BUDA BITES

In an entertaining article in the Washington Post last week by Jane Black she discussed how much spelling and grammar mistakes on restaurant menus bother her. Here’s her fantasy:

I enter a restaurant, order and sweetly ask the waiter if I can “hold on to the menu” during dinner. Then, using a distinctive purple pen, I discreetly copy-edit the descriptions of the dishes.

Caesar, not “caeser.” Shiitake, not “shitake.” Riesling, not “reisling” (though I’d quietly applaud restaurants that spell it wrong as long as the misspelling was consistent.)

Black will be in trouble if she ever comes to Budapest, where the menu mistakes would be way too many to correct with her purple pen. Spelling mistakes on menus is something that has long bothered me also, although in Hungary I excuse the spelling mistakes because the people writing the menus are Hungarian speakers, not native English speakers. (Black excuses ethnic restaurants from her rant as well). In Hungary it’s the often hilarious menu translations which stand out more than the excusable spelling mistakes. One of the most memorable that I have come across was the “chicken make you slobber” at a Chinese restaurant. I assume that the menu writer meant to say something along the lines of “mouthwatering chicken.” And then there is carp, that common Hungarian fish, which I have seen countless times spelled as “crap.” True, many people think that it is, but it’s not a very appealing description.

I generally find these translation mistakes to be entertaining rather than annoying (after all, if I had to translate a menu to Hungarian it wouldn’t be a pretty sight). But I do wonder why it is that so many restaurants here can print their menus (which at traditional places can be very long and often laminated, which is surely expensive) without having someone who speaks English at least read it over. But I guess that is just the copy editor in me.

On the other hand, it does really get to me when menu writers translate “pörkölt” (a typical Hungarian stew) as “goulash” into English. This happens constantly, and it just perpetuates the wrongly-held notion outside of Hungary that goulash (gulyás) is a stew. In Hungary it’s not a stew, but a soup. These menu writers who purposely mis-translate it just add to the confusion. I cannot tell you how many times that I have had discussions with waiters to try to get to the bottom of whether or not the dish listed was actually a soup or a stew. I once ordered a gulyás and received a pörkölt only to have the waiter insist to me that it was goulash. Even the fact that I ordered in Hungarian could not convince him that I knew the difference and that what I wanted was actually the soup, and not the stew. Do restaurateurs think that foreigners cannot understand the difference between the two? Now I have taken to either only using the Hungarian menu, or comparing the English menu to the Hungarian before I order. Maybe Hungary should do what the Chinese government has done and make an official list of suggested translations, even if it is just for these to two oft confused dishes.

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.