with a very high mark-up (2,550 HUF!) at Bestsellers. The article includes food-themed recommendations for  a Budapest weekend.

A few weeks ago while everyone else was eating turkey we ate wild duck. And as you can see in the photo on the left it was truly a wild duck, which someone had actually hunted and shot. The poor thing was even missing a leg. The duck weighed in at just under a kilo and we bought it on the lower level of the Central Market for astonishingly cheap (around 1,400 HUF). We didn’t plan on buying wild duck that day, and although we’ve cooked plenty of duck, neither of us had ever cooked wild duck before so we didn’t know where to start. After unwrapping the duck and seeing the pellet hole, I wasn’t feeling very prepared for cooking this duck, especially after reading this in one Internet recipe:

Most wild ducks are apt to have the flavor of fish and when on hands of unexperienced cooks are sometimes unpalatable on this account. Before roasting them, parboil them with a small peeled carrot put within each duck. This absorbs the unpleasant taste.

I didn’t like the idea of parboiling it, but I also didn’t want a duck that tasted like fish. But as usual, Hungarian cooks aren’t as fussy when it comes to recipes, so I checked one of my Hungarian cookbooks, Szakácskönyve (Cookbook) by Móra Ferencné and found a perfectly easy recipe. Unlike regular ducks which drip with fat when you roast them, wild ducks are lean and easily dry out, so don’t be stingy with the bacon fat.

Roasted Wild Duck (adapted from Móra Ferencné)

Wash the duck and sprinkle it with salt. Place in a roasting pan and cover with thin slices of szalonna (fatty bacon). Sprinkle thyme and pepper in the cavity of the duck and stuff with an onion half and an apple half. Slice the other half of the onion and add with a half cup of water to the pan. Roast at 350 F (180 C) for about an hour and fifteen minutes (depending on the size of your duck), adding more water as needed.

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I also made an orange sauce in the pan after the duck was finished cooking by deglazing the pan with the juice of one orange and then adding another chopped orange to the mix.

Published in 1949, the Szakácskönyve is a great basic Hungarian cookbook (if you can understand enough Hungarian to use it). It has recipes for any Hungarian dish or preparation that you’d possibly need. It also includes entertaining illustrations on how to set the tables for the different meals which comes in handy of you want to make sure you’re putting the sugar bowl and the butter container on exactly the right part of the breakfast table. Life in Móra’s house must have been nice, with a lunch table that included six separate glasses.

But like most books from that time it doesn’t include cooking temperatures or times, so you’ve got to have some idea what you’re doing. The recipes are always short, but often too short. Back then, it seems, readers did not have to have cooking techniques explained to them. Everyone knew how to make a roux and a butter cream without step-by-step instructions. Móra Ferencné (or Mrs. Frank Móra) was the wife of a famous Hungarian writer, known for his children’s books. Móra néni was such a perfectionist, according to her granddaughter who happens to live in the village where my husband grew up, that she’d throw any dish that didn’t turn out well onto the kitchen floor. Marta néni, the grand daughter, sweetly wanted to sign our copy of the book after finding out that we use it.

Our duck turned out great–we didn’t have to throw it on the floor–and it tasted nothing like fish. If you try this recipe yourself, remember to watch out for the pellet while you’re eating, especially if you’re feeding it to small children.