It’s been a while since I wrote a piece here. Life gets in the way sometimes and I struggle to articulate my thoughts when I’m overwhelmed. I’ve been to a few different countries over the past year, including Turkey, Greece and Albania, and each time I’ve been reminded of the importance of fresh, flavoursome vegetables, herbs, spices and fruits as the backbone of an at first deceptively simple cuisine. So it is with Hungarian cookery, which relies on several key ingredients to create the flavours that I always associate with Hungarian food.
For most people, paprika would be top of that list, a sweet and spicy rust coloured dust that adds a subtle heat and mineral tang to soups, stews, salads, charcuterie and sauces. But paprika is only part of the story. Paprika came to Europe post 1493 and the visits made by Columbus to the Americas. By the 16th C it was being grown widely across Europe and was introduced to Hungary by the Ottoman Turks. Hungary’s climate proved to be a very good one for growing paprika and it has become an intrinsic part of the landscape and food. It sits on the dining table alongside salt, and often in place of pepper, for diners to add their own to their dish. A famous fish soup from Szeged – Halasleves or river fish soup, is always served with a pot of nose tingling erös or hot paprika.
So what came before paprika? The other flavours that create the distinctive Magyar taste are caraway, marjoram and dill. Caraway is an ancient European plant, known to the Greeks and Romans, as well as in the Middle East. It is part of the carrot family and can be eaten as a leafy herb but is more commonly cultivated as a dried seed after the plant flowers. It’s used in both sweet and savoury dishes but is an essential for gulyás soup, pickled sauerkraut, and is used to flavour the Liptauer or Körözött cheese spread my aunts used to serve up at breakfast. This is really delicious and I give the recipe below if you want to have a go. I was really interested to find something similar in Albania – Tirokafteri, but I know most Central European cusines have a version.
Dill is commonly used to add freshness to salads and pickles. No Hungarian table is complete without some form of uborka (cucumber/gherkin) either as a fresh salad (see blog post Salad, But Not As You Know It) or bottled as a fermented pickle. You find beautiful glass jars of kovászos uborka with fronds of dill flowers in the brine. Dill is also present in the sort of tartare sauce that accompanies fried fish or mushrooms – a sweet mustard mayonnaise spiked with fresh chopped dill. And of course, it is noticeably present in one of my favourite vegetable dishes – tökfözelék or marrow stew with dill (see blog post Marvellous Marrows).
Marjoram is the last flavouring to talk about. Introduced by the Romans, who came to Hungary in search of silver, marjoram is a relatively unknown herb these days. It has the appearance of oregano with velvety small green leave and tiny white flowers, but the flavour is more akin to citrus and pine. I’d describe it as sweetly aromatic whereas I find oregano to be more spicy and strongly flavoured. Marjoram and pork are a wonderful combination and it’s a necessary addition to the fasírt pork patties recipe below. The marjoram helps to cut the fattiness of the pork mince and adds a subtle citrus herb tang. Marjoram is also used in preference to paprika in a Transylvanian pörkölt dish, known as a tokány.
Körözött
Ideally this is made with túró cheese which is a smooth cream curd cheese that’s similar to quark. If you are using supermarket cream cheese, as opposed to Jewish deli cream cheese which is much more solid and “sour”, I’d recommend adding a little lemon juice to sharpen it. The essentials of this mixture are good sweet paprika, caraway seeds and finely grated or chopped onion and then you can add chopped capers, chopped gherkins and chopped dill or parsley to taste. In Hungary the onions are sweeter, so either use a red onion or if you can, a cipolla salad onion. Take 250g of soft cream cheese, and mix with 1/2 small grated onion sprinkled with a little salt to “cook” it. Fold in 1/2 tsp of caraway, 1 tsp of paprika, and 4 tbsp of soft butter. Mix well and add the other things if you like, it’s a real taste to suit sort of dish. Cover and pop in the fridge for the flavours to mingle. Serve on rye bread or with crudités.
Fasírt
Take two slices of stale bread, I used the heel of a sourdough loaf. Pop in a bowl and soak in water for 5 minutes. Then squeeze out the water in a sieve, and break up the bread with your fingers back in the bowl. Add 500g pork mince, 1 finely chopped onion, a pinch of salt, 1 tsp dried marjoram, 1 tsp sweet paprika and 1 egg. Mix together and then form into flattened balls – this makes about 24. If you wet your hands, it prevents the mixture sticking. Heat a shallow frying pan over a moderate flame, then add lard or oil. Pat the pork discs into bread crumbs, then add to the frying pan. Cook gently and don’t overcrowd the pan, until a crust forms underneath. Flip and repeat until all the patties are cooked. They should be juicy inside and crisp outside. Serve with a squeeze of lemon or a mustard mayo. They are good hot or cold, as a snack or with pasta and a sauce.
Finom - the food of Hungary 