Hungarian Heritage Review, 1986 (15. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1986-12-01 / 12. szám

DECEMBER 1986 HUNGARIAN HERITAGE REVIEW 9

A HUNGARIAN CHRISTMAS DESSERT

In my childhood, many special foods were associated with the Christmas season. Even if we couldn’t understand the mythological and ethnological reasons behind them, they certainly made lots of sense for making the holidays a wonderful time of the year and giving them a character of their own.

For example, our daily bread throughout the year was a heavy, coarse-textured, very tasty semi-white bread. It was baked twice a week in the summer and once a week in the winter. But for the Christmas and New Year season, we baked a much lighter, snow-white (or, if we baked more eggs were used, pale golden) milk bread.

This is the bread the Hungarians call “kalacs”. Our wooden kneading bowl was usually quite clean after removing a batch of dough for the daily bread, but not so with the sticky kalacs dough. We would scrape out the remains with a large wooden spoon, lightly reknead the dough with some extra flour and, after an hour’s wait, cut it into long strips like homemade Italian bread sticks. We baked these long sticks two or three days before the beginning of the holiday, just like the special holiday bread, and on Christmas Eve, when most abstained from meat, these bread sticks were the main ingredient of dinner.

The usual fare was a delightful soup made from the liquid in which the traditional Christmas ham and smoked and cured belly bacon were slowly simmered Dec. 23 so they could be chilled for the holiday. The liquid was also chilled overnight, and the fat carefully removed from the top. Then it was reheated, thickened with a mixture of sour cream and flour and flavored with homemade vinegar. For each person, an egg was broken into the soup and gently poached.

After this fairly thin soup, came the dish for which I now give you the recipe.

Answers to Letters from Subscribers:

My question is — writes Bill Wiggins (Bela Baranyai) of Delaware — when making paprikash csirke with dumplings, do you blend the sour cream into the liquid on the chicken or on the dumplings? My family used to call the galuska or csipetke by another name, “nokedli.” Which one is this? Csipetke, the tiny pinched dumplings, or galuska, the larger soft ones? I cannot find the word in my Hungarian dictionary at all.

Answer:

I do it “double or nothing.” I put sour cream as a finishing touch into the sauce on the chicken paprikash, but the way I do it is to take some of the sauce and fold it gently and slowly with a rubber spatula into the sour cream. This way it never curdles, because by adding small amounts of the sauce I slowly warm the sour cream, and when it is warm, I add back the mixture to the chicken and it won’t curdle.

I also add it to the Hungarian pasta, — be it csipetke or galuska — and it is delicious — if you can take the extra calories. We warm up the sour cream slightly and fold it, together with a little melted butter, into either one.

Perhaps it doesn’t look like it a first sight, but the word “nokedli” comes from the Austrian “nockerl”, which has its origin in the Italian word for dumpling, “gnocci”. The old Italian “gnocci” became the Viennese “nockerl”, which, in turn, is called “nokedli” in Hungary. As a rule, it means the softer, larger type of pasta, properly called galuska, (but in certain parts of the country it is also named haluska.) I had better stop now, because once I start, I could really write a book on it! Enjoy it by any name!

>|c>|c»fc>|e>|e3fe>{«%9ic>|cafc

Another reader, who is a long-time subscriber, had a question on an imported Hungarian wine that he enjoyed in our restaurant several years ago. The white wine, which is enjoyed by so many Americans, is called Hárslevelű, and it is a medium white wine, very pleasant, not acidy, with a golden color, great fragrance, smooth mouth feel; and it is an excellent accompaniment with Hungarian veal and chicken dishes, and it will be wonderful with a holiday turkey as well.

The red wine that this reader asked about is the most well-known of the Hungarian reds, Egri Bikaver. This is a burgundy-type light but absolutely not sweet red wine, which goes very well with pork and beef, and also with duck, goose and game birds. Mixed with one-third mineral water, it gives the original, several hundred years old Hungarian “wine cooler” called froccs (sounds like fretsh), or with a German word used in Hungary very often, spritzer.

—continued next page