Finom, finom, pompás, pompás

“It’s not enough to have talent, you also have to be Hungarian” Robert Capa

We are poor, but we eat well. Antal Aladarné

My grandmother said this often. My father also. I would retort, we are poor because we eat well. But it’s true. Eating well in Hungary is mandatory. In fact it’s impossible not to. Every time I visit, I leave feeling more akin to a well stuffed goose than a human. My relatives do not understand the concept of enough. I once arrived at my aunt’s house in Pécs in Southern Hungary at 2am in the morning, following a late flight and terrifying four hour drive through the dark (Hungarians make Italian drivers seem sedate), avoiding random boars and deer with a death wish crossing the not wide roads, to be greeted by a full dinner. What fool wouldn’t want a brimming dish of chicken paprikás and nokedli at stupid o clock in the morning? And pudding. Of course. I wasn’t going to argue with my aunt. I ate it. Then stayed wide awake until 6am when she presented me with breakfast. True story. To not finish what is put in front of you is a grave insult. You must eat it. And then have some more. Indigestion? Pah. Have a palinka, you’ll be fine.

But I’m starting this all wrong. A bit of context is required. And maybe a disclaimer. I’m not all Hungarian. As my father would so eloquently say to my sisters and I, “you are mongrels”. I was born in and grew up in Liverpool. My father was a GP in the south of the city, renowned for his the Count on Sesame Street accent and prowess with a pistol (of more later). My mother was a more genteel Scot by birth, raised in a mix of Malayan colonial homes and Swiss boarding schools. They met at medical school and moved to Liverpool in the late 1960s because obviously it was the place to be (still is IMHO). My father or Papi as I called him, was a casualty of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, forced to flee his home with his brother and several friends or face the firing squads. Apparently locking the chief of police up in his own prison cell wasn’t at all appreciated, despite the fact that doing so almost certainly saved that policeman from a lynching. But people can be so ungrateful.

Yes, there are so many stories to tell. And I will, I promise. But primarily, this is intended to be a celebration of Hungarian food and drink. So I’m putting it out there. I’m half Hungarian, I grew up in Britain and I speak rudimentary Hungarian at best. But I’m a cook. Someone who is greedy and impatient. I eat the cheese on toast whilst it’s still molten and sticks to the roof of your mouth. I add pinches. Dashes. Splashes of this and that and then forget to write down quite what I’ve added. The recipes you find here might not be perfect, and I’m imagining quite a few Hungarians shrieking imprecations from the back row about various dishes, but many of these recipes were learnt watching my Papi cook. Yes. My mother could burn water. Papi did all the cooking til I was old enough to take over (another story for another time) and I also learnt from my paternal grandmother and aunts. Some of these recipes were captured before my Papi passed away in 2010, and others I just know. Don’t ask me how, it’s ingrained somewhere in my DNA that I need to add paprika and caraway, salt and sugar, vinegar and cream to create that distinctive sweet/sour/spicy/savoury/rich and tart flavour that says ‘home’ to me in all ways.

Oh and that phrase at the start? Finom, finom, pompás, pompás? I have no idea if that’s a generic Hungarian saying or just in my family but we said it, all the time about food. It roughly means delicious, delicious, gorgeous, gorgeous. Basically, it’s yummy.