Salad, but not as you know it

Hungarian salad is a bit different. For starters there’s rarely any oil involved, instead a dressing is made of water, vinegar, sugar and salt and is used to lightly pickle the vegetables. It’s tart, refreshing and slightly sour on the palate. Of course, much depends upon the base ingredient being tasty in the first place. Hungary is still a place where growing your own food is the norm. The notion of the English garden is an alien one. If you have land at your home, you grow food.

One of the things I love about the many markets that still exist even in the capital city of Budapest, is that space is reserved in them for “locals” to sell their produce. It’s not uncommon to see ladies and gents of a certain age rock up with a basket of fruit or vegetables, jars of pickles, slabs of home-cured pork fat, salamis, jars of honey and fresh ground paprika. They will set up on trestle tables set aside specifically in a central aisle for them, and will, given half a chance, flog you everything. There is a bittersweet taste to this. The food is amazing, but due to somewhat turbulent history of Hungary during the 20th C, the reason many of these older folk sell their homemade food is to supplement their very meagre pensions. Rampant capitalism has come to Hungary, with many of the older population left nostalgic for the “good old days” of collective state ownership of everything and having a “strong” leader in charge. Not like us at all….

If, as many people do, you plan to visit a food market in Budapest, the most visited one is the Nagy Czarnok or the Great Market. It’s a beautiful 19th C building at the far end of the Vaci Utca, near the Gellert Bridge. It’s become a bit of a tourist destination, which has created a certain “attitude” amongst the stallholders who get quite cross if you take photos but don’t buy anything (rightly so), and have a somewhat cavalier attitude to the notions of customer service. Don’t, whatever you do, touch the produce unless you know some Hungarian and can shout back.

I’d advise you to walk about 15 minutes further to another market – the Rákóczi Market Hall. It’s much smaller, and, to be frank, is struggling a little so your custom will be welcomed. There’s no souvenir stalls here, just fresh food, with a few stand up bars to grab a bite or coffee or who are we kidding, this is Hungary, a palinka. Here you will find the older locals with their homemade salamis, fresh honey and paprikas. Here you can buy Szalonna – Hungarian bacon which bears no resemblance whatsoever to our own. This is a thick smoked slab of almost pure fat. There “may” be a tiny sliver of meat within it. This is one of the building blocks of Hungarian cuisine, it’s the engine room of the deep savoury flavours to be found in soups, főzelék (of more later – a type of vegetable dish that defies easy translation) and classic dishes such as Chicken Paprikás. But I digress. This post was supposed to be about salads. How have I got onto bacon? There’s so much to write about, my head is fizzing.

Back to vegetables. As we all know, the tomatoes we grow ourselves, even in our pallid northern clime, taste so much better than the red cannonballs we find in the shops. My worst thing is when you eat a tomato and it’s dry – a sort of cotton wool misery that makes that whole 5 a day thing a chore. One of the things I love about Hungary is that the fruit and vegetables you get there are so tasty. They taste of the sunshine and the earth they grow in. It’s so easy to eat them. So a simple salad dressing makes sense to let the flavour of the vegetable sing. There’s a practical purpose as well. In Hungarian cuisine, salad isn’t a thing on its own, it’s an accompaniment to a main dish. I mentioned szalonna earlier and the fact that it’s basically a block of solid fat. We Hungarians love a bit of fat. Maybe it’s in our DNA from the Mongol ancestors trundling across the Siberian tundras til they found the land of plenty, fat being necessary to create internal warmth. Whatever the reason, we love it and we use it. Duck fat. Goose fat. Lard. Pork fat. This of course makes our food a tad rich. And then we add sour cream. Of course we do. So our lightly pickled vegetable salads and other fermented delights such as sauerkraut and uborka (pickled cucumbers or gherkins with dill), act as a contrast to the richness of the main dish. They add piquancy and balance to the meal.

Two dishes we ate growing up in 70s Liverpool were Wiener Schnitzel with pillows of mashed potatoes, and Chicken Paprikás – chicken baked in a rich paprika and sour cream sauce and served with nokedli – a type of gnocchi or spaetzle. Both dishes were always accompanied by uborkasaláta – or cucumber salad. My sisters and I adored it. Growing up with an Hungarian father and British mother led to some interesting language issues. Papi always spoke English to us, but Hungarian words and phrases slipped in. I was 11 before I knew a cucumber was a cucumber in English. To me it was an uborka. Try asking for that in your neighbourhood shop….

Uborkasaláta or Cucumber Salad. This will feed 2 (or 1 greedy person) as an accompaniment to a main dish.

Take one cucumber. Peel. This is a legacy of the tougher, thicker skinned cucumbers we get in Hungary but it’s what I do. Feel free to leave the skin on if you want. Very thinly slice. Again, if using the coarse skinned cucumbers, you may prefer to halve and then remove the seeds before slicing so you have thin jade crescents. At home we had a wood framed mandolin to facilitate the slicing. Having frequently lost the tips of my fingers to this infernal piece of kitchen machinery, I now prefer a good sharp knife and slice by hand. Put your cucumber slices into a sieve and suspend over a bowl. Sprinkle over a tsp of salt, mixing well, and then leave to sit, covered, for up to two hours but at least one. A thin green liquid will appear in the bowl underneath. Don’t discard. Make up the dressing – this is where I get a bit vague – take 3 tablespoons of white distilled vinegar, add 2 tablespoons of caster sugar, and whisk. Dilute with the green salted water saved from earlier until it tastes right (about 5 -6 tablespoons). Told you I was going to be vague. It should be a balance of sweet/ sour/ salt a la Goldilocks – “just right”. As a general rule of thumb, add the cucumber water a tablespoon at a time, stir well and taste as you go. Add your cucumber slices into the dressing and toss lightly. It’s a lot more dressing than you will be used to. Leave to marinate covered for at least an hour, preferably two before serving. If you like, add a sprinkle of paprika, some fronds of dill and a dollop of sour cream. Works very well with fried chicken, pork chops, grilled halloumi. You can also use the same dressing on sliced tomatoes, lettuce and shredded cabbage. No need to salt those salads to remove extra liquid, so use plain water and add a little salt when making the dressing.