Nagymama

When I was born, my father had just received his British citizenship and thus was able, after 10 long years, to return to Hungary to see his family. As is the way, I arrived and my grandfather Aladár departed, in the same month of August so I didn’t get to meet my paternal grandfather or Nagypapa. My Nagymama however, was an integral part of my early childhood. My parents blithely dumped me with her when I was a few months old so they could have a belated second honeymoon around Europe. My first word was Hungarian, because she spent so much time with me between the ages of 0 and 3. That word was repülő or flying because she would walk me down to the promenade at Cressington to watch the planes take off and land at the old Speke airport. Nagymama came to visit us for weeks at a time, whenever she could get a visa. Her other son, András, had left Hungary with my father but ended up in New York. He suffered from PTSD following a year of solitary confinement in prison as a so called dissident and killed himself when I was 2. My father was Nagymama’s baby. The unexpected late child, (there were 12 years between him and his brother), he was spoilt rotten by her and she missed him dreadfully when he was forced to leave Hungary in 1957.

Nagyi was one of 13 children and was born in 1900, the daughter of a well to do bourgeoise family in Pécs where her father was the Mayor. Named Margit, her maiden name was Nentwych, and thereby hangs a tale of strange circularity. One of my aunts has traced the genealogy of this side of the family all the way back to the 16th C to the town of…. Nantwich in Cheshire, not a million miles away from where my father ended up in Liverpool some 400 years later. Travelling apothecaries, they had left during the reign of Elizabeth I due to their Catholicism and had gone to Italy to work at one of the courts of the Medici. A Medici princess was subsequently married to an Hungarian prince and her chemists travelled with her to the South of Hungary (Hungary at one point ruled Naples, so the ties between Italy and Hungary have always been strong). Family legend has it that this is why there is a streak of red hair running through. Red hair is very uncommon in Hungary but is not so rare in Cheshire. My father, and one of my aunts, were both redheads in their youth.

Nagyi’s life coincided with tremendous upheaval and change in Central Europe, she lived through both World Wars, the break up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as part of the Treaty of Trianon, the invasions of Nazi Germany and later occupation of Soviet Russia. She went from being the pampered daughter of a well to do upper middle class family, married to a lawyer from a noble lineage and having a big beautiful house with servants and a white peach orchard, to scraping an existence on a meagre state pension and living behind the Iron Curtain. I was only 9 when she died, but I do have very strong memories of her and of course, her amazing cookery. We had a tattered black notebook at home, full of cramped blue handwriting, which were her recipes. Full of impossible instructions like “find 12 eggs”, “a piece of lard for your hand” and use of the now obsolete Prussian dekagram measurement, I am thankful that I got Dad to translate these recipes. Well, sort of.

I love food twitter. It leads me down all sorts of rabbit holes and chats. Recently Ms Nigella posted about her Chocolate Pear Pudding and that triggered a memory of one of the desserts Nagyi used to make. As is often the way with Hungarian patisserie, they are a cross between cake and dessert and are deceptively light in texture, but pack a punch when it comes to sheer decadence. Hungarian cakes are also not massively sweet, and use ground nuts, cocoa, rum and of course, cream. The pudding I was thinking of is a version of the Somlói Galuska – which is the Hungarian equivalent of trifle with three different sponges, pastry cream, chocolate, rum soaked raisins, walnuts and cream. Nagyi’s version was a walnut sponge, soaked in rum, topped with a thick chocolate creme patisserie, pears, walnuts and cream. I mentioned this and was hit with requests for the recipe. So here it is. It is a bit of a beast in that you do use about ten pans and bowls but it’s honestly not that hard to make and it looks and tastes fabulous. Do try it.

Margit’s Csokoládé Körte Diótorta (chocolate pear nut cake)

Walnut Cake

3 large eggs, room temperature

40g caster sugar

40g 00 flour (or fine plain)

40g ground (not chopped) walnuts

pinch of salt

Chocolate Creme

250 ml double cream

250 ml milk

3 egg yolks

1 whole egg

3 tbsp cocoa powder

3 tbsp cornflour

6 tbsp caster sugar

Additions

2 x tinned pears in light syrup

3 tbsp caster sugar

3 tbsp rum

300g whipped cream

walnuts

2 tbsp cocoa

Method

Start with the cake. Break eggs into a bowl you can suspend over a pan of simmering water and whisk in the sugar. Keep whisking the mixture in the bowl over the hot water until all the sugar has melted – about a minute. Take off the heat and whisk, either using arm muscles or mechanical means until the mixture has tripled in size and become a thick foaming batter (3 minutes if using machine, 10 or so if it’s you). Gently fold in flour and ground walnuts, and a pinch of salt. Make sure it’s well combined but be gentle – you want to keep all that lovely foamy air in the mixture. Line a cake tin (22cm) with baking parchment and then pour in the cake mix. Level out and then bake for 15 to 18 minutes at GM4 or 350F or 175C until the cake is risen and springy to the touch. Take out and leave to cool in the tin before turning out.

Whilst the cake is baking, open the tins of pears (Nagy would have used bottled preserved pears) and pour the syrup into a small heavy bottomed pan. Add the sugar and stir over a low heat til the sugar dissolves, then turn up the heat to let the mixture boil and thicken into a syrup. Off the heat add the rum and mix well. Drizzle half the mixture over the cooled cake.

Make the chocolate creme pat. Start by creating a bain marie of a bowl over a pan of simmering water. Add the milk and cream and let it heat to almost boiling. In another bowl (yes, you will empty your cupboards making this pudding), sift in the cocoa and cornflour, add the sugar and then mix in the whole egg and egg yolks to make a paste. Add a couple of tbsp of the hot cream/ milk to loosen the paste and then tip the whole lot into the rest of the milk/ cream and whisk madly in the bowl over the hot water until it begins to thicken up. Keep going til dropping consistency – so you can dollop it, then take off the heat and put the bowl into a sink of cold water to chill down.

Whilst that’s cooling down, make the chocolate rum drizzle. Use the rest of the rum syrup, heat gently and sieve in two heaped tbsp of cocoa powder. Whisk well until it’s combined and thick but still pourable. Whisk the cream and slice the pears.

Assembly! Cake on a plate (or you could go trifle bowl), then top with cooled chocolate creme, sliced pears, whipped cream and finish with chopped walnuts and the chocolate rum drizzle. Pop in the fridge to set for an hour before serving.