Dumneazu

The Fall of Orban: The Zebras Did It.

2026-04-16T10:50:00.003-04:00

"Deceptive Propoganda!"

It must have been the zebras. Hungarians are a tough lot of people: they can take a lot of punishment. And God knows they get it. There is a saying: "The Hungarian back does not bend. It breaks" The zebras broke it. Back in 1989 the headlines used to read: "Hungary leads the way out of Communism" Hungary Kicks the Ball to Freedom"... As an editor at Budapest Week in the 1990s our bread and butter story was about how Hungary had embraced capitalism and was hurtling towards the bounty of an EU future and how everything was coming up roses for all the "entrepreneurs" lining up to buy shiny purple "manager suits" at the "manager shop" at the spanking new shopping mall. Today Hungarians live in the poorest nation in the EU. Hungary is rated as the most corrupt nation in the EU. People in the southern counties take dawn buses to better paying jobs in Romania. They hop across the border to save money shopping for groceries in Austria. But the zebras clinched it.

I thought the nostalgia train would be the cause, but it was... the zebras.

Viktor Orbán has been building a Disneyland inspired personal palace west of Budapest in Hatvanpuszta, next to his home village of Felcsút, where he had already built a vanity football stadium in his back yard and a story book nostalgia railroad to bring visitors to it... using EU money, of course. Well, who would want to deny Hungary's number one soccer fan his own adolescent dream football academy and stadium? And the new "agricultural institute" being built in his Dad's name in the next village, Hatvanpuszta... next door to the estate of Orbán's best friend from High School, the village plumber who suddenly became Hungary's wealthiest construction oligarch, Lőrinc Mészáros. Why shouldn't there be a game park with African antelope and ... zebras. Michael Jackson had Bubbles the chimp. Why shouldn't the Orbán family have their own zebras?

Pancho Arena next to the Orbán residence, Felcsút.

Government corruption and ego are dangerous partners. Americans may recognize the symptoms from their own experience with Viktor Orbán's good friend, the Orange Clown Demon of Mar El Lago: grandiose ego projects, giant photographs on Government buildings, name on the currency. In Hungary we have similar tendencies - usually expressed in fantasies of Hapsburg era kitsch - but it finally came down to the zebras. Everybody hated the fucking zebras. Hungary has the highest percentage of dog ownership in Europe: 50% of Magyars own a dog. Dogs eat meat. Meat, in Hungary, is expensive. So you wind up with a lot of unsatisfied, angry dog owners and pooches who debate the drawbacks of a quasi-vegan diets. And then your Prime Minister goes and gets a herd of zebras for the garden at his new palace in the countryside. I don't know what the feed bill for zebras is. The vet bills must be astonishing, especially when he has to take care of the antelopes as well. This was going one safari animal too far. Or as we say in Hungarian "Tele van a hócipőm!" (My snow shoe is full.)

Name your enemies! Péter Magyar and Zelensky

What came as the biggest surprise to many of us was not that Orbán and FIDESZ had lost the election, but that they actually seemed to believe their own controlled state news broadcasts and polling services. In the past year, the ruling party Fidesz has maintained the most sophisticated system of media capture and control yet seen within the European Union, They came to believe their own propaganda. I love radio, but for the last decade Hungarian radio has become a parade of misinformation, government spin, and sports. It was as if they were performing a parody of 1960s Hungarian communist radio. Every now and again we would get mail asking us to participate in a new FDIESZ "civilian referendum"... in order to promote opinions like "Should we pay for Zelensky's war?" "Should we allow George Soros to laugh at us?" Your tax forints at work!

Greedy Ukrainian money- grubber in the mail again!

When Meta, YouTube and Google banned political ads, FIDESZ organized state funded troll brigades such as the "Digital Warriors" and "Megaphone" to "occupy" the comment sections and spread faked AI images and videos of the opposition. The false flag operations suspected to be linked to the Russian Intelligence service (A bomb found alongside the oil pipeline in Serbia. A proposed assassination attempt against Orban) were all leaked before they were planned to go off: proof that even inside the government security agencies there were people who were not prepared to fix the election with Russian help. The Russians, never ones to learn from their mistakes, had sent in the same teams that had failed to sway previous elections in Moldova and Romania.

Demonstration at Hatvanpuszta

So much has been happening in the last few days that it is hard to organize a single theme to address it. I was already in Hungary in 1989 during the "rendszervaltás" - the "change of systems" from late Kádár era communism to the beginnings of democracy. At that time I was a resident in the Bibó Kollegium on Ménesi ut in Buda, the residential college of the ELTE Law School which birthed FIDESZ as the student government which then reorganized as a liberal youth oriented political party. The atmosphere in Budapest is not merely similar to the feelings going around back then, but more focused on change. On regaining power in 2010, Orban used his supermajority in parliament to concoct a new constitution and a new national system which we now call "NER" or "National Cooperation System."

The NER poster required by law to be hung in every public building... kind if like a modern Lenin portrait.

NER is a term rarely used by the government itself anymore, and it has become a term that recognizably describes the mafia-like oligarch system by which Orbán's family, friends and vassals have - in the name of Hungarian patriotism - divided up the economy and made deals to favor their primacy in Hungarian society. (Perhaps the best explanation of NER I have found is Sandor Esik's piece.), Bloviating fake patriotism became a trademark of FIDESZ, just as it is with MAGA followers of Trump. Orbán's followers refer to themselves as "The National (Nemzeti) side" as if any opposing opinion is an anti-Hungarian attack against the nation itself. Openly criticizing NER by name became a prosecutable offense. NER came to symbolize the deep pocket corruption of FIDESZ, and was its most public expression was observable in the monopoly Orbán had over the press and media. There are independent media outlets in Hungary, but 85% of the country get its information from state-run media and newspapers.

Surprise! Nobody likes a thief!

Blog readers may have recognized that I rarely if ever brought up the topic of politics in the twenty years that I have been cluttering up this blog. The reason is that like most Hungarians, I feared retaliation if I drew attention from supporters of the Orbán regime. As a former political essayist for magazines and news sites in Budapest, I long ago learned that, yes.... somebody is reading your piece and somebody is keeping a list of names. So today feels like a breath of fresh air. I'm not, however, interested in reviving my former career as a political writer: I'm too old to be astonished by anything anymore. After fifteen years of carefully controlled state news, so much new information has been coming out since Sunday night that it is almost impossible to keep up. But it is exhilarating to watch the youth of Hungary - who have only known Orbán and his NER system for most of their lives - looking to a fresh future. And we have the zebras to thank for that.

Fehérvári Piac, Budapest: The Holy Grail of Market Lunch

2026-03-11T10:21:00.003-04:00

Quince Jelly

I used to work writing about Budapest for travel guides. All of them, pretty much - American, British., Swiss, and even Japanese. Magazines, guide books, airline in-flight mags all helped pay the bills. The pay was usually miserable, but it went a long way in the weird east European economies of twenty years ago - not that the situation is less weird now, but there isn't much that you can now label as "cheap." You can eat lunch cheaper in Berlin these days than you can in Budapest. Another drawback of writing travel guides is that you don't get author credit, if you are listed at all, and the books tend to go out of print after two years. Its as if you'd never worked on a published book at all. And then came social media and the magical days of the travel guide book were no more.

Now tourists are seen wandering the streets with their faces glued downward onto their phones, following GPS maps to those same "best rated" lunch spots that all the other travel influencers have featured in their previous video spots on Tiktok and YouTube. I love how somebody who has just arrived in a new and unfamiliar place, who doesn't know the language or culture, and has never tasted the local food is suddenly the expert to guide you though your first visit. Where to find good Hungarian food? Just ask somebody who got off the train six hours ago. And thus: the tourist lángos, the goulash in a bread bowl, and the ice-cream filled "Transylvanian" funnel cake.

When I wrote about Budapest I always suggested a trip to one of the city's outer district markets to sample some of "the real Hungary." The Instagram guides will invariably suggest visiting the downtown Vámház Market, where the eateries specialize in serving overpriced tourist food - particularly the lángos sellers who probably bank their daily earnings in Zurich.

Vámház is a pretty good market for produce and especially for meat - its butchers supply a lot of the downtown restaurant biz and so the quality is high and the prices are low for the retail customer. But if you want to eat... get on a bus or tram and head away from the city center. My suggestions are either take the #7E (express) east into Pest to the end of the line to Bosnyák ter, my old favorite market. Or even closer to downtown, The Fehérvári utcai Piac, located next to the old Skala department store, probably offers the best food court experience in Budapest for traditional heart clogging Hungarian food. Take the M4 Metro or the 4 or 6 tram to Ujbuda Kőzpont and you're there. Enter the nondescript grey building marked Vásárcsarnok". Trundle past the wonderfully affordable vegetable sellers and the home made sausage stands and take the escalator to the third level. You are home, Pilgrim. Home.

First impressions: not a single tourist. At least a dozen different food vendors offering Hungarian cooking and a mere hint of "Other" (Ukrainian pierogi, Chinese steam table, Pizza-oid carbohydrates.) A lot of the tables are taken up by gaggles of retired folks knocking back flasks laughably cheap wine and chowing down on the kind of old time Magyar lunch dishes that seem to have disappeared around the time we stopped calling each other "comrade".

The prices tend to be about a half of what you would pay in a "nice" restaurant, and you are guaranteed to get more fat, cholesterol, carcinogens and carbs in every bite. I'm sure that any EU inspector would faint at some of the stuff you can find up here. I found it hard to choose: when I see tripe in one pot and pig feet paprikás in the other, I go into panic mode. We went with two of my favorite home style lunch dishes, ones that I dare you to find in any restaurant that features a tablecloth: Rakott Krumpli (baked stacked potatoes)

Rakott Krumpli is a standard in families where Mom can't really cook. It is like the instant ramen noodles of Magyar cuisine. You slice spuds, chop up some hard boiled eggs and csabái kolbász sausage, which will bleed orange paprika grease as it bakes, empty some sour cream on top of it, and stick it in the oven. Presto! Everybody happy! It sounds like it should be repulsive, but this is Eastern Europe, so somehow the disparate parts come together in a harmonious symphony of Sunday lunch. Sour cream, lard and paprika are the essential Staff of Life staples here. They make anything taste good.

My choice for lunch was káposztás tészta, cabbage noodles. This is a peasant dish that evokes the end of winter, when all other food has run out. It almost screams "Famine ahead! Eat while you can! Famine coming'" It takes hours to slowly sauté and caramelize the cabbage into a soft brown edible stage, oddly sweet and peppery and with a distinctive whiff of cabbage farts. It is one of the dishes I crave but don't have the patience to make at home. It was one of those old farmhouse dinners that disappeared with the rise of the microwave oven. Again - it doesn't sound like it should taste good but somehow it is.

The real reason to go to the market is to bring stuff home with you, which doesn't seem so urgent after you have eaten two or three plates of concentrated carbo-lard energy loaf. But don't miss the strudel seller on the first floor: decide how much you want and then order double that amount to bring home. You will thank me.

There's nothing more I like to do when I first arrive in a new country than drop into a market to see what's on offer: there is a lot more history and tradition to an open market than a Tescos. The Fehérvári market used to be a sprawling open tiered market, rebuilt around twenty years ago to stand the weather in all season. I used to work up the street when Budapest Week had its offices in the old Sopianae Tobacco factory. After work I used to hang out at the snack kiosks in front where the Transylvanian Roma used to hang out while sojourning in Budapest: That is where I learned a lot of Romani language over beer and sausages. You wont find the kiosks out front anymore, but head inside to the third level and don't worry about reserved seating. There's room for everyone.

The Tourist Lángos

2026-01-20T06:45:00.000-05:00

I just bought a subscription to the Hungarian online news magazine 444.hu, which is a first for me because I am a crabby cheap old bastard who rarely subscribes to anything. I read 444.hu every day, in fact, but they gated their feature writing and in-depth articles behind a paywall. 444, however, is one of the last holdouts of progressive journalism left in Orbanistan, where the FIDESZ government has bought up a large percentage of the private media and choked off outlets dedicated to investigative reporting and opposition opinion. With Hungary facing a federal election this coming April, independent news sources are crucial. My daily diet of Hungarian news mainly comes from 444, HVG, Telex, and Magyar Hang, and I usually peek at a few of the pro-government sites as well just to get a look at what they are saying in the right wing fever swamp. It isn't like I need more news. I read a lot in Hungarian, but I have always been hampered by the fact that, having not been educated in Hungarian schools, I don't take much satisfaction in Hungarian literature. (If you want to argue with me, first try translating a bit of Krasznohorkai.) I like the colloquial voice, which is, to say the least, not dominant in Hungarian literature. So a lot of my favorite writers are actually mere essayists and columnists, people who write in the voice of actual people. Especially when they can take my mind off of the news.

Szily Laszlo - one of my favorite Hungarian journalists - just started a new series of food reviews in 444. And so yes, I subscribed! Szily's previous food series was about some of the old communist restaurants that still hang on in Budapest. The new series is about eating only tourist food in Budapest. Since I live in the Bulinegyed - the seventh district "party zone" - I see these places popping up weekly. Hungary doesn't have a tradition of "street food" but once it became an idée fixe of industrial tourism, "street food" popped up everywhere. If influencers want street food, influencers shall have street food. One of the most common - and from the vendor's standpoint, most profitable - offerings is lángos. Lángos are simple deep-fat fried dough, often made with a bit of mashed potato mixed into the dough. You could fashion a crispy, chewy pillow of hot carbs that would be slathered in salt and garlic sauce or served sweet with apricot jam. They were sold at stands in open markets, at beaches and from fryer trucks at festivals, When I was a kid visiting Hungary I practically lived on lángos on the beach at Balaton.

Lángos as it should be: garlic and salt, upstairs at Klauzál tér market.

I don't actually eat lángos that much. I'm afraid that when I die and my life passes in front of me I will see visions of a greasy, salty lángos and know that I probably could have stayed on the mortal coil for another few years if I had avoided it altogether. Lángos is the fried pastry of mortality. We are all going to die. And we all have to eat. But nothing ties the two together as well as a lángos.

Lángos were always a simple, trustworthy cure for hunger, but around 1990 things changed. Gradually alternate toppings appeared on lángos: sour cream, grated cheese, ketchup... but the humble dough pie remained a feature of market stalls. Then somebody realized you could take the humble lángos - the most minimal investment in food conceivable - and market it to tourists hungry for a taste of authentic Hungarian food. Heck, you could add topping... like sausages! paprikás stew! caviar! Just watch the profits roll in! Soon the humble market lángos - the joy of destitute students, pensioners, and the homeless - were marketed at restaurant meal prices. You can easily find lángos being sold in the FT 4000-5000 range, the same as an entree in a sit down, downtown restaurant.

FT 600 for a plain. Klauzál tér.

Szily's first adventure takes him to the Retro Lángos near the Parliament, where, for a mere FT 3790 ($11.50 USD) he orders a fusion lángos called "The Peasant" topped with sour cream, cheese, raw red onion, and fried kolbasz. Szily writes What does the Hungarian peasant do? If we can believe the hit product of Retro Lángos, then he gags all day long. No wonder, since there is no peasant who could get air while his entire oral cavity, plus his esophagus, is filled with a rubbery, dense, elastic substance... It wasn't just any cheese, but the cheapest, completely tasteless, usually not even "cheese" anymore, but one of the substitute products sold under the names "pizza topping", "sandwich topping" or similar. I've never eaten grated rubber gaskets or fishing lures made of silicone rubber, because they wouldn't be able to show anything new in comparison

The aforementioned "peasant" lángos (courtesy 444.hu)

Szily's writing alone is worth the price of the subscription, but he is not exaggerating. Very little of the food served to tourists is very good. If you really want a good lángos , go to one of the big vegetable markets outside of the town center. Usually around the back you can find a few kiosks selling roasted meat, sausages, and with luck, decent lángos. I recommend nothing more than garlic water and salt, but the apricot jam is divine as well. Keep it simple.

The Kádár Étkezde: Good food for Bad Jews.

2025-10-23T08:04:00.001-04:00

Beet salad at the old Kádár Étkezde: that is adequate horseradish.

The Kádár Étkezde is back in business! Or at least something very much like it under the same roof and name. The legendary lunch-only Hungarian restaurant closed at the beginning of the Covid epidemic, and a year ago I wrote about reports that local businessman Gerendai Károly had purchased the place with the intention of reopening it without any major changes to its quirky traditions, menu, and food. It was a long wait: besides basic renovation it took a while to sort out the paperwork when it turned out that the original Kádár had been operating since 1957 without any permit.

It kinda makes sense: located in the middle of Klauzal ter - the heart chakra of Budapest's Jewish ghetto - the Kádár essentially served old fashioned, home style Communist Hungarian Jewish food. Good food for bad Jews. The classic Jewish bean stew sólet (the Yiddish cholent) was served with a either a goose leg or a slice of smoked pork loin, Matzoh ball soup was served alongside lung stewed in cream sauce. It was the kind of nostalgia that would - in say, the 1960s - comfort a middle aged Jewish party functionary who had survived both the Holocaust and Stalinism and wanted lunch in his old neighborhood when visiting his Grandma living nearby. Kádár served classic Hungarian food, which cloaked the Jewish identity of dishes like sólet - a traditional sabbath meal in both Ashkenazic and Sephardic culture. And much like the Spanish Jewish cuisine of the post-1492 era it was gloriously unkosher: extra helpings of lard and pork innards help to keep the Inquisitors away.

Sólet with roast goose leg in 2025

I'll cut to the chase. The new Kádár is good. Go there. But it is new, and it is not exactly the same as the old place. They have only been open for a couple of weeks and there was an incredible PR campaign surrounding its opening, so one can expect a few bumps and growing pains, but it shows promise. The menu is pretty limited - they are just starting and running a full house every day so they will need time to finesse their repetoire. Go to their website and make reservations beforehand: it is really popular right now. The old Kádár had a regular menu and then a page of changing daily specials - the sólet was offered only on Friday and Saturdays. Today sólet is the star of the show - not surprising since few other Hungarian restaurants offer it at all. But... but.... but... it was a bit too... cheffy. A plate of quasi-semitic beans and bird will never be haut cuisine, but the old sólet presented as a savory mess of dense bean mud and goose fat begging to be shoveled into your gaping maw, offering the promise that you would never, ever be hungry again. This version, however, was a dish of identifiable beans in a sauce. It was good, but it needs to sit around long enough to... mature? Congeal? Solidify? Pre-digest?

Sólet in 2014... with horseradish beet salad

Compare the old sólet. Not an errant drop of moisture to be seen. And more than the beans, I ordered the "horseradish beet salad" for our lunch. It came... without horseradish. I saw a strand or two of horseradish in the beets, but... the old style dish was a mound of violently pungent fresh ground horseradish that ripped your nostrils and left you gasping for air. Maybe the kitchen is worried that their modern clientele can't handle the crowd-control quality of the old dish.

Old Kádár: goose meatloaf on sólet

One of the subtexts that identified Kádár as a secret Jewish restaurant, and one that was specifically native to Klauzál tér, was it use of goose. Klauzál tér park was once an open air market, divided into two halves: the side along Nagy Diofa utca was kosher and specialized in selling goose. Goose provided the grease of Hungarian Jewish cuisine: Hungarian cuisine is based on cooking with pork lard.

Klauzál tér in 1896.

Károly Gundel, the famed chef whose restaurant in the city park bears his name, opened his classic Hungarian cookbook with the lines: Hungarian cooking always begins with onions cooked in lard. Jews... substituted goose fat. (This was in the days before vegetable oil, and olive oil was still stuff you could only get in the south Balkans or Italy.) Over the decades, in face of social forces including assimilation, mass annihilation, and anti-Semitism, Hungarian Jews adopted more and more Hungarian eating customs, including an increasing tolerance for pork. In this neighborhood, however, Kosher butchers and restaurants maintained a strong clientele, with several establishments that catered, like the Kádár (and the Fülemüle) to an odd chimera of Hungarian and Jewish cooking: the unkosher Jewish restaurant. And thus the demand for goose meat and fat was centered into the seventh and eighth districts of Budapest. As I often did in the olden days, I ordered ludaskása, which is essentially goose bits in rice pilav.

Kádár ludaskása today

The Kádár went through a lot of goose: it roasted the legs, ground the breast meat into its goose meatloaf, and roasted the carcasses to provide a base for stock. Ludaskása was a dense pilav-like dish of goosebits, soup veg, and rice, dense and wet, extremely filling and fatty. I did enjoy the ludaskása we had last week, but... it was something made by somebody who had imagined it as some sort of risotto - the rice light and fluffy, a few bits of goose guts floating around in there, and worst of all... I was hungry when I finished it. This never happened with the old version. Let me illustrate why with a few photographs of a serving of the old ludaskása:

Kádár Ludaskása circa 2016

That was a small serving of ludaskása. There were about three goose wings stacked on top of a mound of rice. Fumie and I would drop into Kádár on Wednesdays and order a takeout of two servings of ludaskása to go. They would just drop a whole roast goose carcasse on top of a box of pilav and we would take it home to strip the meat off the goose bones. We would eat our pilav of ludaskása and then boil the bones for more stock, add some rice and the excess goose meat, and make an entire fresh pot of more ludaskása for the rest of the week. (As a mixed Jewish and Japanese household we can eat a lot of rice.)

Ludaskása to go in olden times.

Yes, I know. That was then... this is now. I am not criticizing the new Kádár for not distributing whole animal carcasses to go, or for not poisoning the clients with weapons-grade horseradish. But Gerendai, the owner of the new Kádár, is also the founder of the Michelin starred Budapest Costes restaurant, and the kitchen staff are rumored to have come from that temple of fine dining. I suspect that there may be a few erudite theories of cuisine development percolating in the background of the chef's notebooks here... as we say in the backwaters of Trumpistan...it seems that perhaps they are overthinking a plate of beans. As an old time alumnus of the Kádár, we didn't go there for a culinary experience. We went there for lunch. We didn't go to the Kádár to dine. We went to eat.

The late Sándor Orbán, former owner and soul of the Kádár

And I will add that I did not try either of the desserts offered, both of which were huge portions of either sweet poppy seed noodles or vanilla sauce bread pudding. They looked great, though. and the prices were actually quite fair for all of the dishes, and yes - I will return again, expecting time to iron out all the bumps and boo-boos that go with opening a new / old restaurant. Whichever direction the new Kádár goes in, it is a welcome addition to the local food scene. It is making a genuine effort to keep alive the standards and accomplishment of the former owner, the legendary Sándor Orbán, who passed away earlier this year. Real Hungarian food has become harder and harder to find, especially in the downtown and particularly in the heavily touristic seventh district. Welcome back, Kádár Étkezde!

Subotica, Serbia: Train to Nowhere

2025-08-28T07:21:00.001-04:00

No summer is complete without a jaunt south to the Balkan lands! After a few months at home in Budapest's 7th district - the underage tourist drinking capital of Europe - a trip to the Balkans, even just to cross the border, is a tonic, a breath of fresh air. There is an electricity simply to being in the Balkans. Central Europe - as Hungary likes to style itself - combines the dour moralism of Protestant Europe with an East European "how many of us does it take to change a light bulb?" approach to technology. The Balkans - and I am specifically addressing Serbia in the post - is like crossing into a strange mirror world, where light bulbs are a privilege, not a right. The Balkans wear its traditions on its sleeve. Budapest is so modern, so European, so... expensive. So: cross the border, easily marked by a razor wire fence erected in 2015 when Viktor Orban was gleefully making a name as the Troll King protecting white Christian Europe from the brown hordes of refugees from the Middle East.

A Warm and Welcoming Hello! Hungarian Serbian Border

The border has been quiet for the last decade, almost too quiet. Serbia, however, has been rocked by huge street protests against the 11 year rule of Prime Minister Alexander Vucic, a populist who cozies up to Orban and licks Putin's dainty parts and plays the Serb nationalist card close to his chest. Vucic and Orban have been involved in the building of China's "Belt and Road" railway system, a multi billion dollar Chinese Commie fantasy scam of railways and ports that will provide Chinese car batteries, and Labubus to hungry consumers in the EU. There have been,... glitches. Long story short: there is no railway service in northern Serbia anymore, and won't be for a while.

(This is a pub, actually, not the train to Szeged.)

The lethal collapse of the Novi Sad railway station on Nov 1 2024 led to mass protests which have continued to peak this summer, with mass demonstrations in Belgrade, Novi Sad, and other cities, in which protesters were often met with violence from thugs and hooligans organized by forces close to Vucic. Big infrastructure projects are to political corruption like shit to flies. In the burning summer sun there are Chinese workers squatting around the unopened Subotica railway station chipping at concrete with hammers, and the station itself is closed for safety reasons. The Budapest - Belgrade railway, which has already officially opened three times, is now predicted to run by around 2028. For now there are no trains onward towards Serbia from here, sorry. Luckily, there is a two car tram-train that can get you from Szeged to Subotica twice a day, but beyond that you are on your own.

Subotica (Szabadka in Hungarian) just next to the Hungarian border, is the main city of the Bacska region of the Vojvodina, the northern province of Serbia that was a multi-ethnic autonomous region of old Yugoslavia. Although Serbs comprise the majority in the province, in many places the ethnic mix - even after the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s - remains a diverse cultural patchwork of languages and local traditions that seems to have forged a tolerance that evades many other regions of Eastern Europe. Subotica is nearly half Hungarian, with a large minority of Bunyevac, a Catholic Croatian sub group that has native to the region long enough to claim its dialect as a separate language in the municipality

By chance, we arrived during the weekend of the Bunyevac harvest festival, Duzijanca. Every evening crowds would gather near the central square to listen to tamburica bands and marvel at the hay sculptures. Folk dance groups from the villages showed up, and people contentedly traipsed up dawn the streets chatting and visiting, the classic Balkan corso, the evening social stroll.

I can only take so much tamburica music, an aversion dating to my days playing in Balkan bands in the USA (I prefer funkier, less harmonious music, as in gaida!) On Saturday, at least, Serbian Gypsy Brass bands gathered outside the City hall to rent themselves out to wedding parties.

The City Hall itself is worth seeing: tours are given daily by showing up exactly at noon at the main entrance. Subotica was once one of the most important cities in the Kingdom of Hungary, a role that shrank after the region was made part of Serbia after World War One. Just before the first World War Hungary - of which Subotica was then a part - had gulled itself into believing in a glorious, pan-Danubian Hapsburg future, and grand architectural statements like the Budapest Parliament and the Subotica City Hall are testaments to the dashed dreams of that briefly optimistic era.

City Hall Square

During Subotica's glory days local architects built dozens of gob-smackingly beautiful Art Nouveau palaces and city buildings. During the communist era a lot of these were demolished to modernize the city center, but the remaining ones define the look of Subotica.

Our Hapsburg Connections! (City Hall)

Subotica, indeed, the entire Vojvodina, was once home to a large Jewish community, who were apparently doing rather well from trade at the end of the 19th century. The Subotica Synagogue, built in 1908 is without a doubt the most gorgeous shul I have ever been in, and I have been in a lot them.

Photo by Fumie Suzuki, taken from the tower of City Hall

Designed by two local architects, Dezső Jakab and Marcell Komor, who idolized the Budapest Jewish architect Liport Baumhorn. They applied their taste to the City Hall office and many other local buildings as well. And then came the First World War, the Hapsburg defeat, and the Trianon treaty. Little did they realize at the time that the busy mercantile center of Subotica would soon become a dusty border town, albeit with some spectacular buildings.

The Synagogue alone is worth the trip to Subotica, even if you are not Jewish. The motifs reflect the Hungarian Neolog Jewish sentiment of the late 1800s: an embrace of Hungarian cultural identity al0ngside Jewish religion following the German Reform model. The stained glass work alone is astounding. Motifs from Hungarian folk design adorn the ceilings (alongside some decidedly Bunyevac designs as well, probably not by licit intention of the artists)

The real reason we went to Subotica is to eat. On Fumie's birthday we were thinking of going to one of the few places in Budapest still serving cevapcici... and we realized that we could take a train to Subotica, stay over night, and eat cevapi for about the same price as dining out in Budapest. So we did.

If you like meat, you will like Serbia. Cevapi, cevapcici, meatwads, call them what you will, they are good down in Serbia. They are even better in Bosnia, but the Vojvodina became home to thousands of Bosnian Serb refugess after the Bosnian War in the 1990s (replacing about 60,000 local Croats, but not the Bunyevac... its complicated....) and bringing the Bosnian obsession with little tubes of grilled meat with them.

A Master at Work: Ilijanska cevapi

Perhaps the best cevapi we found was at the Ilijanska Cevap House, a tiny place across the street from the synagogue. Ilijia is the western bit of Sarajevo, now in Republika Srpska territory, and I have eaten cevap in Ilidja itself, and the customers at this hole in the wall all assured me these were the best in Subotica. These cevapi are the reason we will be returning to Subotica in the near future.

They were spot on. The somon bread are baked in a pizza oven just as the cevapai are tossed on the grill, and the whole things is slathered in butter as it comes out of the oven. At one point a customer ordered a pleskavica: the Serbian analog of a hamburger. It was constructed from a slab of ground meat and onions literally the size of a pizza.

Burek near the Flea Market

Burek is the breakfast of choice in the Balkans, and Subotica, again, has several burek bakeries that make theirs using the old fashioned Bosnian sac method - a retro baked-in-the-coals technique that was inherited directly from the Turks. The Sac Burek place on the road just before you get to the flea market is the best in town (we tried all of them.) They were out of meat burek when we arrived so we went with spinach and potato burek. As we were finishing our breakfast the owner arrived and plopped down a hige slice of fresh meat burek straight out of the oven.

The Flea Market is the main draw for visitors to Subotica. Buses loaded with Hungarians cross the border every weekend to load up on canned tuna fish, laundry soap, toilet paper, and tool sets, all at prices well below what they would pay in Hungary. Most of the market sellers are, or at least can speak Hungarian, and accept Hungarian Forints in payment.

There is the usual cheap Chinese clothing section, a food section, an area selling tools, farm implements, and bicycles, a classic shit-for-sale junk and antique market, and also a fresh vegetable market.

Of course, we were there ion the second hottest day of the summer, so I couldn't fully appreciate the garbage laid out for my perusal in comfort. I didn't even have the appetite to sample the pleskavica stands that are scattered throughout the market. Pleskavica is Serbia's answer to the hamburger. Basically, it is cevap meat in a burger shape, but better, and you get to choose the toppings, which is also better.

Just before we began our trip back to Budapest, we visited the main vegetable and food market in downtown Subotica, which is open on Sunday until noon (the train leaves at 1pm) We stocked up on natural garlic, prunes, almonds and some vegetables at prices about one quarter what we pay in Budapest. We bought four ear of sweet corn for about a 80 US cents: in Budapest corn goes for over a dollar an ear these days. Boiled up that night at home, it was absolutely the sweetest corn I have ever tasted.

Walking past the fish seller Fumie noticed they were selling fully roasted red scorpion fish, the Adriatic scarpina that goes for top prices in Dalmatian restaurants. For the equivalent of four euros she got a whole roasted fish, stashed it in the freezer bag she carries with her everywhere, and we set out for home, which should have been a three hour train journey.

Scarpina that came home with us

We boarded our train back to Budapest on the hottest day of the summer, having invested the exorbitant amount of $14 in order to get a first class seat that would guarantee air conditioning. Now, as much as I have impugned the reputation of the Serbian rail system, that is nothing compared to the Hungarian State Railway MAV this year. See, we actually had a working railway system. In theory, at least. But since 2022 the Minister for Transportation has been János Lázár, a long time political fixture who exemplifies the "fixing lightbulbs theory" of running state railways. Hungarian trains no longer run on time, and refunds are sketchy and often not forthcoming., Austria no longer lists the arrival times of Hungarian trains on its schedule, because... why would you?

Farewell Serbia!

Needless to say our trip home was an endless mess of breakdowns and transfers. We were offloaded from our comfy fist class seats onto buses and taken to a countryside station where we sat in the sun with a few hundred other disgruntled Hungarians until MAV could figure what to do with a few hundred irate Magyars standing in the blazing heat. At one point they had us enter an already full train before ordering us off it again.

Visit beautiful Szatymaz! thanks MAV!

Finally, an old local train was pressed into duty to get us back to Budapest, on which we were grateful to have even found seats. With the heat around 100 Fahrenheit, only open windows provided moving, if hot, air. I am glad we got back to our flat with any sanity (thanks goes to my sister, who got us an air conditioner for the flat this year!) And the most surprising bit of the story: the fish survived the journey'

Don't ask how the cevapi is made...

Istanbul's Inflated Economy

2025-07-10T12:58:00.002-04:00

Anatolian gözelme grannies at the Bakirköy Market

This blog began in 2006 as a newsletter to friends and family about our time in Istanbul. Fumie was working for an travel guidebook which let us spend several months living in the Galata neighborhood of Beyoglu, enough time for us to feel at home in the city and for me to pick up enough Turkish to make basic conversation. Looking through those first blog posts I am still shocked at how affordable Istanbul was. Lunch could be had for a dollar, and three dollars got you a full meal served on a tablecloth. That is no longer the situation. The Turkish economy is in crisis, and inflation has raised Turkish prices. Not prohibitively expensive for the traveler, but for Turkish citizens the cost of living has exploded. For Turks, a generation of dreams has collapsed.

Istanbullites eat out a lot, and they have ever since it was Byzantium. Its a big city and people can't go home for lunch. People pick up a bite for breakfast on the way to work, and tradesmen's cafes - called Esnaf Lokanta - serve cheap, filling lunches during the day. Snacking is considered a basic right to all Turks, but that döner kebab that was a dollar back in 2006 can now hit eight dollars and up, while the average Turkish wage is basically the same as it was years ago. If you read history, going all the way back to the Byzantines, Istanbul has always been a poster child for urban economic problems. Istanbullites are tough and cynical about it. Hell, they survived the Fourth Crusade, they can survive this.

The explanation for what brought the Turkish economy to this sorry state lies with the increasingly undemocratic rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Like his close friend Viktor Orban in Hungary, Erdogan runs a performative democracy in which processes like elections are held giving the appearance of democracy, but without the mechanisms - free expression, free press, civil society - that feed a democratic process. Erdogan, like Orban, has zero patience for political rivals - last May Erdogan had Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu arrested on hazy charges of corruption, sparking mass demonstrations leading to riots. Whatever can be said of Erdogan, however, he is not an economist. Playing to a religious conservatism that runs contrary to the secular traditions of Kemal Ataturk, Erdogan promoted the idea that banking interest is "un-Islamic" and during his time in office he has repeatedly fired the heads of the Turkish national bank, each firing lowering confidence among foreign investors on which Turkey depends. This video (by a former CNN reporter) does a pretty good job of explaining what happened to the Turkish lira in the last few years and how it affects travellers..

Bakirköy Pazar

The resulting economic turmoil led Turkey to an 83% inflation rate in 2022, which hit Turks where it hurts: in the stomach. Today the inflation rate still stands at around 35%. Given the government controls on free press (there are a lot of Turkish journalists in prison) the Turkish general populace takes to social media to express itself. My Instagram feed is full of examples of Turkish meat porn, a wide ranging genre featuring smiling Anatolian chefs offering mounds of steaming, juicy sliced meat to the camera lens. Some of my favorite Turkish cooking videos are the ones where big muscled guys with moustaches work up a few kilos of lamb in the back room of a butcher shop, grill up the results and stand around tasting the results like satisfied wine experts discussing a vintage. And people can express themselves freely about the price of food.

House made döner at Abdulkadir in Bakirköy : 80% veal, 20% lamb

What I have noticed is that more and more Turkish food videos are focused on cheaper foods that can be had in local grocery stores: grilled cheese sandwiches, chick peas wrapped in flatbread, foods sold from street carts like the ubiquitous chicken, chickpea and rice or gözelme pancakes. Comments on the clips are largely shock about prices, especially for common lunch items like köfte kebab and döner. Meat has gotten pricey. A downtown döner kebab lunch can be as much as a full service pit roast lamb dinner in the Kadinlar Pazar. Carefully choosing can keep costs down.

Cheap and filling: Beans over chicken and pilav

For a tourist, Istanbul can still be negotiated on a budget. We no longer choose to stay near the downtown. We took advantage of the Turkish Airlines stopover program, which offers a night free in a five star hotel if your flight connects in Istanbul - two nights if you a flying from a long distance (like the USA). We added two extra nights to that by contacting the hotel directly, and got a 50% reduced rate for two extra nights. Our neighborhood - Bakirköy on the sea just outside the old city walls - was a normal part of Istanbul. No tourists, a few universities, a busy shopping district, malls, mosques, and a stop on the new Marmaray train line to downtown Istanbul.

As you wander north of the Marmaray rail station towards Incirli you hit the Bakirkoy Market on Thursday and Saturdays. Municipal Bazaars like this operate all over Istanbul on different days of the week: this is how Istanbullites deal with the economy. Home goods, clothing, second hand tools, its all here for a song. Crowds gobble down gözelme Anatolian pancakes stuffed with meat, spinach, or cheese, made in front of you by real Turkish grandmas for 70 Turkish lira (about $1.75) Among the things that followed us home was an entirely affordable modern Afghan kilim rug. A similar piece downtown cost 100% more.

The nearby neighborhoods of Incirli and Gungören are known locally as "Little Gaziantep" - home to a Anatolian internal immigrants from the Gaziantep region in southern part of Turkey, a region known for its uncompromising traditional cuisine. Yes, we took advantage. Antep cooking is militantly conservative: bread must be fresh, kebabs must be just so, and dessert must be like grandma used to make.

In "Little Gaziantep"

For our first night in Bakirköy, after a ten hour flight and an hour taxi ride from Istanbul Airport, we already knew where we were having dinner: Çevre İskender Kebap Lahmacun Salon a small all night kebab place a few blocks away from our hotel. We have been there before. Pure Gaziantep style kebab, with a big wooden oven churning out fresh lavash bread and lahmacun to order. Fumie had the classic ground meat Adana kebab, I had kanatler - simple grilled wings, crunchy and perfectly finished by one of those moustached meat masters of southern Turkey. The night before we left we returned for another Antep specialty that I have been wanting to try for years: katmer.

Katmer is a thin, flakey baklava pastry folded around a pistachio and vanilla cream filling, served hot from the oven. I don't usually eat sweets but there is a first time for everything and this was our final stop before returning to Budapest. We also found a local festival of regional foods near the Marmaray train staion: producers from all over Turkey were handing out samples and selling both fresh traditinal and cooked foods. We stopped and shared a cağ kebab - a specialty of Erzurum in Eastern Turkey, the horizontal ancestor of the modern vertical spit döner.

The meat, she sings!

Turkey is home to several million refugees of the Syrian civil wars. A large Syrian neighborhood coalesced in the conservative Muslim neighborhood west of Aksaray station in Fatih district. We went there one very hot Saturday day to visit the huge Findikzade market.

Down the block was something I was curious about: real Syrian falafel. Falafel isn't a Turkish dish, and until the Syrians arrived it was virtually unknown. Most of us know falafel from its Israeli version, translated through trendy vegan recipes and commodified as a fast food. The falafel I had at Tayba Falafel next to Haseki tram station was an eye opener.

Syrian falaful in Fatih

It was lighter, crunchier, lighter and less heavily spiced than most snack stand falafels I have eaten. The Syrian Hummus was creamy smooth with whole chickpeas sitting on top, the taboon bread was hot and fresh. It was wonderful, just the thing for a hot day. Fumie went for the lahmacun, which was spiced with mint and served inside a wrap of flat taboon bread, sort of a bread on bread sandwich, but stıll good.

At Yesilköy beach. The 1877 treaty that ended the Russo-turkish war was signed here!

People may ask me if Turkey ıs still worth visiting and my answer ıs a wholehearted yes. Yes, it has social and economic upheavals due to a megalomaniac Leader figure - but then again, I live in Hungary and just visited the USA, so I am familiar with that form of social misery already. But careful planning can keep your budget intact, and nobody should pass up the chance to experience the openness and overwhelming grace and friendliness of the Turkish people. You don't return to Turkey for the food, or the rugs, or the beaches. You go for the people.

New York New Jersey New World

2025-07-02T03:43:00.000-04:00

We're heading home. It's been a relatively short trip back to the family homestead in New Jersey, a full four miles outside of New York City, just a Spanish bus ride down Route 4 away. We didn't go into the city very much this time. The main purpose was to be here for my Dad's 99th birthday.

Jack Cohen, US Navy veteran and retired Gold Shield New York City Police department detective is still sharp and fully operating at 100%. He is a bit shaky walking long distances and his career as a dancer of 1950s mambo and chacha are definitely over, but he still gets out to the Jersey meadowlands almost daily to go bird watching, which is a unique hobby for a former NYPD detective. He doesn't mess with the finches and sparrows much. He watches eagles and Ospreys, the big birds.

There are two things I miss about New York that I can't find in Europe: decent Cantonese Chinese food and Jewish style pastrami. Most of the "authentic Chinese" food we get in Hungary is straight out Beijing: dumplings, dumplings, and dumplings. For pastrami I have actually made it myself, which is messy and a ridiculous effort. Other than that Manhattan has changed so much since 9/11 that I don't have much use for it anymore. Gone are the quirky bookshops, the record stores, the oddball ethnic percussion shops, replaced by chain department stores selling sneakers to teenagers and Gucci to the luxury class.

Hand cut meats at Pastrami Bistro Grill

For Jewish deli food, there are fewer and fewer real Jewish delis left. Liebman's in the Bronx, Pastrami Queen, and notable Pastrami master Freddie Loesser of the legendary and excellent (and closed) Loesser's Deli in the Bronx just passed away this month. Katz's Deli, which I have written about many times, has become a major New York tourist destination, with long waiting lines (people say to go late at night if you don't like lines) The pastrami sandwich at Katz's is now $32.00, which sounds like a lot but it is the best in the world (alongside Schwartz' Smoked Meat in Montreal) and 32 bucks generally won't get you far in New York anyways. We opted to stay in Jersey, and went to the Pastrami Grill Bistro in Garfield.

Brisket Sandwich, Garfield, NJ

Where I am a hardboiled pastrami guy, Fumie loves beef with a pure beefy flavor, so she ordered the brisket sandwich. It was fourteen dollars. Less than half the New York price these days. It was fantastic. Same texture and consistency as the corned beef and pastrami but without the spicing. I may become a fan of brisket sandwiches in the future. They are certainly easier to make in home recipe version than pastrami, although finding the right cut of beef in Hungary is going to require negotiation with a butcher. Butcher cuts in Hungary are entirely different from those in the USA.

Classic $8 Wonton Noodle at 218 Grand street.

I have nothing against taking the 7 train all the way to Flushing for New York's widest selection of regional Chinese food, but for Cantonese food Manhattan's Chinatown still rules. In my younger days I used to underwrite trips to the city by economizing on food: I ate almost exclusively Hong Kong style wonton noodle soups, which used to be the cheap option for a meat and soup dinner under five dollars. Today that has doubled. A lot of the cheap noodle soup and congee places that used to sell chopped Cantonese BBQ meats have disappeared along with the sweatshop clothing industry that supported them until recently.

Giant wonton and noodle in duck soup with beef tendon at Maxi's.

In their place a new generation of wonton noodle soup houses have opened up. I had read about Maxi's Noodle, which specializes in the old Hong Kong style noodle soups. They used to be one of the only Cantonese places in Flushing. The daughter of the original owner took it over and made a hip atmosphere and preserved the family tradition of making some of the largest shrimp and meat wontons in the city. I had to go. Fantastic, and worth the price.

Grandmas Rulez at Mott Street Food Court

Chinatown used to be the home of massive dim sum parlors, many of which, like the legendary Jing Fong, reputed to have had New York's largest single dining room, have closed down due to greedy lanlords and real estate managers. The newly opened Mott street Food Court, however, seems to have plugged the hold. There were no tourists to be seen, instead the tables were filled by seemingly vagrant Chinese Grandmothers shouting across the room in Cantonese. Perfect. Jackpot!

Rice rolls, shiu mai, turnip cake, tofu skin rolls.

This isn't a classic Dim Sum spot: there are no servers pushing carts piled with bamboo steamers around the food (you can still find that in Queens.) There are several stalls selling everything from bubble tea to Taiwanese beef noodle soup, but we chose to order Dim Sum, which came in plastic trays.

Teochew dumplings

About a quarter of the old Chinatown population comes from Teochew, a region in eastern Canton bordering Vietnam that speaks its own form of Min Chinese (instead of the Cantonese Yue language of Guangdong) and became to source for the majority of Chinese emigrants to southeast Asia. Teochew food shares a lot of flavors and techniques with Vietnamese and SE Asian food, and we usually have a go at Bo Ky, which is still one of the most affordable joints in New York. Here on Mott Street they had Teochew dumplings: wrapped in a soft gooey rice and mugwort coat and containing a mix of mystery meat, peanuts, and scallions.

We came back for the Teochew dumplings with my son Aron and Chi, who had already eaten when we met them so they missed out. Perhaps because the night before Aron had gone with us to Fort Lee, NJ, for shanghai style food at Soup Dumplings Plus, one of the few Chinese restaurants in the overwhelmingly Korean part of Bergen County next to the George Washington Bridge.

The Soup dumplings were excellent, and that says a lot since I was never sold on the soup dumpling craze. We finished our trip with a family tradition - the mamaliga and seafood feast. My Dad's family came from Moldavia, and while growing up poor in New York in the great depression during the 1930s, my Grandmother would rely on that old Romanian staple, mamaliga, (which is essentially cornmeal mush, or more elegantly, polenta) to feed her four children.

The Cohens: Fran, Jerrie, Jack in baseball cap, Grandma, Eli around 1938

Dad still craves mamaliga, and I make it for him when I am around, especially as a side dish to shrimp creole. Dad has to watch his sodium and potassium these days, so okra subs for tomatoes and shrimp has enough flavor to not need salt. My Dad also introduced me to clams on the half shell when I was about twelve years old, possibly as a hedge against me becoming increasingly kosher as I entered the bar mitzvah study stage (clams, indeed, any shellfish, are not considered kosher.) I introduced my son to clams when he was around 9, and he has been sucking them down ever since as well. So here it is: three generations of Cohens, integrating the traditional with the modern. Seafood and mamaliga!

Voltaire Had it Right: Tend your Garden!

2025-06-01T06:19:00.000-04:00

"I also know", said Candide, "that we must cultivate our garden."
"You are right," said Pangloss, "for when man was put in the Garden of Eden, he was put there ut operaretur eum, to work; which proves that man was not born to rest."
"Let us work without reasoning," said Martin, "it is the only way to make life endurable."

NagyDiofa Community Garden today

Voltaire had it right when he wrote Candide. You can fill your head with all manner of nonsense and trivia, but the best way to settle down and feel... normal?... is to cultivate your garden. That is very sound advice in the world we live in today, crowded as it is with competing outrage, threats, and tragedy. Our little green world is a plot of community garden land sitting just below our upstairs window. About 45 plots are held by diverse set of local residents, and about four years ago we got lucky and took over an abandoned parcel. At first it looked like a bit of dry dust, but over the years that has been fixed with lots of organic compost. And egg shells. And Fumie's labor. The garden is mostly her baby. She can work on it for hours, planning and scheming compost strategies and planting schedules like a General planning an invasion offensive.

Breaking ground

We live in an old building surrounding a courtyard in what was once - and to a large extent, still is - the Budapest Jewish Ghetto. Not exactly a green country paradise. In fact, our address is a listed "Yellow Star House" - during the holocaust Jews in Budapest were forced out of homes outside of the official ghettos and restricted to living in Yellow Star houses. The building itself is not exactly conducive to agricultural pursuits. It gets little sun, and is increasingly turning into a rabbit hutch of cheap Air B&Bs housing large groups of loud, drunken British stag parties on weekends.

There are only about four or five flats left in our building that are still home to actual residents. One way to let the tourists know that your part of the gangway is not a part of the communal lobby is to hang plants from the railing. Fumie excels in balcony botany. she has a selection of flowers along with peppers, herbs, and even a giant cabbage plant which was threatening to turn into a cabbage tree.

These old buildings were all built around a central courtyard. Klauzal ter, where we are located, is still in the center of the old Jewish community of downtown Pest. Before WWII there were a lot of Jewish tailors in the neighborhood, and they competed for status by trying to outdo each other for the largest flats. A single apartment could be over ten rooms and take up half a floor of the building. Since few needed so much space, they subdivided the flats into smaller apartments, usually accessible to a shared bathroom at the end of the gangway outside. After the Holocaust, bustling Klauzal ter became an undeveloped backwater neighborhood, and the flats were separated into individual state owned apartments, with many going to rural Gypsy families who found employment in the post-war period revival of bombed out Budapest, mainly removing rubble from the streets and construction labor. When I was a kid I remembered seeing these piles of rocks and bomb rubble on street corners all along the boulevards of Pest. One of the last rubble piles was in the space where the garden is located today.

Treviso lettuce

Most of the soil here was trucked in, so with the addition of compost - which the garden produces in several huge bins along the walls - the soil is pretty healthy. We have been eating salads from our own lettuce and ruccola since march. We have been using it to produce vegetables we couldn't normally find in Hungary - things like okra, ruccola, and Italian eggplants.

We are flying to the USA tomorrow, so for the next month we have friends who will look after our plants and water the garden, but I definitely do not think I will be able to find any tomatoes or cukes that can match what we grow. Nor will we be able to enjoy a nice strudel at the corner pastry shop in the afternoon after a day in the garden. But... there will be clams... and pizza. And more surprises.

Romanian Stuffed Cabbage: The Sarmale Awards

2025-05-14T14:02:00.000-04:00

Sarmale at Varzarie, Cluj

We just returned from a quick trip south to Transylvania, where, I am happy to admit, I ate stuffed cabbage - sarmale in Romanian - every day. Stuffed cabbage is the soul food of East Europe, the apex cuisine of everything east of Austria. Every nook and corner of the Balkans and Carpathians has its own unique, localized version, little logs of meat or veg mixed with grains and rolled inside a cabbage leaf, stewed, and served by a doting grandma in a flowery head kerchief. All are praised as the epitome of local cuisine, proudly stated as the "national dish." Go to Poland: try our Gołąbki. Visiting Hungary? Tőltőtt Káposzta! Serbia - sarma! But after spending decades eating around southeast Europe, the award for best stuffed cabbage goes to... may I have the envelope, please... Romania!

Rodica Tuli's summer sarmale in Mociu, Transylvania

Sarmale is the go-to food for nearly every family gathering or dinner event in Romania, at least if it held indoors and doesn't involve an animal roasting on a spit. Families usually have a home made batch frozen and ready to serve for whenever visitors drop in. Romanians take their stuffed cabbage seriously. There are lots of local variants. Sarmale usually consist of a stuffing of meat and rice wrapped with a whole cabbage leaf, but then the taxonomy begins to branch out. Vegetarian sarmale are made for Orthodox lent and fast days, called "sarmale de post" which swap out the meat for combinations of mushrooms and carrots. The cabbage leaf can be either fresh - and soured with either vinegar or borș, a sour soup stock made from wheat bran (easily purchased in powder form from any supermarket.)

Rodica's winter sarmale with smoked pork

The souring agent is the thing that sets most Romanian and Hungarian stuffed cabbage apart from the so-called "cabbage rolls" you can get at ethnic church dinners in the USA, which are usually made with fresh cabbage leaf. You need to have whole heads of cabbage given the sauerkraut treatment in big buckets. When I still lived in the USA I used to make my own using 20 gallon plastic cement buckets. As directed by my Macedonian buddy Emil's Mom, you have to cut out the bottom core of the cabbage, fill it full of coarse salt and let it sit overnight before immersing the heads in a bucket of salted water, where they will sit for about a month to ripen and become sauerkraut. Meanwhile, Macedonian friends would stop by to ask for bottles of the pickling juice - nearly everybody in the Balkans swears by sauerkraut juice as the most effective cure for hangovers, usually backed up by gravely pseudoscientific theories involving ions and magnetic fields.

Sarmale and stuffed peppers in perfect harmony

Next, depending on your religious beliefs, you prepare the stuffing, which will ecumenically include pre-soaked rice. Then you roll them up, something you need to spend years learning from your Balkan grandma and practicing on a weekly basis until adulthood. You place the sarmale inside a huge pot separated by layers of sauerkraut and - if not following a religious fast - chunks of smoked pig you would have hanging in your pantry from an innocent porker you dispatched in your back yard a few months ago. If you are Jewish, smoked goose will do just fine if you can find a smoked goose leg. I can easily obtain this ridiculously overpriced ingredient, but then I live in the last real Jewish neighborhood in East Europe. Cover with broth and stew for about two hours. Serve with a bowl of sour cream, preferably made from water buffalo milk.

Don't forget the smoked pork!

Hungarians tend to roll their cabbages rather big, and also use more meat in relation to the rice in the stuffing. Romanian sarmale are smaller - two-bite wonders that you can really pile on your plate. Prodigiuos eaters of sarmale are noted in family histories. The great Gypsy fiddler Bela Kodoba from Palatca was famous for his record of eating 38 sarmale in one sitting, an accomplishment still mentioned in his village two decades after his passing. Gypsies in Transylvania also make a form of sarmale with corn meal stuffing - sarmale de păsat - which inspired a dance tune that came to be played at virtually all Gypsy weddings.

Dobruja style stuffed grape leaves

Like a lot of classic Balkan cooking, sarmale have origins in the Ottoman Empire, at least linguistically. Turks prepare lahana dolma from cabbage as well as from the better known grape leaves. I once had stuffed grape leaf sarmale in Maramureș cooked by a woman whose husband was from the Dobruja region along the Black Sea, an area of pronounced Turkish influence. These were made with beef, making them halal for Muslim consumption, although I am pretty sure there are no Muslims in Maramureș.

Sarmale with mamaliga at the Varzarie in Cluj

You can get sarmale in nearly any Romanian restaurant, but if you ever visit Cluj - the central city of Transylvania - make a point to visit the Varzarie at Bulevardul Eroililor 35-37, in downtown Cluj. In business since the 1960s, the Varzarie (translates out to something like the "cabbagerie") specializes in stuffed cabbage and in varză de Cluj, a deconstructed dish consisting of the parts of a stuffed cabbage formed into a loaf. That's a pretty unappetizing description but believe me, you will want more.

Look Ma, no paprika!

If you are in Hungary stuffed cabbage is less of a restaurant dish than a home style Sunday lunch. Due to arcane Hungarian health laws, food has to be sold on the same day that it is prepared, making it difficult for restaurants to prepare labor intensive dishes like stuffed cabbage that are usually made in large quantities and left overnight to mature before serving the next day. Hungarian stuffed cabbage also tends to be seasoned with lots of paprika, and sometimes tomato sauce, something you don't often see in Transylvania. If you can't find tőltőtt káposzta on the menu, you probably can find székely káposzta, which is pork stewed in sauerkraut, something of a deconstructed stuffed cabbage but still a pretty good runner up for the flavor profile.

székely káposzta

You can usually find tőltőtt káposzta in Budapest at proletarian lunch counters called étkezde or classic Magyar eateries like the Pozsonyi Kisvendéglő, and I believe the Pleh Csarda out on Kolozsvar utca serves them, although why would you go all the way out there if not to order the gigantic fried pork cutlet? The surest guarantee to eat tőltőtt káposzta is to stay late at a Hungarian wedding: usually after midnight the late night meal gets wheeled out which is usually a Volkswagen sized food cart full of stuffed cabbage.

Romanians are so invested in sarmale that there is now Sarmale Delivery stuffed cabbage in Cluj - suggested for events such as weddings, birthdays and funerals! Not only that, there is a facebook group dedicated to sarmale. One friend in Cluj tells me that there is a European wide network of Romanian home cooks that will deliver sarmale to Romanian truck drivers stuck on the highways of Western Europe on weekends without sarmale. No Transylvanian can imagine life without a plate of sarmale. I certainly can't.

Kadiköy: Asian Istanbul

2025-03-01T11:59:00.000-05:00

We've been to Istanbul many times so the famous tourist spots have little to offer us. Erdogan's love-hate relationship with the economics of tourism provided the backdrop to a steep rise in entry fees to museums and historical sites. The Agha Sofia Mosque - an absolute must see - now charges over EURO 25, and non-Turks are allowed only through a special entrance to one of the balcony areas - where some of the magnificent Byzantine images by are hidden by curtains. The Kariye /Chora Museum now charges EURO 20, the Galata Tower charges EURO 30. But we didn't come to Istanbul for the Museums this time. We came for the food, and a lot of the best is found in residential zones outside of the tourist districts.

Kadiköy Market

Kadiköy is on the Asian side of the Bosporus straits, and visitors usually reach it by ferry from Eminönu station across the water. With the newly opened Marmaray train service you can now get there directly by taking a modern subway underneath the Bosporus - a feat of engineering that counts as one of the modern world's technological marvels at least until the next big earthquake hits the Aegean fault, which runs directly beneath it. But, as they say in Turkey.. Mashallah... if God wills it. For the moment, God willed us to get to Kadiköy cheaply and quickly, so He held back on the quakes for the afternoon. We booked into the aptly named Duck Hotel in the fashionable Moda district of Kadiköy. After the spacious five star Ramada in Bakirköy the Duck was a bit downscale (read: cheap) and cramped, but we did have a roof terrace. Lesson learned: never choose accommodations based simply on animal names!

Kadiköy is the nightlife and market district for the Asian side of Istanbul, and has been since it was known to the ancient Greek s as Chalcedon. Compared to the working class congestion of the European side, the Anatolian bit of Istanbul is definitely upwardly mobile. Leading to the southern suburbs of Moda and Maltepe along the coast are fashionable boulevards lined with designer shops and trendy hamburger joints. Go north and you hit Usküdar, a conservative Muslim neighborhood with prime kebab grills. Continue north and the Bosporus is lined with affluent garden suburbs housing Istanbul's techno-and-media glitterati. And when these folks want to go pub hopping, they take the ferry to Kadiköy.

One advantage of our location was we were on the quaint T2 historical tram line, which runs in a circle around hilly Moda center. Another was the burek shop across the street. Cheap lodgings meant no fancy breakfast, which was fine as long as I had access to fresh meat and cheese pastries at 7 am. You find all kinds of filling: minced meat, cheese, spinach, or potato. I tend to choose su böregi "wet burek", basically a white lasagna. Kadiköy is famous for its open market, one of the largest in Istanbul, but it is equally a center for antique hunting, second hand and vintage shops, and tons of eateries which serve the crowds on weekends and evenings. We had already been to the rightly famed Çiya for regional Turkish specialties, so we tried a few new spots. first off: Fumie needs seafood.

Midye dolma - rice stuffed mussels - are a specifically Istanbul street snack. Most Turks think they are disgusting, and when a newcomer arrives into Istanbul from the Anatolian hinterlands his friends take him out and force him to try mussels as a rıte of passage. They are stuffed with a mild rice pilaf and usually affordable at around thirty cents a piece. We went big: all you can eat, the price being figured afterwards by counting the shells and dividing by half.

But the evening was young and I was still hungry. Instead of heading to our original destination - Çiya - we wound up at Tatar Salim Döner kebab, allegedly the best in Kadiköy. Döner kebab is everywhere in Turkey, all of them much, much better than anything you can imagine in your home cities where they serve to soak up drunken binges and wind up painting the asphalt after a night of partying. Most döner are the pre-made gigantic hunk of meat ordered from a central factory for kebab making, but if you search there are still old-fashioned döner masters who layers thin slices of lamb or beef on a skewer in the old traditional method.

Such is Tatar Salim, which only serves the house special döner - either with or without rice, with a fresh, flatbread lavas, salad and French fries. These guys take their spit roasted meat very seriously, and it shows. This was one of the most memorable meat dishes of my life - while Fumie was in rapture over the simple pilaf (made from bardo rice) served underneath it, leaving half of her meat for me to inhale.

We were in Turkey during the hamşi season, which we missed last visit. Hamşi are Black Sea anchovies, and they are everywhere during the cold months. Black Sea cuisine is dependent on these tiny fish for a huge variety of dishes - from hamşi pilaf to hamşi bread to hamşi stews. We had taken the ferry across the water to visit the Beşiktaş market one day and found ourselves right outside the fish market. There was no escaping it.

Hamşi tava - fried anchovies. Simply served with a squirt of lemon and a loaf of fresh bread. Don't worry about the bones - they won't bother you. Black Sea culture is obsessed with hamşi - folk dances mimic the movements of the shoals of fish, and it seems that every third or fourth song is about their favorite fish. If you ever visit Trabzon, Rize, Ordu or Samsun, try to get there for the opening of hamşi season. it is kind of like Cajun Mardi Gras, but with three string kemençe fiddles and more fish.

We were in Beşiktaş just as the local football team was about to play a match, The streets were crowded with hardcore Beşiktaş fans of all ages dressed in the black and white colors of their team, selling scarves and ribbons and getting ready for the evening game by spending the afternoon drinking beer and eating hamsi. Teenage Gypsy bands played Beşiktaş Team anthems on street corners. Fifteen years ago we went to a Beşiktaş game - when Turkish fans are happy, or even when they were not, they liked to shoot live pistol ammunition into the air which went straight up skyward, and then - unfortunately - down atop the hill above the stadium in the trendy Taksim neighborhood. People used to stay indoors and hide after games to avoid falling ammunition.

We didn't witness any such bad behavior, in fact, the crowds were the best behaved footie fans we have ever seen in Europe. But the crowds were growing and we escaped up the hill to the weekly Beşiktaş market. A huge concrete building - somebody's idea of a parking garage yard sale gone wild - was filled with stands offering vegetables, kitchen wares, fish, and dodgy blue jeans.

A woman was selling dried herbs whose smell attracted us from far across the concrete. We bought some Mediterranean wild thyme - kekik - which is somewhere between thyme and oregano, and a bag of dried spearmint - nana. We also got a bottle of nar ekisi - pomegranate molasses. Since getting home we have been making our salads Turkish style with a sprinkling of mint and a squirt of pomegranate, which lends a more sour taste with a bit of sweetness. Of all the things you can take home from Turkey, we always end up with a suitcase full of flavor.

The Rug.

Then Fumie spotted a rug. The Rug. Her eyes filled with textile love the likes of which I had never seen. Not an antique or some collectors item, but a recently made Afghanistan kilim rug for everyday use. Asking about it consisted of spending about fifteen minutes speaking in weak Turkish while fucking up the number system and writing things down on cell phones, and in the process the rug went from about $250 down to $100, which was its actual price because I heard a local woman ask about it and understood their Turkish enough to hear it priced as about $100. And then we walked away. Quandary #1: How were we going to get it home? The last time we bought a rug I hauled it on my back via trains, buses, and ferries overland to Budapest. Quandary #2: We still want it. Quandary #3: Similar Rugs are available at any normal market in Istanbul on any day of the week. They are waiting for us. And we will be back.

Kadiköy seaside at Moda

Outskirting Istanbul Part 1: Bakirkőy

2025-02-11T08:18:00.003-05:00

Şırdan

Let's just state the obvious: I love Istanbul. This blog began as a diary while working for Time Out! travel guidebooks, which allowed us to visit Istanbul several times for longer stays. One of the perks of living in East Europe is easy access to the former Ottoman Empire. Thus I was reading my own old blog posts to remind me just how much Istanbul had changed since 2008. Istanbul has always been a center of cutting edge urban technology balanced by a sense of Rube-Goldbergesque Anatolian "Turknology." The subways are science-fiction slick and there are no longer any donkeys rambling along the streets (that I could see) but you can still get lamb head sandwiches from sidewalk carts. The problem for the budget traveler - and the average Turkish citizen - is that the lamb head sandwiches have become expensive. Turkey experienced a sharp 64% inflationary spiral in 2023 as a result of boneheaded economic policy (Islamic banking, anyone?) and a bout of cryptocurrency fever tinged with nationalism, and things have not improved since then. A peek at my first blog post in 2008 mentions the cost of a pide at about one euro, and a plate of adana kebab for three Euros. Today that pide is about $8 and the kebab plate will be $12. And the average working Turk is making roughly the same low wage.

Here is a not so secret tip: if you travel with Turkish Airlines from countries not neighboring Turkey, Turkish Air offers stopover options including the first night in a hotel free and discount hotel rates for up to a week in an effort to promote tourism. Regardless of the bad press Turkish Air received about being infested with bedbugs - I did not notice any - Turkish Airlines remains one of my favorites. They offered the best rate from Budapest to New York, and they offer a stopover option to visit Istanbul. The airline food is excellent. The legroom makes other airlines seem laughable, and the service on the air is wonderful. It makes you nostalgic for the era of state-owned Airlines. On the other hand, the ticketing procedure - online and on the phone - is very buggy. We had booking problems, but we survived and I would still happily fly with them in the future.

Bakirkőy

The procedure for the stopover is to register by email with Turkish Airlines and they assign you to a four or five star hotel of their choosing. Most of these hotels are outside of the city center, but near public transport. We were put up at the Atakőy Ramada in Bakirkőy, a seaside suburb west of the old city walls. Bakirkőy is where the old Istanbul Airport was located before they moved to Aranvutkőy, an hour north of Istanbul proper, and so it has several high end former airport hotels. (Fun fact: it includes Yesilkőy, was where the Treaty of San Stefano was signed in 1878 ending the Russo-Turkish war.) It is also a bustling neighborhood with universities, shopping centers, market streets crammed with cafes and restaurants, and not a tourist in sight. We liked it enough to book a few extra Turkish Airline discount nights at the Ramada, because of the convenience of the Maramaray railway station a few blocks away, and the the fact that the Ramada offered an amazing Turkish breakfast. (Also: A five star hotel at motel prices!)

Breakfast is for yourself

Turks like breakfast - they tend to go a bit overboard, and we gazed into a treasury of Turkish style salads, breads, jams, and even a huge hanging honeycomb to slice into your yogurt. There is a saying in Turkish: "dinner is time for friends, but breakfast is for yourself." We found a small kebab shop on a side street near our hotel and were treated like the first tourists to have ever entered. A lot of the kebab shops specialize in specific regional styles of Anatolian cuisine. We lucked into one serving Antep food: freshly baked flat bread and lamajun came to the table with some local dry white cheese, and kőfte kebab - ground beef mini burgers from heaven.

Beefier than Shake Shack!

I make no bones about it: I go to Turkey to eat meat. The area around the Kadinlar Pazar ("Girls market", also known as the Siirt market) near the Aqueduct in the Fatih neighborhood is my personal mecca for meat. Fatih is one of the more conservative Muslim districts of Istanbul - when we first visited a lot of our progressive cool friends advised us not to go and they were absolutely wrong. Fatih is Istanbul at its untouristed best - and the food at the Kadinlar pazar is the best of the best. The restaurants that circle the square specialize in cuisine from southeastern Turkey - towns like Siirt, Gaziantep, Diyarbakir, and Mardin and the areas near the Syrian border, especially tandir: pit-roasted lamb called büryan kebab. We arbitrarily chose one place just off of the square: Şırdanci Mehmet.

The pit roasted lamb of my dreams

For ten bucks we got a portion of büryan - a meat so aromatic and addictive that it has come to rival my allegiance to Katz's Deli pastrami - but I also had to try the Chef's special - sırdan. Şırdan, a specialty of the southeast of Turkey, is a stewed lamb's stomach stuffed with a spicy Anatolian rice pilaf. If you like barnyard aromas and chewy meat, it hits the spot. It does, however, look like a giant dick, a point not lost on the host whose Instagram features literally hundreds of bad joke setups in which women jump up in terror at the sight of one of Chef Mehmet's Juicy Johnsons. This aptly represents the present state of comedy in Fatih.

Is that a Kurdish stuffed tripe in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?

Bakirkőy is a convenient stop on the Marmaray metro line, which at one point runs underneath the Bosporus connecting European Istanbul to Asia. Yes, there is the active Anatolian fault which has caused catastrophic earthquakes multiple times in Istanbul's history. Yes, some of the engineers that built the Maramaray have stated that they would not ride it through the Bosporus tunnel. Did this stop me from using it? No. This made getting into central Istanbul from Bakirkőy easy - and we headed to the Kapali Carsi, the great covered bazaar to do a bit of consumption. The bazaar functions both for local folks and tourists as it has for centuries: a massive drain down which to throw all your supplementary cash.

We didn't buy a lot in the main bazaar - a few things from the Afghani antique dealers who have colonized one corner of the bazaar since our first visit in 2000. The young boy fumie photographed back then was now running his own shop, and we got a few gifts for the folks back home. We long ago learned how to avoid Carpet Buying Syndrome - we simply don't engage the friendly rug salesmen in any conversation. The one time we broke that rule back in August 2000... I wound up schlepping a full room sized Turkmen knotted kilim back to Budapest on the train. It still lives on our bedroom floor. (Can you blame me? It was $125. As they say in the rug business: those were the days!)

I also managed to control my musical instrument acquisition syndrome (but... a tulum? You don't have a tulum!). I have a student quality baglama saz I bought twenty years ago, and thanks to YouTube tutorials I can manage a few Anatolian Alevi melodies, but I knew that if I was placed in the middle of one of those shops where a few hundred exquisite instruments hanging from the walls I would walk out a much poorer man. If I need to play something I already have a fiddle.

Need garlic?

After a day in Bakirkőy on the European side we moved ourselves to lodgings across the Bosporus to Kadikőy on the Asian side of Istanbul. Ever since our first visit we stayed in Beyoglu, usually in the area near the Galata Tower, but we wanted to explore some new neighborhoods, and for the food-obsessed, Kadikőy is the spot. Less touristed, Kadikőy is where local Turks go out for a night on the town, drawn by the bars and beer halls that are nonexistent in more conservative nabes up the road like Uskudar. More on that in the next post.

A Taste of New York: Thanksgiving

2025-01-01T15:26:00.001-05:00

Urban New Jersey. Five minutes drive from Manhattan.

Happy New Year, welcome to 2025! I was born when Dwight D. Eisenhower was still President of the USA, so if you had mentioned the year 2025 to my young self I would have conjured a science fiction paradise future. I was expecting a jet pack to help me fly to work, a berth on a space station, ray guns, stuff like that. Like the Jetsons, but better. Instead we got a president who is a convicted rapist and con man who thinks he can buy Greenland. Not what I was expecting. Why not start the year off with a roundup of where we've been in the last few months. We hopped across the pond for a quick reunion with family in fabulous New Jersey for Thanksgiving.

Fumie, Aron, sister Pam in NYC.

Thanksgiving, if you are not born and raised in Turtle Island, is a particularly American holiday patched together from historical misinformation concerning the meeting of English colonists and the Wampanoag Indians in Plymouth Massachusetts in 1609. This year I decided to spare my family the annual diatribe about how the Thanksgiving holiday is essentially a whitewashing of one of the greatest genocides in history and just let everybody enjoy getting together at my sister's spacious house and enjoy my chef brother's annual roast turkey. For most Americans, Thanksgiving is The Secular Holiday - nobody cares what religion you are as long as you spend a week focused on eating turkey... or something... with family and friends.

Brother Ron's heirloom turkey with my mom's Sweet potato and Corn Flakes.

My son and his GF hopped over from London. My Dad was in fine form at 98 years old, still 100 percent there and stubbornly guarding his right to drive his huge black car (at least to Overpeck Creek park where he bird watches for New Jersey's resident bald eagles.) Part of what I love when visiting my Dad is making his dinner dreams come true. My Dad was raised in the 1930s during the Great Depression when food was a luxury, and my grandmother - from Moldavia - always had a pot of corn meal mamaliga on hand.

Jack and Aron, Grandpa and Grandson

Ask my dad what he wants for dinner and chances are his answer is "mamaliga." My mother was born in Hungary, and to her mamaliga, or puliszka as we Magyars have it, was considered a dish of the abject poor, and even more - a symbol of what our despised neighbors ate, so we rarely had it at home while she was alive. My Dad also likes steamed clams. When I was a boy he used to take me to City Island in the Bronx specifically to eat clams, thereby insuring that I wouldn't become annoyingly kosher after my Bar Mitzvah. There is nothing more unkosher than clams, except maybe rabbit. So I got him a mess of steamer clams at the H-Mart Korean Supermarket, whipped up a pot of mamaliga, and we feasted.

Soft Shell steamer clams

With only a couple of weeks to spend in the USA, I couldn't touch base with every delicious thing I wanted from the USA. The word is that pastrami sandwiches at Katz's Deli in NYC have hit the $30 mark, which is actually justifiable considering it is the world's best and in NY you can't really get a mediocre plate of Chinese food for $30. Food prices in the USA are really crazy - they jumped up after covid and there is no likelihood they will drop anytime soon. Not good news for somebody like me who knew how to feast all over the city for less than $10 a meal.

Bob G. with Corned Beef

Still... I called my old buddy Bob Godfried, the man who knows all the secret snack spots of most of New York's lesser known ethnic enclaves. Together we drove fifteen minutes from my Dad's home to Garfield, NJ. There, in a generic strip mall, is the Pastrami Grill Bistro, which serves classic, hand carved home made pastrami, brisket, and corned beef in true NY deli fashion for... half the price. Oddly enough, its a Polish deli run by Dominicans and Yemeni immigrants. Next door is the amazing Bratek's Deli, the best Polish supermarket I have even seen outside of Poland. Actually, Brateks is more Polish than anything I ever saw in Poland. The ready to eat foods laid out on steam tables is like an ethnological exhibit of Lechitic delicacies, and the bakery section features unique giant folksy loaves of every kind of regional Polish bread, things you would never see all together in one place in modern Poland.

A Pastrami Sandwich as she should be.

Bob is known in NY as the man who fixes and tunes oddball accordions - the button boxes of the Dominican meringue scene, the harmoniums of the Indian emigrants, you name it he's tune it, repaired it, and probably plays it. When you see some incredible ethnic folk music on stage at a folk festival in the New York area, chances are Bob fixed their instruments. And ate their food. And got them the gig.

Let's be honest: New York is where the best Klezmer musicians in the world live, so anytime I visit I try to catch some performances. Pete Rushevksy of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance has been running a series of small acoustic Klezmer performances at the Old Broadway Synagogue, one of the last remaining old-world style shuls still functioning in Manhattan. Pete was joined by Lisa Gutkin of the Klezmatics on fiddle and Lauren Brody on accordion. Lauren was fundamental in the revival of traditional klezmer when she was a member of the seminal band Kapelye, and has since focused on historical recordings of Bulgarian music - order her CD reissues for hours of great listening!

Frank London and Tina Kindermann at home in NY

Most folks know Frank London for his prolific work with the Klezmatics - now celebrating their 40th anniversary as a band - but Frank and I go way back to our hippie days in Alston Massachusetts... again, we were born when Eisenhower was President. Do the math. A shared appreciation of Balkan and Jewish music along with Count Ossie's Mystic Revelation of Rastafari have bound us ever since.

Frank spent a lot of last year out with health issues. He's on the mend now, and to prove it he took us on a walking tour of hidden pocket parks and community gardens on the Lower East Side. these were different than the community gardens we have in Budapest - for one thing, we don't have a large population of Puerto Ricans in Budapest. Many of these local gardens serve as meeting places for the long establish PR community of the Lower East Side (aka "Loisada") and are set up with shaded rincons, gazebos, grills and park benches to provide a space for community get togethers.

Frank also took us to Carnitas Ramirez, which he claimed was the best taco in New York City. Picture two representatives of Yiddish vernacular culture entering a place that serves ONLY pork products and consider the theological implications. It was delicious. They have a map of a pig on the wall and you can point to different parts of the pig and they have it already stewed and grilled and ready to consume in taco form. God, apparently, thinks nothing at all of us nibbling on hog tripe and jowl tacos with crunchy chicharone crackling on top. Klezmer musicians get a special dispensation from God in Mexican taco joints.

I will admit that it was, in fact, the best taco I ever ate. New York came late to the authentic Mexican food party - Californians and westerners have had access to authentic tacos for decades, but the Mexican presence in the New York area only dates back about twenty or thirty years, so we are still in discovery mode. And the place to search is mainly in Queens, but I have had some fine tacos in the Bronx and in Yonkers. One thing I did get while I was traipsing about the city was breakfast at a diner, which in New York can also mean blintzes!

Blintzes stuffed with sweet cheese or blueberry.

Think of them as Jewish tacos! They seem to have grown smaller and neater than I remember them , but still good. While I was visiting I got together with some of my oldest circle of friends, Mike Porcelan and Chris March, who were the backbone of the band Chops McCoy And Something Good back when we were in high school (special mention to the late Jimmy Carter, who was president when I graduated High School.)

Chris March, moi, Mike Porcelan

Chris and Mike were the musicians I aspired to be like when I first dared to stand in front of an audience with a guitar and embarrass myself. I soon learned that it was difficult to embarrass oneself by playing a guitar, so I gradually moved up to things like mandolin, fiddle, kobza, and Macedonian bagpipes to reach maximum audience reaction. These were some of my best friends at a time in life when I needed friends - they shaped a lot of my life and outlook. I'm so happy I can still enjoy their company.

So that's the brief take on three weeks of New York and New Jersey. On the return trip home to Budapest we flew Turkish Airlines, which offered us a stopover in Istanbul. More on that soon!

Sztrapacska: The Carb that Counts

2024-10-31T07:45:00.002-04:00

Roma Étkezde, Buda: Beef pőrkőlt with sztrapacska

This autumn my lovely wife has been updating the new edition of her Japanese language guidebook to Budapest. That meant that she had to review and photograph restaurants and needed me to come along and order photogenic classic Magyar meals for her pixel collection. I'm not going to complain too much, but I did spend the last two years studiously avoiding carbohydrates in an effort to lose weight. It is still a process, but I did lose the equivalent of a small Balkan teenager hanging around my midsection - merely by not eating anything that I wanted to eat. And not eating out in restaurants. Except when I am traveling. Locally: I eat at home. We rarely go out unless friends visit. So Imagine my joy at going to the Roma Étkezde in Buda and the Pozsonyi Kisvendéglő and ordering sztrapacska!

Pozsonyi Kisvendéglő sztrapacska

Sztrapacska, as we call it in Hungary, is the crown jewel of Carpathian carbohydrates. Essentially it is gnocchi, but in a smaller, cheesier, and more peasanty guise, plus you scatter fried bacon bits on top to scare away all the Jews. As halusky it is the national dish of highland Slovakia, on the menus of nearly every eatery in that country. Like gnocchi, it is made from flour, mashed potato, and egg. It resembles the more familiar Hungarian galuska dumpling, but despite the similar sounding name, galuska (nokedli, spaetzle) are made without potato, and the are formed by dropping the soupy flour batter through the holes of a special galuska grater into hot water. Sztrapacska come from a thicker dough which is spread onto a wooden cutting board and slices in chunks into the water with a wooden knife. The term itself comes from the Ruthenian verb "strap" - to cut, and Hungarians learned it from migrant peasants from eastern Slovakia who were mostly speakers of Ruthene. However, if you order sztrapachky in Slovakia you get a plate of halushky with sour kraut instead of cheese (which kind of ruined my day once when I ordered expecting my usual cheese and crispy pig bits.) At the Roma Food bar in Buda they served it strapacska with beef pőrkőlt, possibly the best Hungarian combo meal of the year. Hungarians can get very strict about their carb pairing. Galuska are served with pork stew or chicken paprikas. Beef is served with tárhonya (egg barley pasta.) Tripe is served with boiled potato. No substitutions. Serving sztrapacska with beef stew counts as revolutionary nouveau cuisine in Hungary.

I am often heard to complain that it has become harder to find decent Hungarian food in Budapest. The Káhli Vendeglő in Óbuda is an exception. Óbuda once had dozens of beautiful old fashioned garden bars and restaurants that filled up at night with drinkers and diners and Schwab German accordion players. Then, around 1970, our dear dead commie leader János Kádár decided that Óbuda should look like East Berlin so he tore everything down, built monstrous gigantic cement apartment blocks inspired by East Germany, and left a few blocks untouched as a kind of folklore museum. The Kéhli is on one of these (the other is around Fő ter north of the Árpád bridge.) perhaps the Kéhli is the only one left that hasn't undergone a retro refit. Its the kind of place that flies under the tourist radar. A classier older Budapest crowd go there knowing that the specials will not have changed, there will be no avocado salad, and no tuna carpaccio. There will be The Classics, among which you should not miss the velő csont: bone marrow served with toast. Bone marrow is fat. Fat tastes good and makes cardiologists upset: win-win!

Meat

One dish that that used to be on every menu but has become rare is hagymas rostélyos, or "onion steak". Over the years it seems that most cooks never learned how to fry onions until crispy, and the quality of Hungarian beef, once famous, did a death dive in the 1990s after the communist system of collective farms broke up. Beef cattle need large ranch operations, and when the TSz collective farms reverted to small privately owned family farms, cattle were raised for dairy with dairy cow meat becoming a by-product. Most beef in Hungary gets stewed into goulash anyway, but Hungary was once famous for the high quality of its steak. That is just a memory now, although some producers are cashing in on a new craze for quality beef. The Kéhli steak, however... was nothing to write home about, but it was a wonderful, if somewhat tough and dry, bite of the past.

Trabant: a hallucination of the past

We will be on the road during November, visiting the USA for thanksgiving and stopping over in Istanbul on the return trip. Speaking of which, we have found that the quality of beef in the USA seems to .. how do I find the right word... um... SUCK. Compared even to Hungarian supermarket beef, the American beef you get at regular shops is wan and tasteless. I used to look forward to going to the States to eat real beef, but unless you are willing to shell out for a pricey steakhouse, the quality of beef that you get is hardly worth the price. The chicken is not much better, but you can still get good stuff in Hispanic neighborhoods especially if they have a local vivero that slaughters chickens on the spot when you buy them. It will be a shorter trip than previous journeys. Apart from some Hong Kong style meals I can't justify breaking my diet for White Castle Hamburgers, Italian subs, or pizza in the Bronx. I don't need more Balkan teenagers hanging around my waistline.

August: Lecsó Season

2024-08-25T07:48:00.002-04:00

In Hungarian the late summer news cycle is called the "uborkaszezon." Cucumber season. There is not much to report except that the cucumbers are ripening. That might be selling the month of August short. It is also lecsó season. Lecsó is Hungary's sole, lonely candidate for the category of "light summer food." If the usual Hungarian diet of braised pork in sour cabbage topped with sour cream with flour dumplings seems a bit heavy for days when the temperature climbs above bearable, lecsó is your go to dish.

Lecsó

Lecsó is a quick sautéed stew of onions, peppers, paprika, and tomatoes served with whatever protein you may have at hand - usually sliced kolbász, scrambled eggs, hot dogs, or bits of meat. Before the days of refrigeration - which for a lot of Hungarians lasted well into the 1970s - families would take advantage of the late summer to cook up massive pots of lecsó to preserve in jars for the winter, a season when the only vegetables to be found were slowly desiccating carrots and dodgy heads of cabbage stored in the root cellar. Now that people shop in supermarkets instead of outdoor markets, basic veg can be had all year round, so no need to pack the pantry with lecsó.

Hunyadi ter market

Lecsó has actually become less common on Hungarian tables, for many reasons. For one thing, during most of the year peppers and tomatoes are just too expensive to buy in the amount needed. Lecsó isn't something you are likely to find on restaurant menus often. Lecsó is the taste of home, and the minor variations are set by your Mom, and all others are counterfeit. My Mom made hers with kolbasz, but since we lived in the USA , she subbed in Polish kielbasa. My Aunt in Budapest was a purveyor of scrambled egg lecsó. The other reason for the decline in lecsó is the simple fact that Hungarian cooking has changed so much in the last 40 years that most people today have simply not grown up eating it. I read an interview with the owners of a new Hungarian restaurant last week in which they complained that they couldn't find any young chefs familiar with Hungarian cuisine. Most people today have been raised on pizza, sandwiches, instant noodles, and a few Magyar standards that Mom could reheat in a microwave. Their familiarity with Hungarian classics comes mainly from memories of school lunches.

Bulgarian Gardeners in Hungary

Nor is lecsó some ancient traditional Magyar food. Hungarians tend to forget that the tomato and pepper - and by extension, paprika - didn't exist in medieval Europe. Paprika itself was not widely used in Hungary before 1850. The large scale farming of peppers and tomatoes (as well as eggplant, kohlrabi, and most other vegetables common to the Hungarian table) began with Bulgarian gardeners, who began arriving in the 1870s. They rented garden plots within carting distance of towns and cities and practiced intensive gardening using a system of irrigation ditches, green houses, and hot beds, supplying urban markets with produce that had rarely been available out of season. The Bulgarians settled in the outer districts of Budapest - when I first moved to Zuglo there were still a couple of Bulgarian farm plots operating. To this day, Bulgarian-Hungarians maintain a presence in the market business. When Fumie and I came back from a month spent in Bulgaria once we found we could chat in Bulgarian with some of the market people in the Bosnyak ter market that we had been shopping with for years. If you go to the touristy Vamház tér market the entire north side of the market - the fancy gourmet paprika souvenir row - is dominated by Bulgarian-Hungarian families. If pressed, I suppose we could consider them an example of a successful migrant community...

Lecsó is essentially the Hungarian version of a Balkan guvetch, which is itself a part of the continuum of Turkish cuisine that defines the southeast of Europe. In Romania or Bulgaria it usually includes eggplant, which in Hungary is almost always considered a Transylvanian identity food. I like mine a bit spicy - we have a wide array of peppers to choose from so I mix in some small hot yellow peppers with the others and pray that Fumie can eat it.

A Yurt. Yes, a Yurt.

Actually, Hungarians eat relatively few foods that have ancient origins, a fact that huge swaths of Hungarians would debate me on, (my answer to them is "Who cares?"). We went up to the Buda Castle this last week for the Mesterségek Ünnepe (Handcraft Festival) which is part of the celebrations for Hungarian National celebration of August 20, which is, depending on your point of view, Saint Stephen's Day, New Bread Day, Constitution Day (not so much anymore, depending on the Government's mood) And What better way to celebrate the founder of Christianity in Hungary than with... a central Asian yurt in honor of our pagan ancestors who thought Stephen was out of his gourd to kowtow in allegiance to the Pope in Rome.

In the city park the Two Tailed Dog Party was celebrating its strong showing in recent local elections. The Two Tailed Dogs were originally an art project satirizing the absurdities of Hungarian politics, but over the years they have become one of the few representatives of a large portion of fed up, sane Magyars. They once sent a guy in a chicken costume to a televised political debate. I voted for them. They now control the fancy 12th district in Buda.

And to cap off the evening, fireworks! 14 Billion forints worth of them. This was kind of interesting because the weather report predicted a thunderstorm for the night of August 20th, and as 9 PM approached, the wind picked up and lightning started. In 2009 a similar storm in the middle of the Fireworks show caused a mass stampede of spectators and flooding of the streets and subways. FIDESZ, then campaigning, used the bad emergency response to blame the Socialists and coast to their 2010 election win. And this year - oh, the irony - they were sitting on 14 billion forints of misplaced prestige spending and waiting for the weatherman to give them an OK. It was like sending a teenage girl into a mall with her daddy's platinum credit card... in the end, they postponed the Grand Explosion of Cash for an hour and then we had some of the best views just by looking out of our living room window.

Zoe Aqua: The Romanian Synagogue Concert Tour

2024-07-09T06:53:00.007-04:00

The Vizhnizer Kloys Synagogue, Sighet.

We return to Romania every summer. We just can't get it out of our system. Like salmon swimming upstream to reach their home waters, we take the train every summer to Transylvania. In theory it is a simple train trip. But it is never easy. Often the trains are re-routed or, like this year, the border is closed because Romania has entered the Schengen zone. Schengen, you may say, "That's great! No more border checks!" Not quite: the main rail crossing at Episcopeia Bihor was deemed "not ready for Schengen" so the train had to be diverted to Valea de East Bumfuck. But we got there. Satu Mare here we come!

The Synagogue of Satu Mare. Not the Big One.

Satu Mare abuts the Hungarian border, and for most people it is known mainly as the original home base of the Satmars - one of the largest and most insular of the fundamentalist Hasidic sects ever to emerge from the extremist Hungarian Hasidic movement. But since the Holocaust the Satmars now mostly live in Brooklyn and Antwerp. Today there are less than 100 Jews left in Satu Mare, and Klezmer violinist Zoe Aqua - with her local band and her collaborator, British violinist Anna Lowenstein - was going to give a concert at the last remaining Synagogue in Satu Mare.

Zoe and Anna in the Satu Mare Synagogue

Zoe Aqua is well known in Klezmer circles as one of the young generation of violinists diving deep into tradition in an effort to inject some much needed life into Klezmer music. Most East European folk traditions have survived into the 21st century, while the folk traditions of east European Jews were abruptly cut short by the Holocaust. Jewish survivors left for Israel or the America where - like the Satmar Hasidim - they worked to rebuild the intellectual and religious atmosphere that had been destroyed. They did not put a lot of effort into maintaining folk music traditions so that their assimilated hippie grandchildren could wake up in the 1980s and say "I'm bored of playing bluegrass banjo. I want to play Jewish music!" What we know today as "Klezmer" music was revived by a hard core of Jewish musicians who had to learn pretty much from scratch from the last alter kakkers living in Brooklyn and from scratchy gramophone 78 RPM records gleaned from Coney Island antique shops and archival sources like YIVO.

Zoe with Maramures fiddler Dumitru Covaci

That first generation of Klezmer revivalists have now ourselves become The Old Guys and it is time to pass the baton to a younger generation, one that is not covered by Medicare and can still get out of folding chairs easily. One of those young virtuosi is Zoe Aqua. Originally from Denver, Zoe was already an accomplished violinist and music teacher when she began to play Klezmer, and soon moved onto neighboring styles of music such as Transylvanian fiddle. When I first heard Zoe she was technically perfect - as a violinist - but she lacked that certain "oomph" that you get from hard core Transylvanian and Romanian fiddlers. The lead fiddler in east Europe is called a "primás". In east European string bands there is a strict hierarchy - the primás is the leader, and the accompanying second fiddles, violas and basses follow the primás. There simply ain't no democratic discussion of roles in a Gypsy band. It helps that most trad bands in Transylvania are family based - you can't complain about the leader when your sister is married to him. (And 99% of the time, it is a him.)

Zoe spent two years living in Transylvania studying traditional violin styles. During that time she visited dozens of traditional musicians in villages far off the main roads, and learned the etiquette for working with Romani families in rural areas: you bring gifts for the wife, chocolate for the kids, and you make sure to pay the fiddler for his time. She also got good enough to be accepted among the discerning and very male in-crowd of Hungarian fiddlers who pay for the dance houses in Cluj.

Zoe kidnapped in Oaș

Zoe's newish CD "In Vald Arayn" brings those two traditions, Klezmer and Transylvanian - together in compositions of her own that have the unique feel of traditional music, driven by a seasoned primás accompanied by a band of experienced Hungarian tancház musicians. This year Zoe crowdsourced funding for a project to bring those pieces to their original audiences by doing concerts in some of the remaining synagogues in Northern Romania. Me and Fumie had the pleasure of joining her for the final leg of the tour, which as always meant dropping in to visit old fiddling friends in the mountains of Maramures and the Oas region. After Satu Mare it was on to a concert at the synagogue in Sighetul Marmaței, otherwise known as Sighet, once a vibrant seat of Carpathian Jewish life and the home of Elie Wiesel. More on that in the next post - as well as amazing Romanian donuts!

Waiting for the Kádár Rebirth

2024-06-16T12:24:00.000-04:00

Solet: The Jewish bean stew that launched and empire

So the news is that the Kádár Ékezde, the tiny traditional Hungarian lunch place that has been serving honest, real Hungarian food, is set to reopen soon. The buyer is Gerendai Károly, founder of the Sziget Festival, who also runs a string of successful restaurants such as the Michelin starred Costes. But according to press reports, they are going to keep the Kádár's atmosphere and menu much the same. The only difference is that the place will not shut after lunch, and they probably will not replicate the arcane payment ritual of reciting what you ate at the door (slices of bread and self serve glasses of seltzer included) and tipping your waitress personally by slipping money in her apron.

Raspberry soda and beet salad with horseradish at Kádár

The Kádár closed in April 2020 at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns. The owners were getting old and and the Kádár was not the kind of place that was going to flourish using Doordash deliveries. Usually this spells the end of small family run lunch spots we know as "étkezde"... although the famed Roma Étkezde in Buda Roma Étkezde in Buda did fly from the ashes after covid, which may have given the new owners the inspiration to revive the Kádár. As a resident of the neighborhood, though, I am only hoping that Kádár will not become yet another victim of the mass tourism that blights the 7th district. Its a tiny space, and it was always a refuge for neighborhood regulars. Keeping it open late might take some of the pressure off, but it will never have the table space for a stag party of a dozen drunk Brits. Hopefully, the new place will not serve beer. Its a sad truth, but it is increasingly hard to find good Hungarian food in Budapest. The traditional dishes - gulyás soup, pork stew with dumplings, stuffed cabbage - have pretty well disappeared in a sea of pizza places, trendy burger joints (serving weird ground meat things that have little relation to anything this Bronx nationalist would call a "burger") A few months ago a friend of mine from Romania called asking if I could suggest something near the Opera House that served simple pork cutlets - schnitzel. It took me an hour to find a local spot. The true horror of eating in Budapest, however, is the satanic abomination known as "Street Food".

Lángos: As God intended, plain with garlic water and salt

"Street Food" is, at best, an Insta Influencer marketing term gleefully and parasitically adopted by locals eager to milk ignorant tourists for everything they can. Let's be frank here: Hungary doesn't have a street food culture. People do not eat on the street, and traditionally food was not sold on the street for this purpose., unless , of course, you wanted to eat a live unplucked goose or chicken while sitting on the kerb. People often eat outside... but sitting down. Some often have a piece of pastry after lunch at a cafe and consider it a meal. Two slices of strudel can sub for lunch. You could walk into almost any butcher shop and eat hot sausages and pork ribs from a hot table near the counter. You could buy a lángos - fried potato dough bread - at a stand at any open market. You could eat an ice cream on the street while walking, but that was about it.

Garay tér market

But if the herds of mass tourism want street food, then street food they shall have. Walk around the 7th district and half the store fronts shout "Street Food!" at the punters. there are kolbász in a pita bread cone. There are endless interpretations of "burger" for the hungry twentysomethings. And for a taste of hungary... lángos. And burgers! Lángos burgers! A chunk of ground mystery meat sandwiched between two thick, fat, greasy potato pancakes. Hey - your cardiologist has to pay for that Tahitian vacation somehow, right?

Satan's favorite burger

A normal lángos is a simple piece of fried dough, known to any resident of an American Indian reservation as "frybread." It is usually eaten with a sprinkle of salt, and a good lángos stand has a jar of garlic chopped in water to brush onto the hot dough. Or you could have it slathered in apricot jam, in which case it became a heavenly ideal of a donut. to sum up: Salt. Garlic. Or apricot. Full stop. Anything else is heresy against all that is good and holy!

Play it safe: make your own!

Since the end of communism, however, lángos started to get creative: sour cream and cheese appeared as toppings, and a jizz of cloyingly sweet Hungarian Globus ketchup turned it into something of a "Hungarian Pizza." Ham and salami started showing up as toppings, and now the poor lángos has become a baroque satire of the simple peasant market snack it once was.

Downtown Budapest: USD $10-17 for a piece of fried dough

While a normal plain lángos at an open market runs about Forint 600 these days (about $1.75) the price goes up exponentially as it comes in proximity to the tourist crowds. Also: Greek salad on a platform of fried dough? Chicken paprikás? Just how many extra clean shirts did you bring? Tofu stew... appears only in the biblical story of Job when the devil tries to tempt sinless vegans. The worst offender is the lángos stand at the Vámház Ter market, which is actually a great market for buying meat but doubles as a tourist trap. The lángos stand on the upper level offers a lángos topped with banana and brown sugar for Ft 4800. That's like buying a twenty dollar Dunkin Donut.

The Petro Butcher Shop- Szell Kalman ter.

You want a taste of Hungarian street food? You can do what Hungarians do. Either sit down at an étkezde - like the Kádár - and ask the waitress to bring you a plate of classic beef pőrkőlt or strapacska and eat it at your table like a civilized person, or go to a butcher shop and stand up at one of the counters and enjoy a kolbász or a chunk of smoked pork.

Lunch chez Petro

But if you do insist on ordering an overpriced lángos covered in liquid paprika stew, remember to bring an extra clean shirt. You'll thank me.

Istanbul 2024: Back for Buryan!

2024-05-13T09:43:00.000-04:00

Scroll back to the first entries of this blog and you find that it was begun as a diary of a trip to Istanbul we made in 2006. Fumie had a job as photographer for the time Out! Travel guidebook to Istanbul, and we spent about two months in the city. It was enough time to get to know the cultural rhythms of the place and pick up a smattering of Turkish language. We traveled to Istanbul a lot in that decade - it was affordable and just a cheap bus ride away from our usual Balkan summer jaunts. and the food was immeasurably better. Its worth checking out those early posts - I looked a lot less like Grandpa Simpson in those days.

Surrounded by attractive people at Çiya Lokantaşı.

It has been over ten years since we were last there, so when Fumie took Turkish Airlines to fly home to Tokyo, she opted for a return stopover in Istanbul, we jumped at the chance to return. My son Aron, who lives in London, joined us. We were only there for four days - not enough. But better than nothing.

Rustem Pasa Mosque

I set myself a few guarded parameters. I was not going to buy a carpet. I was not going to buy a new bağlama saz, any or Pontic bagpipes, or kemençes, not even a tiny three stringed uçtelli saz that can easily fit in hand luggage. I was not going to do any of the things that I did two decades ago when I returned home to Budapest with a small orchestra strapped to my back and a huge Turkmen rug wrapped in the worlds largest plastic shopping bag. I was, however, going to eat as much Turkish food as possible.

Karalahana: Black Sea stuffed collard greens

We were there for the last two days of Ramadan. Many Turks don't have a problem eating during Ramadan, but eating pit roasted lamb in the Kadinlar Pazar (aka, the Siirt Market) in the strongly conservative Muslim Fatih district would have to wait. We ate at at this market for iftar - the nightly feast after a day of Ramadan fasting - back in 2010. Most tourists avoid Fatih, and "cool" people from the trendy neighborhoods would warn us against going there. They were wrong. Sure: you can't buy beer in the neighborhood, but you will find, hard core Anatolian hospitality rules in effect here. You can drink tea.

Kadinlar Pazar: The Baby in the Watermelon Haunts my Nightmares

For the time being, we took the ferry to Kadikoy on the Asian side. Çiya is a restaurant founded by a Turkish chef turned ethnographer which presents dishes collected as folklore through different areas of Turkey. I ate there twenty years ago and have gone back ever since - it rates as one of the world's best restaurants, with absolutely amazing food at normal prices. Over the years Çiya has featured in Anthony Bourdain's show, a Netflix series, and gets written up in all the tourist brochures, but it still keeps high standards and low prices. We had a salad plate of regional specialties, and then some meatballs made with fresh almond fruit, and I - ever adventurous - went for a plate of good old beans.

Çiya salad plate.

We stayed in our old neighborhood of Beyoğlu near the Galata Tower, but the area has since become a victim of over tourism: crowded streets, expensive restaurants pushing out the old neighborhood local kebab shops. Restaurant prices were a bit of a shock: Turkey has had a bad economic year and between inflation and currency devaluation food was up around 130% over last year. Working Istanbullus traditionally eat out during the day and their sticker shock was leading to a lot of small local restaurant shutting down. In the future I would definitely consider staying on the Asian side of Istanbul. Quieter, Cheaper, And some of the best classic Turkish food in town.

Fatih, Kadinlar Pazar

Once Ramadan ended, it was time for Seker Bayram, more widely known as Eid al-Fitr. Celebrating the end of Ramadan, people feast on sweets and for the three day holiday crowds of families go visiting and the guidebooks told us to expect crowds in public transport. They weren't kidding. Everybody was out and gulping baklava and halva from dawn to dusk. We finally made it to Fatih to visit the Kadinlar Pazar, which is a market serving the needs of the southeatern Anatolian internal emmigrants in Istanbul, ringed with restaurants serving the specialties of Siirt, Bitlis, and Mardin: buryan kebab - whole lambs roasted for hours in a pit oven, served simply on Anatolian flat bread and an esme pepper salad. There are few foods I love as much as buryan lamb. Popeye's fried chicken. Sarajevo Cevapcici. Cantonese rice rolls. Maybe Shake Shack burgers. But Buryan wins. I'm already planning to go back.

With only a few days to stay in Istanbul, and city traffic nearly unpassable due to the seething sugar-crazed crowds, I did miss out on seeing any live music. I did encounter some of the most classic Istanbul sounds on record, though. 78 rpm records, in fact. I passed by an antique record shop in Kadikoy and noticed some gramophone discs in the window, walked in, and immediately rediscovered my long gone fluency in Turkish. "Do you have any old Ottoman records? Greek or Armenian music?" and the shop owner sits me down and starts pulling out carefully preserved 100 year old discs, properly stored and protected in new paper sleeves, including classical Turkish recordings by Tamburi Cemil Bey.

Cemil Bey was an Armenian Istanbullu who mainly recorded playing the classical Turkish kemençe, a small three string fiddle played on the knee. In the 19th century, a majority of the musicians playing Turkish classical music were non-Muslims: local Greeks, western Armenians, Jews, and Gypsies. Playing non religious music as a profession was not considered suitable employment for a good Muslim. By the middle of the 19th century this sound had become the contemporary Urban Pop sound of the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean, which is why so many of the melodies and musical practices of Turkish fasil (light classical) have entered into the repertoires and playing styles of modern Greek Rebetika, Jewish Klezmer, and Armenian halay music. Tamburi Cemil Bey's versions of makam melodies have gone down as the defining versions. His Nikriz longa is still played across the post-Ottoman world.

Modern musicians still adapt Cemil Bey's work. Salih Korkut Peker from Izmir plays a modified electric cumbuş - an oud neck stuck to a banjo body, and changed the rhythm to reggae. This version was my particular ear worm for this year.

No, I didn't buy any of the old records. I am very careful to know my vices, and collecting 78s is not going to become one of them. I know 78 collectors. They are very odd people, often well beyond obsessed, and most of this music can be found on reissues. But that won't stop me from rooting around old record shops. We are already planning to go back in the future. Maybe I'll get one of those Black Sea bagpipes yet.

2024: The State of the Blog Address

2024-03-29T11:39:00.009-04:00

Who even reads blogs anymore? Ok, you do, obviously, but the Golden Age of blogging joined the fate of the Wooly Mammoths over a decade ago with the ascendancy of Tumblr, Facebook, Insta, TikTok, and Twitter (now known as Elon's Edsel.) Users of social media no longer consume prose. They like captions, blurbs, viral visuals. Its a trend that I discovered back when working as a print journalist. Publishers began demanding blurbs, not feature articles. More photos, less words. Small local newspapers fell like flies. Finally, Capitalist God declared a pox on all their houses, and print media - along with its modest paychecks - went the way of the ocelot (i.e: its still there but you can't see it.)

Gone but not forgotten

I began blogging back in 2004 after reading a NewYorker article while flying from NY to Budapest. Thought I'd give it a try. It was an easy way to keep in touch with friends and share photos and stories of our first trips to Istanbul, where Fumie was working as a photographer for Time Out travel guides, (a great travel series that was eventually replaced by an ingominous "app".) And then I kept it up. The end result is that I have a non-comprehensive diary of various crap that I engaged in for the last twenty years. I have visual documentation of nearly every pastrami sandwich I have eaten in the last two decades.

I used to write for and edit the culture section of Budapest Week - Hungary's first privately run English language weekely newspaper begun in 1991. The saga of BP Week remains to be written, perhaps someday when all the bodies are finally buried, but suffice to say I enjoyed being read by a few thousands of folks weekly - folks I would often meet later at then flourishing Budapest alternative bars like Tilos Az A, the Raczkert, Picasso Point, and the unforgettable bar "A Széklet" ('the stool sample.') There was evidence that real flesh and blood people read the stuff that I - under numerous assumed names and aliases - wrote.

This was often pleasant, and when it wasn't, it didn't matter because by then I was drunk and belligerent. But I really liked knowing who was reading me. It felt like real communication. Later I wrote for email newslists, magazines, travel guides, even a series of educational readers for American teens. Blogging was like my personal writing excercise space. But in the glory days I could clock in over a thousand readers a day. Nowadays, readership rarely hits double figures.

Perhaps my masterpiece

Budapest Week folded due to gross mismanagement and fraud, and subsequent attempts to revive it failed due to gross incompetance but mainly fraud. Most of the publishing industry in Hungary fails due to corruption and fraud. Heck, we can extend this to explain the failure of business in Hungary in general - note that Hungary has recently slipped behind Romania in the lower rungs of economic vitality in the European Union. Does this sound like a swan song to blogging? A dear John letter to blogspot? Naaaah... not happening. I am way too narcissistic to shut up entirely. I simply do not update the blog every three days like I once did. I'm older and time moves more slowly. My advancing dotage no longer merits the kind of adventure that I once spent so much time pursuing. (To quote the song: "Its getting to the point where I'm no fun anymore. And I am sorry.")

My idea of fun

And I don't care to write much or comment much on the contemporary Hungarian society I live in. If you read the news you can find a lot about our Prime Minister and his policies. You don't need me for that. Every time I read the NY times or the Guardian and they call Orban a fascist I want to rush to the keyboard and spew out an eloquent rebuttal: He's not a fascist! He's just a common garden variety capital-A asshole! His henchmen are a bunch of high school bullies and lickspittles and corrupt wheeler dealers, but they don't have the competence to rate the label of "fascist." It deflates the power behind the term "fascism." Heck, he barely holds a candle to Trump! The young Viktor Orban initially hoped to become a professional football player in Hungary. He was rejected because he was too short, so he got into the ELTE Law School instead. Orban doesn't model his style of government on Mussolini or the Nazis. He models it on FIFA, the international body governing professional football (soccer to us yanks) which is known for deep pocket corruption, quisling politics, and a relationship to its players that evokes high stakes serfdom. If you want to know how Hungary is governed, look at the worst aspects of international football. Viktor Orban may have graduated from the ELTE Law school, but he spent at least an hour a day playing soccer in the Law school dormitory backyard, and believe me, he does not like to lose. I know. I was the resident English teacher at the dorm (albeit a year after Orban had graduated, but he still showed up for games.)

One of my lesser known works

But I digress.

People ask why I remain in Budapest. My answer is that much of what originally drew me here is still here. I arrived at the end of communism, so I am used to living under a deeply cynical incompetant government that has no program except the maintanance of its power. The extreme polarization that characterizes Hungarian politics and social life is not of my making. I only live in it, but I am not of it. What really kept me here were my friends, mostly folk musicians, and the traditional music that consumed their lives. Although that music is mostly found in Transylvania, across the border in Romania, I have lived most of my adult life in Budapest and this is the city I call home. I like the food, although I no longer enjoy it as I once did (I lost a lot of weight this year by avoiding carbs, and that includes bakeries.) I can finally ride the metro for free! I can get Serbian radio on AM. And I do not watch Hungarian TV, for the same reason I do not watch professional wrestling. I can live my life without Kayfabe. I like the real thing, and I know where I can find it.

Ioan "Nuku" Harleț. Budești, Romania. It don't get realer.

This said, I can happily get on a plane next week and fly off to Istanbul, the city where this blog began 18 years ago. My son is coming to meet us there and I can't wait to take him around to places where the public bathroom may well have been built in Byzantine times, where the lowliest kebab shop is better than the best food in London, and where the best roast lamb on the face of the planet can be found (the Kadinlar Pazar in Fatih!) So expect a bit more from the blog in the weeks ahead.

Vienna: The Klezmer Project at the Viennale Film Festival!

2023-11-14T11:06:00.006-05:00

Fumie, Leandro, and Paloma

Some years ago I was approached by a young couple from Argentina at the Krakow Klezmer festival. Paloma Schachtmann and Leandro Koch were making a documentary about Klezmer music and they wanted to accompany me and Jake Shulman-Ment on one of our summer trips around Maramures to record fiddlers who retained a knowledge of Jewish repetoire. I don't always like traveling with a cohort of folks I do not already know, but they turned out to be fine traveling companions. I didn't hear about the project for a couple of years and then in 2020 they contacted me again. They had recieved funding to finish the film with a group of Austrian film makers and could we go on the road with a full film crew again? Covid intervened, but the next year we went to Tranylvania with them. They turned out to be some of the nicest film folks I ever met. (Note: I rarely say anything nice about film makers once they finish paying me.) The result was "The Klezmer Project" or "Adentro mio estoy Bailando" which premiered at the 2023 Berlin Fim Festival, winning the Best First Feature award. The Austrian premier happened a few weeks ago at the Viennale Film Festival in Vienna, and we were invited to attend.

The film is like nothing I had expected - not a simple documentary about collecting folk music, but an experimental fim that works on many levels - a romance, a road film, a I.B. Singer Yiddish allegory, and of course, a documentary. The narration in Yiddish tells a tale that transcends the scenes of film financing, backstage at gigs, and weddings in Maramures, Moldavia, and Argentina. The end result is something I am really proud to have been a part of, and when this film finally gets to widespread distribution I hope it gets seen at festivals of Yiddish culture: it is probably the most contemporary Yiddish film of this generation. In any case... the Viennale was a great excuse to visit Vienna. We got to stay in the Hotel Intercontinental downtown next to the Stadtspark. Not shabby at all!

Plus, the Viennale staff handled everybody with VIP courtesy, no eay task when the VIPs are hundreds of quirky avant-garde types whose stories always begin with "When I was kicked out of film school...". We checked in with the office and were given swag bags with info and gifties and shown a refrigerator full of refreshments to which we could help ourselves while in the hotel. I like swag bags! I like free beer! Plus: the Viennale hosted a dinner each evening at classic Viennese restaurants of the sort that I would probably never visit on my own dime (I'm more of a felaful and chinese noodle kind of guy on the road.) Of course, if traveling in Vienna, there are certain prosaic pleasures that are not to be missed: such is the Wurtelstand.

Wurstelstands are located all over Vienna and offer the street level diner a quick and cheap Teuronic standard, the wurst. For about three Euros you get a choice of bratwurst, boerwurst, frankfurter, or the odd construct that is a bosna. Everybody says to go for the käsekrainer, a kolbasz laced with cheese that is the darling of the Austrian Wurstiverse but just seems like a Polish kielbasa that is trying too hard. There are also Leberkäse sandwiches, a thick steamed slice of square veal baloney on a kaiser roll that fills you up as you hop on the tram.

Bratwurst and käsekrainer in the park.

I do love sausage, but I still had to go farther afield to Ottakinger Strasse west of the Vienna city center. There, along what is called "The Balkan Mile" is the Brunnergasse market. This neighborhood started out as mainly Serbian and Turkish, but has grown into one of the centers for the recently arrived Syrian refugee community, the one that Hungary's Viktor Orban treated so miserably in 2015. They were welcomed in Austria and from the looks of it, have made a pretty decent home here, given that Vienna is rated the most liveable city in the world and Budapest is... not the most livable city in the world.

Brunnergasse Market

You might think that Budapest and Vienna, given their historical connections and their geographical proximity, would have close relations and cultural exchanges. You might also be wrong. Vienna and Budapest are like neighbors that never speak to each other except when one puts hits garbage bins in the other's parking space. It is as if the two cities pretended that the other does not exist. At present, Budapest doesn't even have a direct railway connection to Vienna - you have to switch from buses to trains several times. This has to do with the state of the Hungarian railways, which are no longer allowed to make international connections any farther west than Vienna since the Hungarian trains simply can not run on schedule. In the end, this produces a bit of an inferiority complex which the Hungarian government deals with by producing short films for its government controlled media in which Vienna is portrayed as a shabby and dangerous place inhabited by shady Middle Easterners slinking about the streets in burnooses and caftans. Like much of the propoganda coming out of the Hungarian government, it comes off as a bit racist and laughably inaccurate all at the same time. I considered this as we sat down for a snack of fresh Syrian mankaneesh - a freshly baked flatbread topped with olive oil and za'atar spice - and tea. Three Euros for all of it. Why couldn't we have this at the corner market in my neighborhood?

Syrian breakfast

Given that the news in the Middle East at the time of our vist was rather catasrophic, we found everybody in the market to be chatty and friendly as they went about their business of selling fresh vegetables and halal meats and Syrian street food at prices even I can afford. We had two of the most impressive lamb kebab sandwiches of my life at one stand. it was hard to choose - there are stands offering kebabs, felafuls, lahmacun, every kind of Middle Eastern delicacy in its raw, local authentic version. We simply got lucky.

You choose your meat skewer, and they rack it on an upright grill to roast for about five minutes and roll it with parsley, onions, and sauce on a fresh flatbread. Two full kebab sandwiches and two ayran yogurt drinks came to nine Euros. And I will add on more thing: the Wiener schnitzel we had at the Viennale dinner that evening was transcendant as well. And then, on our way home, we stopped at the huge superkarket located in the Main Train station and did a weeks worth of shopping to bring home to Budapest. Yes, shopping for groceries is now cheaper for many things in Vienna - due to the 125% food inflation that Hungary has accomplished in the last year. We picked up smoked fish, wurst, cheese... at about half the price I pay at my local supermarket. As soon as they get the direct trains running again, I will be back!

Old Timers on Fiddle: Maramureș

2023-10-16T08:41:00.007-04:00

Goreu Canaloș on fiddle, Tărșolț, Oaș, Romania.

When I began playing fiddle (as in not classical violin) Richard Nixon was the President of the USA. America was going through one of its periodic "folk revivals." There had been several by then: the Great 1950s Beatnik Folk Scare, then a period in the 1960s where cleancut trios and quartets with three guitars and a banjo sang arranged "folksongs" in harmony, then came the Dylan-does-Woody-Guthrie Protest Song era. In the 1970s Bluegrass music broke into AM radio with "Dueling Banjos" - the theme song to the film "Deliverance". I had an old Harmony acoustic guitar that my parents got for me when I was recovering from an illnesss. Of course, I wanted an electric guitar, but my parents were smarter than that. As a result I wound up playing a lot of old time blues, Appalachian and southern string band music, most learned from reissues of old 78 RPM recordings made in the 1920s, and friends of mine who drove down to West Virginia and North Carolina to tape record and learn from people like Tommy Jarrell and Melvin Wine. I never made the trip down south (although I did drive to Canada recording fiddler Cameron Chisholm in Cape Breton in 1975) and by the time I could, a lot of the old timers had passed away.

Chris March, Chops McCoy, and me on fiddle, 1975.

To us New York kids, North Carolina and West Virginia were the last pockets where the old "archaic" fiddle traditions still hung on. (I was entirely wrong about that. Time and age have granted me a lot of enlightenment as to what I am entirely wrong about.) I felt like I had missed out on some golden age of folk music because I had never made it down to the Appalachians a half century before I was born. When I moved to Hungary in the 1980s, I had the same sense: I wanted to get into the boondocks before their fiddle traditions evaporated into a dust of decaying folklorists' tapes. I finally got to roam around Transylvania in 1988. Since then I have made an astounding realization: this music is not disappearing. It isn't always apparent, but it hasn't disappeared.

Ceterașul Dumitru Covaci

This should explain why I am hooked on the Maramureș region of Romania. I know of almost no other region in the world where folk fiddling is as essential to the local cultural identity as in Northern Romania. Transylvanian music is still a proud badge of local identity, whether providing the background music to a wedding or thrilling the crowds in a bar before a football (i.e.: soccer) game. Tradition is strong in Transylvania.

Ieud, August 15th, Virgin Mary Day.

Spoiler alert: If you didn't already know, I play Jewish music. Traditional, kind of like the stuff you probably call "klezmer." And due to the fates of history, there aren't a lot of people alive today who can play this sort of music. Maramures was once home to a large, rural Jewish population. Unlike Jews who lived in the "Pale of Settlement" in Russia and Poland, the Jews of Maramureș - like the Romanian, Zipser German, and Rusyn peasants who flocked to these mountains in the 1700s - had rights granted to them directly by the Hapsburg Treasury, and were able to own and farm their own land, an anomaly among Jewish settlements in Europe. As such they created a Yiddish world much closer to the culture of their neighbors, which lasted in some pockets even after the Holocaust. Today, however, most of the Jews of Maramureș are gone. A large part of their surviving descendants form the bulk of what we know as the Satmar Hasidim in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and Antwerp Belgium. The community in the town of Sighet is now down to 22 members.

Jewish and Rusyn musicans, Bogdan, Maramureș 1909

Like their neigbors, Maramureș Jews were avid fiddlers - the ceteraș is an essential figure in the life of Maramures, and even after the Jews had been eradicated during the Holocaust their presence and musical traditions continued to have an echo effect on their neighbors. (The villagers, mind you, did not take part in the eradicating. That was the work of the Hungarian Army.) When I began recording music in the 1990s, older fiddlers - particularly in the Iza Valley - still played a repetoire of Jewish fiddle tunes. They did not necessarily remember the details or context in which the tunes were played - most had heard them as teenagers while playing as pickup musicians for Jewish fiddlers playing outside their home communities. (Gheorghe Covaci "Cioata" from Vadu Izei remembered playing with the Shloimovich family band from Rozavlea "They used to pay us with cake!") These were tunes that were remembered mainly because they were interesting musically, since most Maramures tunes are connected to either a ritual function or to an aspect of social dance. For the aging fiddlers I met these Jewish tunes were simply "cool tunes my father played for listening."

The late Brothers Nicolae and Viktor Covaci from Dragomirești in 2015.

If you have heard recordings of dance music from Maramureș, it is easily identifiable: the fiddle is backed by a four string guitar tuned to an open A chord and a small bass drum. The guitar - called zongora - which, oddly, means "piano" in Hungarian - has been around since at least the 1920s, when Bela Bartok made recordings in the Iza valley. There used to be an older style, however, that used a three string viola kontra fiddle like the one used in central Transylvania, and a bass. Around 1964 the Petreus Brothers, a fiddle and guitar dueo, recorded an album for Electrecord, the Romanian State label. The State culture authorities declared that from then on all Maramures music had to be played on fiddle and guitar to be broadcast on TV or radio, effectively killing the older style of music and the repetiore that went with it, including the Jewish tunes. During the Ceaucescu era only a few ethnomusicologists had access to tape recorders and little of this style of music survives, although a recording made by Ghizella Sulițeanu and Anca Ghircescu in 1971 featured the fiddler of Borșa, Gheorghe "Stingaci" Covaci and his band playing several sets of the Jewish repetoire in the older style.

Ion Pop is one of the hardest working musicians in Maramureș. He is the leader of the Iza folk music ensemble, and as he says "I'm a peasant from Monday to Friday, and a musician on weekends." Ion, in fact plays a large role in the continuation of Maramureș traditions. He consciously strives to make the old village aesthetic marketable, playing for village weddings as well as appearing on television and at festivals.

Ion Pop with Fumie, just off to work!

Romania loves its folk music, but just like the United States has Contemporary Country and Western, Romania has Musică Populară - at any time there are about seven round the clock TV video channels playing professionally produced "folk" music videos featuring idealized peasants and trained dancers and musicians lip synching while choreographed stepping around the haystacks. Ion doesn't do musică populară. Among his talents, he single handedly revived the use of the three string kontra viola in Maramureș music. Once, when I asked him who was left in Maramureș who still played music in the old style, Ion answered "You and me, Bob. We are all that's left."

Jake on stage with Ion Pop in Breb, summer 2023

Luckily, we aren't all that's left. Zoe Aqua from Denver, Colorado has been living in Transylvania for thae last few years actively learning from the surviving village musicians, and has even synthesized what she has been learning into her own compositions in traditional style on her CD "In Vald Arayn" (dowload it from bandcamp!) Jake Shulman-Ment has been a fixture of the New York klezmer scene since he was a wee child. He has traveled around Maramures with me as well as spending a year living in Bukovina while working with the Lautar orchestra of the city of Botoșani. His CD A Redele on Oriente Records in Berlin is one of my favorites. He is also one of the reknowned Brothers Nazaroff. Vasile Rus, from Vadu Izei, also consciously preserves a repetoire of Jewish melodies, and was instrumental in teaching the style to Zoe Aqua, who subsequently, taught some of this music at a workshop last summer at KlezKanada.

Nicolae and Viktor

We were lucky to meet these musicians when we did. Sadly, most of them are no longer alive. Jake and I leanred a lot from Nicolae Covaci in Dragomirești, who passed away around 2019. His brother Viktor could play the Jewish repetoire when playing duet with his older brother, but unless I prompted him he couldn't remember more than two or three of the melodies, since he had been born after the era when Jewish musicians were in the area. This summer I dropped in on Viktor only to find his wife dressed in black - he had passed away in late July, two weeks before my visit. I miss him. Viktor was one of the last old style fiddlers in the region. He was a great guy to hang with, gentle and always the little brother, even into his 70s. Two years ago we filmed him while working with Argentinian film makers Paloma Schachmann and Leandro Koch on their indie documentary The Klezmer Project "Adentro Mio Estoy Bailando" This weekend Fumie and I are going to Vienna to meet them at the Viennale film festival for the Austrian premier of the film. I wish Viktor could be with us.

Bonus: At 1:10 into the trailer, Fumie is dancing with Maria, the wife of fiddler Dumitru Covaci.

Romania Part 1: Trumpet Fiddles and Goulash

2023-09-14T06:15:00.004-04:00

Pictured above is a plate of iahnie de fasole cu ciolan afumat. Stewed white beans with smoked pork hock. It is one of the most radically non-kosher foods existing in the universe. It is also one of the most delicious. Similar dishes may exist elsewhere in the world, but iahnie de fasole with smoked pork is decidedly Romanian. You can't get this in Hungary, or in Serbia, or even in pig loving Austria or the Czech republic, which boasts the highest per capita consumption of pork in the world. Only in Romania. And in Romania, you can get it in nearly every restaurant, where it is usually the most expensive dish on offer, and still clocks in at under USD $10. It had been too long since I had been to Romania to enjoy its swiney delights... so this summer we made plans to meet up with Zoe Aqua and Jake Shulman-Ment, two of my close associates in the world of old style Jewish fiddling, to drive around the porkier parts of Romania visiting some of the older fiddlers. As fate would have it, our small party expanded into a small safari as six other friends joined the caravan, but somehow we managed.

Neolog Synagogue, Oradea, Romania

We started out just across the border from Hungary in the city of Oradea, (known as Nagyvarád in Hungarian.) Once a grey and dusty border outpost, Oradea has spent the last few years using its European Union funding to spruce up and attract foreign investment. I was literally shocked at how magnificent the city had become, with several pedestrian streets lined with carefully restored old buildings filled with outdoor cafes and shops. But we were in Oradea to hop out to its suburban villages. In nearby Cihei lives Marius Mihuț, a maker of the vioara cu goarne, a resonator fiddle unique to the Bihor region of northern Transylvania.

Zoe was there to purchase a vioara from Marius, and every time we visit him he and his sister like to make a party of it. First, there was wild boar goulash made over an open fire in the backyard, followed by home made salami and home brewed palinka de prune, plum brandy. This is the reality of doing ethnomusicological "field collecting." You end up with wonderful, insanely generous new friends in places you would never expect. Also, amazingly great fiddle music.

Vioara cu goarne remain a popular instrument for weddings and celebrations around Bihor county, because it is loud enough to be heard over crowds at events such as football matches, where the local identity of the instrument dovetails perfectly with the local Oradea football team (by which I mean soccer for all you Americans...)

The demand is such that Marius keeps quite busy churning out these hand made fiddles. The horn is attached to the body through a small reonator device set beneath the bridge and strings, rather like the metal resonator on a National Steel or dobro guitar, but in miniature. A more developed tone can be made by using the resonating device cannibalised from old phonograph players, particularly the Czech Suprahon brand, which Marius collects by being in touch with antique phonegraph collectors on ebay.

"Bobby" the deer with Fumie and Zoe

Did I metion that Marius keeps a pair of tame deer as house pets? Yes he does. Bobby and Bambina. He's raised them since they were orphans found by some local hunters. They walk around the farm in back and seem to think they are just another one of the goats. He also has a couple of baby wild boar. I'm pretty sure those will not end up as house pets, though. The goulash is just too tempting.

The Status Quo Ante Synagogue in Marosvásárhely

With a few days to spend before we traveled to Maramures, Fumie and I decided to see Tărgu Mureș, (Marosvásárhely in Hungarian.) For some reason, I have never actually stayed in this traditionally Hungarian speaking city, (today about about 50% use Hungarian and the language has official status) although a lot of my acquaintances in Budapest hail from here. I, personally, base myself in Cluj (Kolozsvár) when I am in Transylvania, and for some reason I haven't ever had a big reason to spend any time in Marosvásárhely. It is, however, off the tourist circuit and that meant hotel prices were cheap, and so was the food pictured above, the iahnie de fasole cu ciolan afumat from the Laci Csarda around the corner from our pensiune.

Herbal teas, fresh berries, and jams

The thing to do in any town in Romania is to visit the local open market. We were there in time for summer produce to be piled up in small mountains. People will preserve fruit and make huge amounts of vineta and zakuska eggplant spread for use later in the year.

Mountains of egplant

Usually there are people setting up to sell locally made products like carved spoons, basketwork, and custom farm tools. Fumie found a 90 year old woman selling thick woolen socks she herself knitted, perfect for Fumie's mom and sis back in Tokyo, so she began to ask about them and the woman was utterly charmed by the existance of a Japanese woman who can chat in basic Romanian with a markedly Maramures accent.

Also, it has been a good year from wild mushrooms. These are fresh chanterelles going for about USD $6.50 a kilogram. Not a pound. A kilo. I don't really want to slag on any of the places I have visited in Romania, but honestly? These mushrooms were the most exciting thing I saw during my time in Marosvásárhely. It is a pretty town, in a stunning location. Don't miss the mushrooms!

After a day in Székélyland, we were off to visit fiddlers in Maramureș, a few hours drive to the north. I will post more on that later. Pictured below is what greeted us when we arrived. Home made sausage with stewed sour cabbage. No. It was not kosher. It was, however, wonderful.

You may well ask about my obsession with pork. Well... for most of my young life I did not eat pork. Although my family did, I avoided pork for a variety of reasons from the time I hit my teens until after I moved to Hungary. That all changed for me in Hungary and the Balkans. You have to be pretty effing hardcore to avoid pork in Hungary, or anywhere else in Central Europe for that matter. Pork is simply what is for dinner, lunch, breakfast, snacks, and in the intravenous feeding tube that hangs over you as you take your last breath. The amount and variety of pork available here was so overwhelming that I used to write a regular column for the English language newspaper in Budapest - Budapest Week - bylined by "the Prince of Pork." Its easier now - there are halal butchers and kosher markets, and vegetarians are no longer slaughtered as mass entertainment in the town squares, but after that first bite of kolbasz so many years ago, there was no going back for me.)

We Become Peasants

2023-06-15T05:09:00.000-04:00

After going dormant for the longest spell in its long history, the blog is back. I'm sorry about the delay. thanks to the readers who took the effort to reach out to me and inquire whether I was still alive or had been incarcerated or just gone off my meds and become a Republican. I'm fine. Life has been a bit less adventurous in the last year... we spent a lot of it (well, too much of it) in the USA getting surgical things stuck into various bits and parts and getting squeezed through MRI tubes and other such nonsense (playing Klezmer music around NY, eating Turkish food in Paterson and Yemeni food in the Bronx with the near-legendary Bob Godfried...) but finally we are back in our Budapest home and happily finding our true selves. We have become peasants. We are now people of the soil, as they say in nationalist circles.

Our little plot of Heaven

Usually I write posts about our visits to various peasants around East Europe, but we finally decided to take the leap and become peasants ourselves! For years we have been using our huge living room window to grow basil, peppers, and other kitchen herbs, while Fumie has turned our inner courtyard walkway into a minor botanical garden of flowers. I used to have a garden when I lived in a rundown slum tenement in Allston, Massachusetts in the 1980s - growing in soil I composted from horse manure I trucked in from the Boston Police stables on the back of my bicycle.

Allston, Mass. 1982, with zuchinni

When we lived in Zuglo we had a balcony on which we grew a huge amount of herbs and peppers, and when we moved downtown that was supplanted by a huge living room window. Fumie set up a small mega-industrial scale window garden and soon our living room was being taken over by errant avocado plants, smelly muskatlis, and potted mints and basil. We needed more room. And luckily, the Kisdiofa Community Garden appeared on our horizon and we applied for a plot.

our living room window nursery with community garden below.

The community garden is conveniently across the street from our building. When we first moved in it was a vacant lot with rubble from a demolished building, but a community organization (KEK) set about cleaning it up and trucking in organic soil to set up an urban garden in our densely developed old downtown Pest neighborhood, the seventh district Jewish Ghetto. The garden is strictly organic, and an entire compost system was built this year, so we can bring our kitchen scraps downstairs and recycle them into dinner for next year.

Cherry tomatoes and Japanese cucumbers

We got back to Budapest in March, so we were a bit late in getting started, but the folks running the garden were there with advice and guidance and soon we had turned over an abandoned plot, worked in organic compost and petrified alga-limestone, and we put in our early spring vegetables. One part of the plots is for flowers, including something Fumie found at Stop and Shop in Teaneck labeled "Grandma Flower Mix" that she swears by and we have no idea what is in it. Spring in Budapest this year was cold and wet and long, and the results were that our chinese yu-tsai greens didn't make it, our snow peas failed, and our radishes emerged as a lesson to other radishes to just say no to the Man pushing crack. On the other hand, once it warmed up we had a bumper crop of lettuce and we had an amazing crop of arugula, which we are still eating.

Since, we have put in tomatoes (cherry, black Krim, and yellow) Japanese cukes, peppers (Jalapeno, Japanese Shishito, and Romanian hot long pepper) two types of eggplant (Japanese and Italian) and okra. Okra is hot weather vegetable not often seen in Hungary. We are almost too far north to grow it, so I am counting on late planting and global warming to see us through. It is also, without argument, my favorite vegetable. When I'm in the US I eat about a kilo of it a week, and with peppers and tomatoes I should be fed well into the fall.

OK. There was Yemeni food in the Bronx...

And Turkish Kunefe hot pastry with home made pistachio ice cream in Paterson...

And of course, nobody loves New Jersey diners more than my Dad, who will be 97 on June 20th:

But we are very happy to be home!

Maramureș: "A Sausage Every Day!"

2022-11-15T11:01:00.011-05:00

In July I was up in Maramureș, the northern region of Romania which has become my second home-away-from-home-away-from-home over the last twenty five years or so. When I first began visiting Maramureș, it was one of the least developed regions of Romania. This was partly due to Ceaucescu's suspicion that Romania would have to sacrifice this slice of Transylvania if there was ever a Soviet invasion (Ceaucescu was paranoid, but in hindsight, not that paranoid.) Accordingly, Maramures was left a backwater region during communism, with no industrial developement beyond forestry and mining. As a result the peasant culture of Maramureș was able to maintain a sense of cultural continuity that was beaten out of most of East European peasants in the late twentieth century.

The Moroșeni, as people of Maramureș are known, are famous for hard work. The mountain land is unforgiving, and it takes twice as much work to produce a crop of potatoes than it does in the lowlands. Traditionally Moroșan men would travel to do farmwork or construction in order to send money home. Today that tradition continues with adults leaving to work in Italy, France, or England and returning in August for a family reunion. And they return with their earnings - western earnings - which they invest in weddings, home contruction, fine new embroidered folk costumes to wear to weddings and dances, and a growing investment in village status. It also means that during the year the children stay at home to be raised by their grandparents, which means that the traditional skills and values of the village are passed on and continued.

Dancing in front of the church... these guys all work construction in Manchester...

In August there are often four or five weddings going on in any village on any weekend day, complete with processions marching through the streets and house receptions where guests are greeted with music, food, and a glass of plum brandy horinca at the gateway. We usually stay in Ieud, a large village in the eastern Iza valley that was described by anthropologist Gail Kligman in her monograph The Wedding of the Dead. (google books link here.)

Ion de la Cruce,

When we are there in August, we often get impromptu invites to weddding receptions, which means fiddle music, stuffed cabbage, and serial shots of plum brandy at 11 in the morning. The ceremonies involved receptions at the homes of various inlaws (cake, brandy shots, fiddle music) marching aroiund in the streets to and from churches and inlaws (cakes, brandy shots, fiddle music) and finally, at night, buses to transport the whole party to one of the new Wedding Halls - huge, kitsch modern catering halls with garish lights, pink tablecloths, and monstrous sound systems blaring... fiddle music.

We met Nița Dancuș, our host and good friend, back in 2001 when we went to Ieud to sepnd a few months immersing ourselves in the local dialect of Romanian language while I spent time with the late Gheorghe Ioannei Covaci, the eldest of a dynasty of fiddlers who, at the time, had a large repertoire of Jewish melodies learned in the 1940s from playing with members of the Shloimovici family of Klezmer musicians from thre neighboring village of Rozavlea.

Nița is an encyclopdia of Iza Valley folklore, history, recipes and jokes. She is from one of the most high status families - the Iza valley had a strata of "noble" peasants during Austro-Hungarian rule - and was an activist on behalf of her beleagered Greco Catholic Orthodox Church during the Ceaucescu years. She is also a great cook, and her sarmale (stuffed cabbage) may well be the world's best. Her goat soup isn't bad either, and I particularly like her stuffed peppers.

The stuffed pepper that defines stuffed pepper.

Back in 2001, I wanted to record Gheorghe Ioannei and his family for a Cd to release to my friend's label in Germany, a mix of their local and Jewish repertoire. I backpacked into Ieud in the winter - transportation was bit more difficult back then, involving a freight train from Cluj to a lumber station on a mountain above a village and then hitchhiking and walking to get to Ieud, hauling a huge Marantz professional recorder and microphones stufffed into my backpack. My spine has never forgiven me. Ghorghe lived in a one room log house on the "gypsy" street along the river in Ieud, and he continued working as farm labor into his late 80s. He once told me about his time as a Hungarian Army POW in an American Prisoner camp in Germany after WWII. "It was wonderful... We ate so well! They gave us a sausage every day! Imagine that! A sausage every day!" The imagined title of the CD I had hoped to produce was, of course "A Sausage Every Day!"

Gheorghe Ionnei Covaci and wife.

I arrrived just in time to find Gheorghe's son and designated accordion player Ion, sick with an abscess that looked an eggplant growing out the side of his cheek. I paid for the transport and doctor bills and we sent Ion off to the hostpital in Sighet, followed in true Romani style by his entire family - the family band I had hoped to record. I was left alone with the old man. Hoping to salvage the recording, I still went ot visit him every day, but he insisted his wife accompany him on guitar. Mrs. Covaci was not a great guitarist... A lot of older Maramureș fiddlers heard on field recordings are accompanied on guitar by a single chord rythymically droning on behind them without any chord changes... this is a clue that the guitarist is, in fact, the wife of the fiddler. Instead of hiring a guitar player (usually a brother or neighbor) the fiddler saves money... and so... we never released a CD of one of the most amazing fiddlers ever to pick up a bow in Romania.

Nicolae Covaci from Dragomiresti, MM.

Gheorghe Ionnei Covaci passed away at the age of 88 almost two decades ago, but since then I have been tracking down his brothers, all of whom are fiddlers, to record more of this older repertoire of Maramureș fiddle music., along with other older generation fiddlers, most of whom had never been recorded for commercial or even folkloric purposes before. Gheorghe's brother Nicolae and Viktor lived in the neighboring village of Dragomirești, and for the next few years I visited them regularly until Nicolare passed on some years ago... Nicolae was as poor as a proverbial churchmouse, but he lived next door to his daughter and her husband who worked as a miner. We always make sure to pay village fiddlers for sessions - they are professional musicians, after all - and we always bring a shopping bag for the fiddler's wife: coffee, chocolates, salami, cooking oil, juice, cigarettes, and violin strings. (Cash gifts you pay directly to the primás lead fiddler.) Seeing the treasures we gave the old couple, Nicolae's neighbor was convinced we were making millions of dollars from our recordings of the old man. There is nothing quite like a drunken Romanian miner screaming at you while you adjust your microphones to start a day of field recording.

Most people identify Maramureș with the fiddle, guitar and drum sound that was made popular on Electrecord records by the Frații Petruș (Petruș brothers) in the 1960s. The success of those recordings caused Romanian State Radio to declare that all music from Mramureș would thenceforth be broadcast or recorded only as a fiddle and guitar style. This ignored and pushed out an older style of music that was predomonant in the Iza valley, music played with fiddle, three stringed kontra viola, and bass, the classic Transylvanian string trio ensemble. This was the style of orchestra heard up into the 1970s, and was the preferred style for playing Jewish music. This is a recording made by Romanian ethnomusicologists Ghisela Sulițeanu and Anca Ghircescu around 1970 of the left handed fiddler from Borșa, Gheorghe Covaci known as Stingaci ("Lefty") playing a set of Jewish wedding dances. (Yes... everybody is named Gheorghe Covaci... you get used to it.)

This older style of Maramureș fiddle music has become increasingly rare as the older generation of fiddlers passes away and the slow, odd metered Transylvanian and Jewish repertoire was replaced by more popular local neo-folkloric music spread through popular recordings and video channels. At this point, there may be only one older fildder who remembers having played with Jewish musicians in Maramureș and maybe four who still keep up any of this repertoire. I once asked Ion Pop, the acknowledged curator of Maramures musical tradition, who was left playing the old style music if Maramureș. "You and me... maybe only you and me." that is not entirely true, but that's a blog post for another time.

The late Gheorghe Ioannu Covaci from Saliște, known as "Paganini"

Transylvania: Mera World Music Festival

2022-08-21T04:55:00.203-04:00

Mera is a village about 15 km west of Cluj (Kolozsvár in Hungarian) in the Kalotaszeg region of Transylvania. Mera - whose population is almost entirely Hungarian speaking - is famous in folk music circles due to the role it played in the revival of Transylvanian Hungarian folk music and dance in the 1970s Hungarian Dance House music movement (táncházmozgalom) Young Hungarians from Budapest seeking to learn Transylvanian traditional fiddle style and dance gravitated to Mera, which famous for its Gypsy musicians, the Berki family, also known as the "Árus" family. "Old Árus" died in 1975 and his son, Ferenc, moved from playing bass in the family band to playing lead fiddle as "primás" He was also considered the best dancer in the region and during the early years of the dance house revival dancers flocked to him to pick up tips on his amazing rendition of the verbunk, the men's virtuoso dance of the Kalotaszeg.

In 1970 National Geographic published a photo book called "Gypsies: Wanderers of the World" by photographer Bruce Dale. Dale accompanied British Romany Clifford Lee on a journey from England to India, producing some of the most striking photos of Roma people I have ever seen. I was around 14 years old when I stumbled across it in the school library and was entranced by one photo of a couple dancing to an older fiddler on a hillside in a village named "Mera."

Clifford Lee dancing with Rozineni and Feribacsi in Mera, 1969.

That photo told me that someplace out there in the world (i.e., not in Teaneck, New Jersey) there were communities of people for whom traditional music and dance were a vital part of life, a life I needed to know more about. Around that time I first began to play the fiddle. In Budapest in1973 my Uncle Jozsi bought me a Czech violin for the equivalent of $14 and a boxed set of Hungarian folk music from field recordings. I spent the next fifteen years becoming a fiddler of sorts: I mostly played Appalachian and old-time American fiddle, but driving me all the while was a passion for the thick, ancient sounds of the Transylvanian fiddle music I had heard from that boxed set. In the pre-internet world Transylvanian music was not easy to come by in the USA. I found mine from LPs in Hungarian language bookstores and in the archives of the NY Public library research division. It was this music that drew me when I moved to Budapest in 1988, and it was in October of that year that I first got to travel to Mera, After Ceaucescu fell in 1989 the musicians from Mera were allowed to travel to Budapest, and I began a deep friendship with Berki 'Árus' Ferenc - Árus Feri - that lasted until his passing in 1996, which I have written about here.

The Berki "Árus" brothers: Feri on violin, Béla on accordion. Mera 1994

In Mera I basically apprenticed with Feri, who was 30 years my senior, but I never mastered the full virtuosic Kalotaszeg style. When I began looking for specifically Jewish music repertoire, Feri accompanied me to visit all the older fiddlers around Cluj who had played weddings with his father - "Old Árus" - before World War II. Mostly I hung with the family and learned to speak their local dialect of Romany. And it dawned on me for the first time: Feri and his wife, Rozinéni were the couple dancing with Clifford Lee in that 1969 photograph taken by Bruce Dale.

With Bruce Dale, Mera, 2022

That made this summer's Mera World Music Festival even more interesting: Bruce Dale was invited to exhibit his photos in the village during the festival. (Dale has been revisiting communities that he had photographed in 1969 and connecting with some of the people he met fifty years ago.) I was there to play Jewish music with Craig Judelman's Klezmer Kapelye, the band I had played with in Germany in June. Its an interesting concept: Craig sings a lot of Hasidic material and rare Litvak Yiddish songs, but the band uses a classic old lautar rhythm section, with the cobza (me) standing in for the bass alongside cimbalom, played by Shaun Williams - the American ethnomusicologist widely known in Bucharest music circles as the lautar accordionist Jean Americanu.

Zoe, me, and Shaun onstage with Judelman's Klezmer Kapelye

Craig shared fiddle duties with Zoe Aqua, who by now counts as a local Transylvanian musician. Zoe has been doing a Fullbright research fellowship in Cluj studying the ways in which Transylvanian music is passed onto younger generations, and she has been learning from some of the old and not so old masters like Ioan "Nuku" Harlet and Florin Kodoban.

Zoe also just released her own CD, "In Vald Arayn" in which she mixes what she has learned about Transylvanian band playing styles with old style traditional Klezmer and comes out with something amazingly new. It officially came out just as we were driving around in Transylvania so we had it on the car stereo all the way to Mera. While we were in Mera I checked in with some of my old acquaintances from the Berki family.

Berki Jeno and Árpi, 1999 [Photo: Fumie Suzuki]

Feribacsi's grandson Árpi was the apple of his eye: Árpi's mom had left to work in Hungary, basically abandoning him as a child and he was raised by his Grandparents. Feri had hoped Árpi would take command of the Mera band, but between the stiff competition among fiddlers and Árpi's need to work as a shepherd in the high pasture stana outside of the village, combined with a passion for women, partying and shitty tattoos... his musical talent was never quite tamed.

Back in the summer of 1999 I bought an old fiddle at the Cluj flea market and gave it to Árpi in hopes that he had the stuff to become a primas. Unfortunately, Árpád, known as Pipi - never rose to the level of leading the village band, and suffered from a series of misfortunes in his life, the most recent of which was a pit bull terrier attack this summer that chewed up his leg and his butt so bad he nearly died.

Every time I meet Pipi my heart breaks - I remind him of his Grandfather and he starts tearing up and turns to me for advice he never takes on how to get his life in order. One of the reasons I stopped visiting Mera after Feribácsi passed away was the simple fact that even as a quasi-adoptive family member, there were expectations that I could preform economic miracles. While Rozinéni was alive we tried to take good care of her - taking her to doctor visits in Cluj, trying to get her eyes fixed, helping out with the bills.

Rozinéni singing in 1999. (Foto: Fumie Suzuki)

But after she passed I didn't return to Mera for nearly 20 years. Until the Mera World Music festival called. It is an impressive event. Held in a former barn turned into a stage, it features not only local traditional music but also a wide spectrum of names on the world music circuit - I had to miss a few on the final day of the festival, including Craig's Old Time American band Interstate Express and the Ghanaian Alostmen, featuring the half Romanian half Ghanaian Wanlov the Kubelor. And I missed the set by Erdofu, by far my favorite Hungarian traditional band right now. And my legs are no longer quite enough to get me up the mountain to the cemetery where Erdőfú plays a memorial set to honor the memory of the great Árus musicians at their burial site. A wooden "kopjafa" memorial marker (top photo) was erected this year, but three years ago I did get the chance to haul up to the cemetery to pay my respects to Árus Feri and Rozinéni while at the festival. Erdőfú and the local musicians of Mera: Berki Béla on accordion, his son Béla on kontra, "Kis Netti Sányi" on violin) did the honors.

Hurka: The Tastiest Turd in Hungary

2022-07-24T08:19:00.007-04:00

Blood and guts and oh so good!

East Europe doesn't offer a lot in the way of extrémé foods. We don't eat bugs, we don't find grubs and worms very tasty, and we do not to eat anything alive. This makes us a bit boring for the TV food travel shows - like Tony Bourdain's No Reservations - which tend to dwell on the portion sizes (case in point: the Pleh Csarda) and the exciting blood and gore of a countryside pig killing feast. But there is one food most visitors to Hungary and its neighbors will probably miss out on: hurka. Hurka is the dark underside of Hungarian sausage. Hurka is the lunch which dare not speak its name. Hurka haunts the nightmares of small children and vegans. Hurka is neither a polite nor a dainty food. Hurka is a culinary afterthought stuffed into a pig's ass. Unless you are invited to a pig killing feast, you are not likely to taste hurka outside of a butcher shop lunch counter. No restaurant offers it - none - and most home cooks avoid it due to its tendency to explode while cooking, splattering grease and guts around the kitchen and reacting exactly like a garden slug that has just been sprinkled in salt. Hurka is a problem food. Also, it tastes really good.

Blood sausage and liver sausage, in action.

Hurka is a kind of sausage made out of spiced ground pork liver or blood mixed with rice as a filler. Hurka is not really that strange except for one thing: it really looks like pooh. This is a point not lost on Hungarians, for whom the term hurka is a polite alternative term for "turd". Hurka was the first food I discovered that could also be used as a psychological weapon against my sister. When I was growing up in New York my Mom used to take us down to the -now vanished - Hungarian neighborhood in Yorkville, on Manhattan's upper east side, to stock up on essentials like poppy seeds and paprika at the famous Paprikas Weiss Hungarian delicatessen on 2nd Avenue.

The next stop stop was at the aptly named "Valodi Magyar Hentes" butcher shop to pick up some kolbász and hurka and the wonderous thing sold there which was actual Magyar bread. The bread was unlike anything available in the USA in the 20th century... which is to say it was real bread. At home my Mom would cook up a family favorite - lecsós kolbász - and a couple of hurkas on the side. Nobody except me and my Mom would eat the hurka. It elicited groans and cries of "ewwwww gross!" from my brother and sister, who couldn't bring themselves to taste the turdlike mix of organs and blood. The mere idea of eating a tube of congealed blood and ground pig weenie was enough to send my sister running from the table. (Update: she has since become a respected and world renowned Oncologist.) You know the saying "don't ask how the sausage is made"? The stuff they don't use to make the sausage is what goes into the hurka.

Hurka, fried liver, ribs at Brunch at Ica Mama Meatshop

You may ask yourself "Why were these otherwise traditional Yiddish speaking New York Jews happily eating pig privates ground with pig blood in casing made of pig intestines?" Simple: my mom was born in Hungary, and we are not orthodox Jewish, kosher, or otherwise bound for glory on tkies hameysin when the souls fly up to find their reward in heaven. When I was nine my Dad took me to City Island in the Bronx to introduce me to eating live clams on the half shell, which is about as unkosher as anything you can put in your mouth except maybe for rabbit. It was a rite of manhood, but also a guarantee that I would not adopt the ritualized eating disorders of my more observant mates... I mean, dude, you ate a living clam, for pete's sake! As for my Mom... Hungarian Jews split into orthodox and Neolog (reform) a long time before that was an issue with the rest of East European Jews, and part of the social assimilation of Hungarian Jews was the acceptance that virtually everything ever eaten in Hungary is made out of a pig. Pushing boundaries is just what we do. The origin of the Neolog movement in Hungary started in 1798 when Rabbi Aaron Chorin chose to make a foodie argument about whether or not sturgeon was a kosher fish. Today many Orthodox Jews won't eat sturgeon, yet it features in the less rigid Jewish tradition of the New York smoked fish "appetizing" shops like Barney Greengrass and Russ and Daughters.

Poland: Kiszka or kaszanka at a restaurant in Krakow

You can go into virtually any Budapest hentesbolt - a butcher shop serving hot foods - and there will almost always be a steaming tray of grey liver majás hurka or black veres blood hurka. Most are made from ground mystery meats mixed with rice, but you may see some labeled "Svab hurka". For some reason, the German speaking Schwabians of Hungary - most of whom were deported to Stuttgart after WWII - preferred to mix their mystery meat with bread crumbs. Those crafty Svabs... what will they do next? Either way, most commercially made hurka is insipid, oversalted, and usually dried out by the time it gets served. Never buy hurka from a supermarket meat refrigerator. Most of the hurka available today is made in factories, and is a rather banal and usually too dry and salty ghost of what a good guts'n'organs'n'blood sausage should be. Worst of all they are often kept warm under infared lamps which dries them out into a sandy, dry, unpalatable bit of pooh in stick form.

The butcher at Klauzal Piac. Hurka on the lower left...

The search for a good, locally made artisanal hurka is never ending. The best was once found at the lunch stand run by an old guy named Palibacsi who made his own organic meats on a farm north of Budapest and for a couple of years his lunch counter at the Klauzal market was easily the best place to experience Hungarian food in Budapest besides the also now defunct Kadar Etkezde, located four doors down from the market. Today, seek out private butcher shops and look for misshapen, odd looking, and juicy hurkas that defy commercial sizing and try your luck. Hurka and other meat products sold by peasant stands at big markets or smaller farmers markets like the one at the Sunday Szimpla Piac or the Czako kert are a good bet. The lady who brings homemade bacon and smoked meats to the Klauzal market on weekends has good hurka, but it sells out fast. At home you can bake them in an oven (in a tray with a bit of water) or fry them at low heat in a pan, but either way they tend to explode while cooking. If you have the time, try soaking them in water for an hour or two before cooking: it helps the skin resist exploding.