Milyen hagyományok és régi rituálék jellemzik az év végi, karácsonyi ünnepkört? Régebben valóban ,,könnyebb,, volt ünnepelni? Elveszőben vannak egyébként megőrzésre méltó tradíciók? Várakozás és készülődés – mi is az adventi időszak lényege?
Hogyan épülnek egymásra a téli időszak jeles napjai – Szent András napjától Luca napon át egészen Vízkeresztig? Mit jelent a karácsony előtti böjt, mennyiben más mint a húsvétot megelőző? Miként lett a böjti menüből karácsonyi lakoma?
Hogyan alakult ki a karácsonyi menü? Mi jött a paraszti hagyományokból és mi a városi kultúrából? Jellemzően mi kerül az asztalra szenteste és mi karácsony első, illetve második napján? Milyen szimbolikus jelentéssel bír a hal a karácsonyi menüben? Töltött káposzta és pulyka – hogyan kerültek a karácsonyi ételsorba? Mák és dió – miért bírnak fontos jelentéssel?
Miért is nem lett hungarikum a bejgli? A szaloncukor múltja és jelene – miként lett Jókai Mór ,,szalonczukkedlijéből,, napjaink kedvelt karácsonyi édessége? Mi köze a szalonnak a szaloncukorhoz? Hol és mikor állították az első karácsonyfát?
Mit jelent szilveszterkor a lencse, a malachús és a pezsgő? Miért nem szabad szilveszterkor szárnyast és halat enni? És hogyan került a szilveszter esték középpontjába a virsli?
És ha már odakerült – akkor frankfurti vagy bécsi?
Vinkó József író, gasztronómus, a Magyar Konyha magazin főszerkesztője az InfoRádió Aréna című műsorában 2023.02.01-én. A beszélgetőtárs Kocsonya Zoltán, szerkesztő Módos Márton. Podcast.
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– Welcome to Inforadio listeners! Zoltán Kocsonya at the microphone. And welcome to today’s guest of the Arena, József Vinkó, editor-in-chief of Hungarian Kitchen Magazine. Welcome. Hello. – I also welcome you all with love. – Thank you for accepting our invitation, and of course we will talk about Christmas food,
Christmas gastronomy and related traditions next time. The Christmas diet, I think you could say, is largely determined by traditions and, well, rituals left over from the old days, so to speak. This is how most of the food on the Christmas table is prepared, even if we don’t know the exact
Rituals and traditions of the past that are associated with a particular dish, and what is associated with these dishes from the past. However, we are perhaps not wrong in thinking that there is also a perception that certain traditions are inevitably wearing out. In the Christmas issue of MagyarKonyha Magazine you also write
That it used to be easier to celebrate. Really? – Well, yes, because the order of the holidays, the symbolic content of the succession of the various feast days reflected a certain order, a certain world view, and helped people, took over some of the tasks, and created an order, gave harmony, gave security.
Modern man lives in a chaotic world, so there’s no need to make a big deal of it, and everything wants to fall apart, to fall to atoms. Time is out of joint; O damnation! “That I was born to push it,” says Hamlet, but everyone senses this.
And so, when I think back even to my childhood, to my grandfathers’, and recall the order of the Advent cycle, then allow me to indicate how much this was an order of security that had evolved over the centuries. The Advent cycle began on 30 November, with St Andrew’s Day,
But it was a day with more significance. In the Great Plain, pig slaughtering began at this time. This provided the ingredients for the Christmas diet and the New Year celebrations. – In fact, a kind of abundance of meat, and the interesting thing is, we’ll talk about this in more detail,
I think, that classically pork, it didn’t dominate the Christmas diet that much, did it? – Well, it was one of the ingredients, if you think of jelly or stuffed cabbage. But St. Andrew’s was not only the first day of the pig slaughter, it was also the so-called Advent
Waiting Day, because the closest rainy Sunday to St. Andrew’s was the first Sunday of Advent. And there was another interesting fact, it was on St Andrew’s Day that the first prophecy was made about marriage and getting married in the coming year.
This was done in some places by lead casting, but in most places by dumplings. Twelve dumplings, twelve months. Eleven dumplings were placed in the centre of the dumpling. I don’t know how they did it, but even with a plum dumpling, the writing didn’t wash out.
The girls wrote down the names of men they knew or found in the village to see who would be her future husband. The last dumpling was left empty. Now they cooked it, and the first dumpling that came out was the husband.
If the first dumpling that came up was the one that was empty, it meant that she was not getting married that year. And he didn’t push it. Now, they were built up quite naturally, I didn’t have to tell you that, because it just happened.
And then came the next big day, St Nicholas’ Day, the day of the Bishop of Myra, which was the gift-giving, the bishop’s glass, the red colour, the Santa Claus look, the candy donation, a huge round of that. Then came Luca Day. Luca was the darkest night of 13 December, in pre-Gergelian times.
Luca-Puca is an evil witch. But at the same time, in Sweden, Luca Day was a celebration of light, as it was light earlier after dark, and girls with Advent wreaths on their heads and candles burning performed various forest dances. This is where Luca’s scones come from.
– For me, it’s the Luca chair that we’re talking about. – The Luca chair was important because if you had made a Luca chair from seven kinds of wood for a week before, it was a small chair, barely bigger than a stool, Krúdy wrote about it several times,
And you stood on it at midnight mass, because it had to be finished by then. Sorry, Luca nap. You stood on the chair in the temple, then you saw the witch. The witch of course spotted you lurking and started chasing you, so you had to keep nuts or poppies in
Your pocket and scatter them as you ran, while you were dragging Luca’s chair, and the witch, who was very stingy, picked them up, giving you an advantage. And then you ran home and threw this Luca chair on the fire, broken or not. And as the wood cracked, the witch screamed.
And then Christmas and New Year were fine. – But the Luca scone? – The Luca scone also had to hide a name. But it was an evil prophecy, it wasn’t about getting married, it was about someone whose name,
Whose name was burnt on a sticker, who unfortunately, at least very ill, if not dying the following year. So that’s what they were afraid of, this type of baking of the Luca scone. And then they started doing, I don’t know if you’ve heard of the onion calendar? -No.
– The onion calendar was one such prediction. You cut twelve onions from an onion, put them in a row from January to December, salted them all, put a little salt in them, and the one that melted on the onion was the wet month, the one that kept the salt was the dry month.
And the peasants took it deadly seriously, just like wheat germination. You sprouted twelve grains of wheat, and they grew by Christmas. It was also put up as an ornament to wheat germination. We tried it at home last year and it pretty much worked.
– In fact, this was one of the richest periods, so it was from St. Andrew’s Day, the first weekend of Advent, to the first weekend of Epiphany, where he really gave out this rhythm and built these days on top of each other.
– Yes, but if you think about it, it used to be the same even at Pentecost, not to mention Easter. We used to say, tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are. But I could turn it around and say how you celebrate, and I’ll tell you who you are.
So the soul-seeker has received from these feasts the explanation of the order of the world. – It was important for the soul, it was important for the spirit. – It was extremely important. and the loss of these feasts, which in all sorts of ways, liturgically of course,
The average person can no longer follow this kind of mixing of saints, of stories, it’s not really something you can wish for, but the main points could be kept through the meal. And that’s why I thought that since you have to eat, you don’t necessarily need to know the cultural
History of the banner of the water cross. But baking an éclair doughnut at Water Cross, and the doughnut is not filled and puffs up, that’s easier to remember. And therefore, through meals, we could regain the order, the order that defines the scope of tasks and helps us to wait.
Because in theory, what is the Advent period all about? It’s about waiting for a miracle, the excitement of waiting. It was a long time ago, when I think back to my childhood, I don’t know how bathing was, but the fact that the potty was swimming in the bath was absolutely certain.
In a lot of places, when turkey came into English fashion, the turkey would be in the pantry or something. And from the kitchen came very delicious smells. The baking of honeycombs, cinnamon, vanilla, and your soul, especially if it was snowing,
And especially if the snow was crunching under your feet, really, and especially if you lived in the country and there were no cars and noises, it became a time of the year so full of spirit that you became a little bit more ennobled, you felt like a better person.
You started to wonder whether the rush, the career, was really the point of life. You have been busy with family members. And the meals and the ingredients were built into this ritual. And so you arrived at Christmas Eve, which the children were looking forward to, and everyone was looking
Forward to, because for four weeks it was always the anticipation. – It occurred to me that there hasn’t been that much change in the food, for example in the Christmas menu. They’re pretty much the same as they are now on the table in most places and for most families.
At most, we don’t really know these ingredients, what all can be associated with them from the old days or traditions. – Well, if we’re looking at the Christmas menu, but let me tell you something first. We do sing that song, don’t we, Little Christmas, big Christmas, has my cake baked yet?
Do you know what a small Christmas and a big Christmas are? – Well, that’s exactly it, the… – But what is a little Christmas? – Well, it’s the beginning of the Christmas cycle, and the big Christmas, it’s already the water baptism. – Well, it’s the other way round.
– The other way round. – So is the melody. – I remembered something. – Yes. So two Christmases. The expression “two Christmases” is only in the Hungarian language. The week between the two Christmases is called a truncated week because it does not add up to seven days.
It’s because of the Paroslavic religion, because in the past and even now the Russians and the Orthodox celebrate Christmas on January 6, and New Year falls later. For us, the little Christmas means the water baptism, but the order is reversed because of the song.
I mention this only because there are so many such expressions. You’ve obviously heard of the Christmas crumb? – Yes, yes, yes. – But do you remember the time a week after New Year’s Eve when the same group of people got together and had a crumb party.
You know, where the leftovers had to be destroyed. So, if you get into this thing properly, even as an amateur ethnographer like me, you’re surprised to some extent at the order in which the food, the ingredients, the logic of things are used, how much it was thought out, wittingly or unwittingly.
So the richness of the ingredients is infinite, because the apples were cut into as many cloves as there were people sitting around the table, and the same could be said of the scones. The walnut meant abundance. – The poppy too. – Lentils meant abundance at New Year.
The two tablecloths, the red striped tablecloth, were for peasant food, and the damask tablecloth underneath, that was for the big Christmas dishes. – So it was a true classic Christmas feast. – It was only allowed to be eaten after midnight mass.
– This midnight mass and the fact that it is allowed to be eaten after midnight mass, does this also indicate that the fasting period before Christmas was the same as the period before Easter? – Of course!
The reason why people don’t fast before Christmas is because they don’t want to fast more than once a year, and they fast before Easter, and fasting is very fashionable now. It’s Teilfasten, as the German says, partial fasting, it’s 16, 8 hours, and there are countless
Forms of it, so those who kept the fast before Christmas, or if they didn’t keep it strictly, they kept it by not eating meat before midnight mass under any circumstances. At this time there was plum soup, very, very little even wine soup. So it was a very low-key meal.
– Was this ban lifted after midnight mass? – Then they took off this tablecloth, this red striped tablecloth, I’m talking about the peasant tradition, and underneath they laid a generous spread. The crumbs were put under the table, because either the evil spirits came and they had to have something,
So in many places they left food on the table, food that would naturally go off, but there were also people who thought that the holy family was starving, so they had to leave gifts for them too.
It’s very strange that in the old world you had to watch out for the saints, and you had to watch out for the crampies, the evil ones and the devils. You had to satisfy everyone if you wanted peace.
And now that I’ve been struggling with more illnesses, now I’ve also realised that it’s not enough to be good with God, you have to be good with evil, or try to be, well of course it’s much harder, see Faust’s problem. – Let’s talk a little more about the Christmas menu.
It has already been said that the vigil, the eve of Christmas Eve, was a fasting day, and that this fasting or prohibition was only lifted after midnight mass. But then let’s look at the Christmas menu for 24 December, because it was very different for each day.
But let’s look at the classic menu for Christmas Eve. How did this work? Because it is almost unchanged. Traditions are… – There is no doubt that Hungarians take this tradition very seriously. The fish plays a central role here because the fish could slide back and forth, since fish was a fasting food.
So, ad absurdum, eating a fish soup or a fried carp horseshoe was not so much a breaking of the fast. The same role was played by sour soups, plum soup, wine soup, which had no meat in them. Then the stuffed cabbage is actually great at Christmas.. – But that’s on the 25th.
– …used to come up.But lately I’ve seen more places bringing it up sooner. So the traditional diet, the same goes for meat soup.There are so many variations. In my version of the Christmas Eve menu, it might be a wine soup or a fish soup, followed by a fried fish
Or some kind of fish dish, and then definitely a nut horseshoe or a bean curd. – That’s poppy seed, isn’t it?. – Poppy seed, poppy seed, yes, poppy seed beans. – So poppy and walnut, that’s a very important connection. – The poppy and the walnut.
In the old days, nuts were also gilded, silvered and hung on Christmas trees. The walnut, because of its self-containment, because of its shelf life, a lot of things were made out of it because of its playfulness, because of its nutritional value, because we know it’s fantastic for
The brain, it was a very important food. Foods like lentils and poppy seeds and carp, carp were the favoured fish, see fish money, because the scales, the scales, everything that was plentiful, was all about abundance. – But fish has always been a symbolic food at Christmas.
– Well, it was a sacred food for Christians. Well, Jesus ate almost only fish. And the anagram of “fish” is the name given to the birth of Jesus Christ by Christians. – Was it also typical to say that it was fried? Because I was reading in the Christmas issue of Magyar Konyha that
This is an urban tradition, a Viennese one, related to Vienna… – Of course. – … tradition, because this is the way of preparing it, it was very popular there, so it has been passed down to us from there. – Well, the panir is definitely from the city, but it’s really from
Vienna, or mostly from Milan, or mostly from Arabia. So we’ve explained this many times before with the fried meat, that the current batch suggests that panir was invented by Milanese cooks in the 1500s, when a wealthy merchant in Venice was curing meat to show off at his daughter’s wedding.
And the chefs in Milan, who were cooking there with almost a thousand people, were so offended that they too prepared the poor man’s gold. And that’s what happened, the French breadcrumbs were turned into the regular breadcrumbs, flour, eggs and breadcrumbs, and they were fried in butter until they were beautifully golden.
This, by the way, so incensed the Serenissima, the Doge and the Grand Council, not by the poor man’s gold, but by the merchant’s pretentiousness, that they forbade the gilding of food from that time
On, and it was at this time that the gondolas, which were of many colours, had to be painted all black, and the large Venetian women’s dresses with the fins had to be cut off, the koturnus was over. The clothes had to be cut off. Eliminating waste.
That’s why this story has survived, because Serenissima has kept it in the archives, and that’s how this complaint came up. So fried carp is basically the fish version of fried chicken and fried meat. – You mentioned that for decades carp was obviously the main dish on the Christmas menu, and you also
Mentioned that when you were a child you had carp, and carp were indeed swimming in the bathtub the day before Christmas. Nowadays, the range is very wide, so I see that catfish, for example, is just as dominant as carp in many places, but there are also carp, trout, salmon and tuna.
– It’s natural, so there’s nothing wrong with that at all. – Obviously, as the range has expanded. – Obviously. – Yes. There is nothing wrong with that. The rhythm, and the search for harmony in food, I mean the preparation, the preparation,
The joy of not cooking for yourself, the joy of involving the children, everything that is real. The fact is that when I order these dishes, no matter how good they are – they are usually not good. Or I simplify it all, and the whole of Christmas is just that….
How did the Christmas turkey evolve? Well, it so happened that in 1834 Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol, and in it, Scrooge, a very evil, very miserly man, who is always alone and constantly tormenting his nephew and his
Employees, has the ghost of Christmas appear to him at night and prove to him that you are a worthless, terrible man and you will die a terrible death. And then his conscience kicks in, he buys a huge, six-pound turkey, roasts it and starts distributing it to the poor.
And it had such an impact on English society in Queen Victoria’s time that it became fashionable to give, and it became fashionable to have a turkey. – It’s mainly in the Anglo-Saxon culture, and then it’s in other countries in Europe. – Basically, in the Anglo-Russian cultural sphere.
But Victoria, the Victorian era had quite an impact on Europe in many ways, think of the tableware and so on, interestingly enough. And so the turkey, the Hungarian… – But now it’s quite dominant at the Christmas table or on the Christmas
Menu here, too. – Yes, but it is completely alien to Hungarian tradition. Hungarian traditions continue to cultivate fish soup, carp with mayonnaise salad, potato salad, stuffed cabbage, poppy seed dumplings, wine soup, and these can be varied. And actually, it’s the bread, the Christ cake, which is a bit of a German tradition.
By the way, we were not always influenced by the Germans, the carp in the pan, that’s more of an Austrian influence. That was more of an Austrian influence. – We talked about fish, fried fish, and tangentially about chowder, and tangentially about wine soup. What is the history of this?
Somewhere I read that it was also somehow mediated by Germany or came to us from German territory? – This is the eternal question of what is the newcomer to the city, what is the peasant tradition. – And then it comes together at the Christmas table. – Well, as the peasant world
Has changed. It’s been a long time since you met. In the old days, a peasant would hang his tobacco bag on a pine branch to mark Christmas. Here, for example, is a very interesting story. If you’re asking about the wine soup, it’s definitely an urban tradition, and it’s definitely linked to Lent.
The Christmas tree claim, I don’t know if you’ll bring that up. – It is worthwhile, but we can talk about it now. – So let’s talk about it now, because it was very, very interesting. That the Christmas tree was erected in the XII-XIII centuries.
From the sixteenth century onwards there are records of them going out and putting candles and lights on evergreen pines. It is light and darkness, light and darkness. Whether I count Luca’s Day, which was the 13th, the darkest night, which was later
Changed to the 21st after the Gregorian calendar, from then on the days are clear, but this filled people with fear, and the church very cleverly tried to build pagan holidays into the church tradition, in order to have an audience. It was – to use a modern word – a very good marketing ploy.
And the first signs of the Christmas tree were people standing outside in the open air around the tree and celebrating. – So forgive me, is it just a legend that Martin Luther was the first to put up a Christmas tree? – I’m talking about earlier. So they were outdoors before Martin Luther.
Martin Luther is said to have been the first to bring the Christmas tree into the room. So they had stood around and danced around the Christmas tree or evergreen many times before, Martin Luther brought it in. Now this is the XVI. century, he died in 1546.
His last word, I don’t know if you know, was that the truth is that we are beggars. It is not known exactly what he meant. It’s like Goethe’s mehr Llicht, and it’s humorous or humorous, literature, German literary
Historians write that it’s nonsense that he didn’t say more light, but before he said more light he drank some fine cognac and asked the servant, mehr nicht? That there is no more? But to return to Luther. So Luther took it in and set it up on the table.
At least such a painting exists, but this painting, this painting, two hundred years… – But then it may have a basis in reality, because many people dispute it and say it’s a myth. – This painting is two hundred years later. Literary history cannot really agree on this, nor can ethnography.
What is absolutely certain is that the XVII-XVIII. century, the Christmas tree appears in the homes of the bourgeoisie, especially in Germany. And there are two particularities, which our own Frigyes Podmaniczky also writes about, according to whom it was his mother who put up the first Christmas tree in 1824,
And not Teréz Brunszvík in the nursery. Because the Christmas tree in our barracks, in the nursery, is a very interesting story… So according to Frigyes Podmaniczky 1824. And this is realistic, because the XVIII. century, the Christmas tree appears in the late 1700s.
This Christmas tree was hung from the ceiling, with its top down, where the lamp used to be. This is very important. – And were they decorated for that? – Sure, totally decked out. How they decorated it, climbing up from a ladder, or were they first grounded and the decorations hung down.
I have seen countless such depictions, and I myself was very shocked. And then when they took the Christmas tree down from the ceiling, which I think was logical, because it must have been a nuisance, because everything fell down. Then in the second period, Frigyes Podmaniczky, to whom we owe the beautification of
Budapest, the City Park and other landscaping, also writes the same. They called him the plaid baron because he always wore plaid. – And Krúdy wrote quite a lot about it, too. – Well, his novel The Cavalier of Budapest is about him, for example. Podmaniczky writes that each child received a separate Christmas tree.
– Then there were several Christmas trees… – Four or five Christmas trees for as many children. Each child had a Christmas tree. Whether it was to avoid getting lost on the sweets hanging on the Christmas tree. In the first Christmas trees, people put up what they had.
I mentioned the old farmer, it’s a story from Kecskemét. He did indeed put his tobacco bag on her, that was the most important thing. Usually the light, that was very important, the candle, these were wax candles, and then again we have what we talked about, the walnut, the gilded walnut, the apple.
And then it was only later that they started the gold hair, and then even later that they started the ornaments. And then, through commercial kitsch, they were just like the Easter bunny, or just like the chocolate Santa,
But of course the trade latched on to that and discovered the money-making potential, and so the Christmas trees degenerated into shocking pink cotton candy bundles. – And let’s not forget that then came the snipe as a decoration for the Christmas tree, which not only has a
History, but perhaps we can say that it has a history. – Well, snipe sugar is very interesting, because I remember when I was a kid, around ’56-’57, my mum used to make snipe sugar, and my dad got some tissue paper from somewhere, and we cut it up into
Rectangles, and rolled the snipe sugar into it, and I didn’t have a rolling machine. .. – Strangles. -Hide it, but I was using little nail scissors to fringe the snipe sugar. This is a boiled, well it wasn’t, walnut or almond, it may have had
Some, but it was a not too sweet and not too delicious caramel. It was mostly like caramel, only darker. And then later came the scones, and the marzipan scones. – Well made with different coatings, then the jelly scones.
But I remember that when I was a kid, for example, it was the classic, hard, sugary scones with no coating. And it didn’t taste as pleasant, and there wasn’t as much choice at the time. – The story of the saloon candy probably originated, although some say it was a Hungarian
Invention, in that there was a confectioner called Papillon, and the butler who made and wrapped these little fondant candies was his invention. However, the shopkeeper, the butler of the lady opposite, who was also a shopkeeper, wrote wrapped notes on the paper and wrapped them and sent them,
And then she was caught and fired by the confectioner. But he realised that it was a great idea to have these sayings and proverbs, and people were curious to find out what message the candy had for them. And that’s where these wrapped sweets and candies first appeared.
– But this fringed wrapped snuff, it’s absolutely, well, can we say it’s almost hungarian? – The wrecking machine is a Hungaricum, yes. The packaging of the bonbon itself, the French Papillon guy… Today, there is still papillon cooking, where you cook a fish in greaseproof paper, baking paper, to put it more correctly.
Now the snipe sugar, which Mór Jókai, who liked to rename everything, called snipe sugar. The reason I say Jókai liked to rename everything is because… – That sounds German too, doesn’t it? Snipe cake, that also has a Germanic sound. – In the 1850s, the German influence…
– It could not be overwritten. – It could not be overwritten. – Because in one of his short stories, he’s in a Jókai short story. – This is The Beggar Child. – Yes. – The beggar child stands stunned in 1856, early enough,
In front of a shop window where a Christmas tree has been put up. This also confirms Podmaniczky that the first Christmas trees appeared in Hungary around the 1820s, around 28-26, until then only Christmas branches were used as a symbol of evergreens.
Then a lot of people wrote about the Christmas tree, and Jókai and Róza Laborfalvi, right, Jolán Jókai! And she was very shocked when, she was their adopted daughter, and she lived in their apartment in Pest, and she describes in her memoirs, in her memoirs about Rosa and Jokai Laborfalvi,
How shocked she was when she saw the first Christmas tree. And this is the same thing Zsigmond Móricz describes in Árvácska, that Árvácska is astonished when she sees her first tree at the age of nine, or I don’t know how many. And if you think about it, you’ll see this oldies and again
Something that seems to have been lost. The angel was ringing, we were going crazy behind the door, and then the door opened and there was the tree, the music was playing from whatever crappy Tesla tape recorder, and you were staring at it with your mouth open because you didn’t want to believe it.
So it was all about the expectation of a miracle. Man needs wonder, and if you take that away from him, these playful wonders too, he will be poorer. And then his soul will be poorer, and he will experience less of the suffering of others.
So it was all set up in such a way that the waiting was unbearable. And then the reward was a big Christmas lunch. The big Christmas lunch was the pineapple, of course. Now, what came from the peasant tradition and what came from the urban tradition, well, that’s something you can only roughly know.
Chowder is certainly an urban tradition. Fried chicken, and turkey, and fried fish, is a town tradition. – And the stuffed cabbage? – It is probably a peasant tradition, even Transylvanian. The chicken must be from the city, because there’s a saying that a
Peasant only ate chicken when he was sick, or the chicken was sick. But the porridge, which we have completely forgotten, the guba, which is certainly a peasant tradition, the nut dishes, the various forms of scones, all of that. – And the poppy seed and walnut bejgli?
– We tend to think that these are traditional Hungarian dishes, because they’re similar, the Germans have similar, the Poles have poppy seed cake. – Don’t make me angry! Don’t make me angry! – I wouldn’t love you in any case. – Because, on this one, to bend is to bend.
And this poppy and walnut horseshoe is the Bratislava poppy and walnut horseshoe. Now, please, the Slovaks have trademarked this, and it is now Slovak national food. The poppy seed horseshoe from Bratislava, but they also trademarked the horn cake, and to my great pain
They trademarked the Spiš sausage, while we are talking about Hungarian products, while they are quite regularly, like the Italians and the French, protecting a mass of Hungarian food. So the quietened down – how nice, isn’t it? – traditional foods in depressed areas.
– And then it would be too late to take off the bejgli. So this is about right. – The Bratislava croissant was protected. I don’t know if bejgli can be defended, because bejgli is, in fact, a longish Bratislava roll. In fact, again, no one knows.
Well, the whole Kossuth fiction, even Béla Fehér’s novel, can’t find out, and solves it in such a way that by the time the deli sausage arrives, the bejgli has been eaten, so the evidence is eaten up, so it can’t be determined exactly.
The invention of the bejgli is that it is in one piece. And it has a lot more filling. This is the essence of bejgli. – If there’s one more thing I wanted to touch on briefly, speaking of sweets, it’s meringue. This was an important sweet for Christmases of the time.
It was also often put on the Christmas tree. Nowadays it seems to be disappearing. – I think it’s the leftover egg whites. So the egg whites had to be processed somehow. It looked good, it crisped up well, you could use the egg whites.
It exists in a lot of foreign countries that I know of, and a lot of bakeries use it.So I don’t really see any… – Moving on from Christmas, and looking at the food, we come to New Year’s Eve, where again the focus is probably on lentils, pork and sausages.
Good luck, abundance, wealth for the new year. These are represented by. – And the champagne. – And the champagne. But that’s also it, isn’t it? Because this golden colour, the bubbles – Of course, the champagne is a gift. – Bubbles can also represent wealth.
– There’s this basic saying that, well, it’s very important, and many people get it wrong, that you can’t eat a pig before midnight on New Year’s Eve, because the point is that the pig is poking its nose forward, so next year it will bring you luck.
Chickens scratch backwards, so they keep everything bad, so stay in this year, scratch backwards. – Then poultry, but I don’t think you can really eat fish either. – Wings…, because they swim away, they take our luck, the rabbit runs away, our luck is gone.
The pig is the only one that pushes you forward, and therefore the roast pig must be prepared, but should only be eaten after midnight. But they actually eat the roast mala at noon on the first. Lentils, like poppies, are a symbol of fertility,
And are used to make money on the first day of the new year. Esau and a bowl of lentils. You sold it, didn’t you, the… what did you sell? He sold his birthright. Now the sausage. How the sausage became the emblematic food of New Year’s Eve, and why we Hungarians eat the most
Sausages on New Year’s Eve, in such an astonishing quantity, I couldn’t really find an answer to. – Are there no German influences here? – Wait, but I’ve just written the story of the sausage, it’s going to be published next time, so I’m fresh on that.
Sausages were first produced in Frankfurt, but it was strictly stated that they could only be made from one type of meat, either beef or pork. And in 1805, a butcher who had studied in Frankfurt, who moved to Vienna,
Johann Lenau, or I don’t know his name, he mixed the two kinds of meat, and the prado, which is the material for both sausages and parisian, he made it that way, 40 percent beef, 20 percent bacon,
40 percent pork, now it’s really pork, so I’m not talking about when they started to adulterate the sausage and put it together from meat trimmings and stuff. He mixed it with water and ice and spices. The resulting meat pulp was called prad.
And he put it in a thin veal intestine, a small intestine. And because he had learned his trade in Frankfurt, he called it Viennese Frankfurt, even though it was not Viennese Frankfurt. Sausages are often confused and people always think that size, thickness or crunchiness is what counts.
No, the difference between a frankfurter and a Vienna sausage is based on the fact that a frankfurter is made of one kind of meat, a Vienna sausage is made of several kinds of meat. And the difference with monzarella is that it’s much bigger, thicker than salami,
And it has pieces of bacon in it, that’s what gives it the white parts. But they’re all really based on prade, prade is what they call the meat pulp, and the quality of the meat pulp is the delicacy of the meat pulp, and the seasoning, and the trick that some people knead
It with water, and some people knead it with ice, imagine that. And as it is mixed with the ice, the water dissolves in it and it becomes terribly homogeneous. – Is it as popular everywhere, especially on New Year’s Eve as it is here? – Well, sausages are very easy to eat.
Sausages have the nice property that you can grab one end and put the other end into horseradish, pickled horseradish, mustard, ketchup, you can create endless amounts of flavour. Well, at Krúdy’s in the ’10s, in the 1910s, Einspanner was the poor food of famous writers.
I’ve already told you about it. Einspanner, you know what that is? Or have you forgotten? – I can’t think of it now, I won’t think of it now. – The confectioner was called Einspanner, which was a one-tooth confectioner with a horse in it.
This was half of a pair of sausages, so it was half a pair of sausages, which were either poured with lecsó gravy, or with leftover gravy, or if there was none, with pickled horseradish. That’s what the poor writers ordered, because it was just a piece of sausage.
It happens in Krúdy’s famous short story, The Brisket Breakfast, that a guest bites into a sausage and screams because he finds a finger pretzel in it, a cut off piece of a finger, and then he is provided with a fingernail, a proper fingernail. And of course this pub goes bust.
But there are lots of reports of sausages being adulterated, phosphate being put into the sausage to bind the water, sausages being made from trimmings, who knows what they grind into them. The famous saying goes that it’s better not to research how the sausage and the law are made! Bismarck said this.
And you can’t know what’s inside John Bethlen’s head, just as you can’t know what’s inside the sausage in Pest. And Mikszáth also has a short story in which a butcher’s wife is asked by a customer, “Didn’t you have a little puppy yourself? But he was, he just ran away.
And didn’t it have a little red collar? But, well, because there’s a red collar piece in the sausage. – We were talking about the food of the festive season, and we’re coming up to the water cross, the 6th of January.
Does this actually mark the end of this holiday cycle, or does it mean it? It’s customary to take down the Christmas tree at this time, but at the same time, Epiphany is one of the oldest Christian holidays. – Well, yes, because it is the feast of the coming of the Lord.
It’s particularly popular in Italy, and they actually invented this particular doughnut, which is an unfilled form of the eclair doughnut. It is baked only on this day and is known in Italy as St Joseph’s doughnut. Water Baptism is another holiday whose meaning in Hungary is very blurred.
Carnival begins on the Sunday after the Epiphany, and this is basically the transition into the carnival period. And from this you can see again how the feasts were built on each other, both gastronomically and theologically. If you take that in your mind now, and the threshing festivals, harvest festivals, Pentecost,
Easter, the vigil, the whole thing, then actually faith has kept you going all the way through, all year round, and always given you something to deal with. You didn’t have to solve the world’s problems yourself. Neither in the gastronomic sense, nor in the religious or intellectual sense, because this order arose,
Which was built up from the peasant tradition, the pagan tradition, the theological tradition, which followed the change of seasons with terrible precision, and kept souls together. – Do we miss it in our lives now? Do you really miss this kind of order? – I miss it very much.
And the fact that in our family we largely shop and prepare and don’t eat things until the right day is a joy. And even if I don’t light the candles on the Advent wreath every night, and I don’t sing every night, I definitely sing on Sunday, the four Sundays.
So, as the wise old Roman saying goes, you only really see what you know. It’s quite another for you to think about these things, what the ulterior motives are. And for meals, it’s not about going to church. This does not mean that I am bigotedly vomiting on myself. This is an awareness.
This means that if the world loses its order, it becomes formless. Everyone thinks that Péter Esterházy said this, that this is a country without form. Well, no, because Esterházy took it from Sándor Márai, who says in Confessions of a Citizen that if you
Don’t give up the woman’s coat, if you don’t open the door, if you don’t let her go forward, these are very small things. But practically the world starts to become shapeless when you give up Sunday lunch, the gesture of grandma
Or mama lifting the lid of the broth bowl and everyone sitting there, no one late, no one mobile. And the smell hits you, and mama cuts the chives with her own scissors into the top of the soup for whoever asks. And the way it always goes to the oldest.
These are terribly small things, but they give an awful lot of security, I know I’ve said this many times, and I may be going to the listener’s head, I may be emotional with these sentences, but somewhere in my heart I am absolutely sure that we can find our way back to the holidays,
To the order of life, through meals, through gastronomy. And it’s the easiest to learn, and it’s a joy. Well, you have to eat! – Thank you very much for the conversation. Last hour, József Vinkó, editor-in-chief of Hungarian Kitchen magazine, was our guest here in the Arena. Thank you for joining us!
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