Kadiköy: Asian Istanbul

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

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

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

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

                                                

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.