Fall Wild Mushroom Madness

It is a warm late autumn in Hungary: foggy nights, wet days with no real rain. Depressing weather. But oddly, the market at Bosnyak ter is full with fresh wild mushrooms. This kind of weather in late November actually is a wild mushoroom boom season, and we lucked out at Saturday's market on a bumper crop of Lila Pereszke mushrooms...

These are known in English as Blewits. They are one of the few naturally occuring purple foods in the animal/vegetable kingdom. Blewits are a mushroom that are actually slightly toxic - you can't eat them raw, and some people have an allergic reation to them even when well prepared. Just my kind of fungus!! But these 'shrooms had the stamp of approval from the official mushroom inspector who is parked in his official camper van outside the market,and after an official inspection he gives an offical approval paper to all mushroom sellers, and so when the seller told us these were FT 1000 a kilo (twice the price of regular factory champignon mushrooms but less than the price of any meat.. about USD 4.50) we caved in an bought a half kilo...

and oh my gawd... delicious, they were jaw-dropping amazing. Fumie smelled them and immediatly thought of Matsutake mushrooms, the Japanese specialty that brings in about fifty dollars per mushroom in Japan... they had a deep, musty smell that said "eat me please!" And so we did. Three times over the weekend. Our first attempt was a simple pasta with mushroom sauce: butter, mushrooms, parsley, black pepper. Heavenly.

Then we had breakfast of loosely scrambled eggs with wild mushrooms. There was some other species of wld mushroom involved in this dish, but by now we have forgotten its name....Later we made simple schnitzel (pork!) with mamaliga corn meal mush and a mushroom gravy. Absolute heaven.

This is what I love about this place: even though you can pretend to love the malls and supermarkets, the smells and flavors of the season and the countryside are still available to us city dwellers at our district markets. How could I ever live without my local market? Impossible! Bosnyak ter is one of the last of the funky old style open markets -"EU conform" be damned - but who knows how long this is going to last.

The Angry Donuts of Transylvania. Again.

I have many favorite European cities, often ones not on the semi-official list of cute and wonderful places to visit. I live in Budapest, but think Veszprém, my Mother's birthplace, is the most beautiful town in Hungary. I love Paris but find the warmth of Nantes more to my liking. My favorite urban centers are probably Istanbul (incredible history, even more incredible köfte meatballs), Milan (uniquely ugly neighborhoods but free food during the aperitivi "happy hour") Sarajevo (for beauty and heroism, not to mention the cevapi) and - in Romania - Cluj. Yes, Cluj-Napoca, also known in Hungarian as Kolozsvár, is probably the place that feels most like my second home town in Europe, although I haven't spent all that much time there in the last few years.The new town town center by Unirii Square is getting a face lift next to the Hungarian Church and the statue of King Mátyás after years of contentious debate that was started when the "Mad Mayor" Gheorghe Funar started digging up spurious archeological sites around the chursh. Today, the park around the church has been stoned over (for "modern purposes like skateboarding" says the new Mayor, only slightly less mad) and statue of King Mátyás is getting his first restoration in many years. Filled with historic architecture, a lively university culture, and a funky ethnic mix, Cluj remains my choice for visiting in Romania, not the least because it has the best donuts on the surface of the planet earth. Angry donuts.I have written about the Angry Donuts (Gogoasa Infuriata) on this blog before, but how can one ever keep quiet about fried dough filled with sour cherries or vanilla cream. The dough is warm when you get it and the frying has given a bit of crunchy bite to the skin... yes, these are donuts you can write home about, which is exactly what I am doing now... (photos may be NSFW) Gogoasa Infuriata seems to have originally been a Cluj donut stand that existed years ago, and over the last few years it has started to franchise out with branches in Craiova and even Bucharest itself. I found a Bucharest branch of Gogoasa Infuriata at the crowded and monstrous Piaţa Unirii next to the 104 Bus stop...As soon as I called out to my band members to wait they started laughing at me. "What is it with Americans and donuts?" I think it is because everybody watches the Simpsons (dubbed in Hungarian) that Americans are stereotyped as donut eaters, but I could not for the life of me do anything to dispel the notion . Donuts... donuts...I had to try them. Unfortunately, these were sold under the Gogoasa Infuriata label, but were just not the same... basically, these were just normal jelly donuts, exactly the same as you would find in any American diner or supermarket. Actually, they were frigging great, but they were just not a real Gogoasa Infuriata! After Bucharest, I sent the boys home and took the train from Arad to Cluj, where I met Fumie. I promised her a weekend in Cluj with all the donuts for free on me! And so we began... on our donut eating quest... eating... eating... donuts... I have posted on Gogoasa Infuriate on this blog before, and I can't really improve on what I said in 2007: "Regardless of what Romania may have or have not contributed to the developement of Western Civilization, any lack is more than made up for by their Angry Donuts. This is quite possibly the best fast food franchise located on the planet earth. I'm not prone to hyperbole, but this modest Romanian donut franchise puts Dunkin Donuts or Krispy Kreme to shame.... The idea is so simple these could easily be a hit anywhere in the world - keeping the batches small means every donut is fresh and warm, and the menu is short: donuts filled with apples, sour cherry jam, vanilla or chocoalte cream, or salty cheese."The coffee is of a type rare in Europe: regular good old filter coffee served in a take away paper cup. You know it has to be good because there is always a line out in front." Angry Donuts are easy to find - one is on str. Memorandului on the main square at Piata Unirii, while the other is tucked on a side street next to the main outdoor market at Mihai Viteazu Square.

Back From Romania: Concert in Bucharest

I'm home in Budapest after spending a week in Romania enjoying the shitty weather and the excellent tripe soup. Di Nayes were invited to play a concert at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest, sponsored by the Austrian Cultural Institute as a series of Klezmer and Jazz concerts. I invited the formidable young fiddler Jake Shulmen-Ment along - he's been living in Paris this fall. After all, if you are playing Klezmer in Bucharest, why not do it right? And since Jake works off the same sources for his music as I do it made for an extremely fun, very Romanian concert.Since we traveled to Bucharest on the overnight train, we had to bring the small portable cimbalom, and I borrowed a cobza from Beatrice Iordan of the band Trei Parale, whose husband and band mate, Florin, actually works at the museum as a folklorist. The Museum Club was a great venue - Romanian folk furniture, tables, very cozy, a great bar. There doesn't seem to be a huge traditional folk music scene in Bucharest - apart from Trei Parale, who focus on flute and historical ballad traditions, and often present their music at early music festivals and rennaisance fairs. When we played within the Moldavian and Transylvanian styles of Jewish music it was pure joy to watch the faces in the audience. They don't often get much Transylvanian string band music down in Oltenia, it seems.

Bucharest is being reconstructed from whole cloth these days, with a lot of major road work disrupting any attempt to get from point A to point B. Bucharestians can be seen carefully dancing their way around all manner of obstructions as they attempt to navigate the streets and sidewalks. if you have to get anywhere, take the Metro. Bucharest traffic at evening rush hour is horrendous. But Bucharest itself has come a long way from the urban hell hole we remembered from the early 1990s. The shops are smart, lots of trendy bars and cafes, good restaurants, definately not the Bucharest I remember from fifteen years ago when all was grey and dreary. Believe me, in the 1990s Bucharest was one of the least attractive cities in the world. That's changing, but it takes an awful big heart to love Bucharest. The dreariest building of all is the former Palace of Nicolae Ceauşescu , now the Palace of the Parliament.

Started by order of the increasingly unstable Nicolae Ceauşescu in 1984, the construction of the Palace required demolishing much of Bucharest's historic district, including 19 Orthodox Christian churches, six Jewish synagogues, three Protestant churches (plus eight relocated churches), and 30,000 residences. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the Palace is the world's largest civilian administrative building most expensive administrative building, and heaviest building. But the newer Bucharest is a series of surprises, especially if you knew the old one. On the up side, I found Europe's best hamburger in a small "French" bistro on Piata Romana, a place that advertised itself simply as "Soups and Meats."The bun was a bit tough but the meat was perfect... good beef, medium rare. Hungary doesn't have a single eatery that can produce a burger anything like this... none of us know why... it is so sad... but Bucharest definately takes the blue ribbon for east European burgers. There were non-burger items to try while I was in romania, but more on them later... I never rush a post when discussing tripe soup and ground spiced meatwad products like mici.

Halloween in Hungary

We don't do Halloween in Hungary. We have "All Saints Day" - known as "mindszentnap". Hungary is a Christian nation, give or take a few hundred thousand Jews (like me) Muslims (like them) and Buddhists (like the band Belga) but by and large Hungarians are not a very practicing religious lot. Most religious holidays are taken as days off, shoppping holidays, a time for family meals, and Hungarians are not generally attracted to hard core fundamentalism or religious revivalism. Christmas and Easter are celebrated but generally are occasions for family get-togethers. The biggest religious holiday, however, may be November 1 - All Saint's day - when everybody heads out to the cemetery to lay wreaths and light candles for the Dead. Everybody. The crowds were insane. Essentially, it is the celebration of the Hungarian Ancestor Cult. Which is actually the most genuine form of family worship you can find. There are traffic jams at all the cemeteries and flower sellers gang up at the intersections. Everybody gears up to tend the family grave sites. No cost is spared. If you die Hungarian, you can at least expect a day each year where your family tosses some serious cash for you. Grave tending is hard work. And you don't attend to it every day. We stopped into a local grocery for some water and we saw a special on gravestone cleaning fluid. This is not something you would find in an American Walmart.... "Gravestone Cleaner"We rode our bikes yesterday a few miles west out to Rakospalota and just happened to be by one of the main cemeteries, which is on the way to the Polus Center, a spectacularly sad shopping mall that has one of the only Army Surplus stores left in Budapest (cheap army cargo pants are hard to pass up.) People crowded the streets, flower and candle sellers did a huge business, and we had to check out the action inside the boneyard... Candle lighting is very important on All Saint's Day - if you travel past a cemetery at night it is like a pre-industrial light show. The interesting discovery were the specialized glass grave houses that Gypsy families erect to protect their graves from the elements.The names on these graves are from the Lovari Gypsy family groups - some of the most traditional of the Roma tribes in east Europe. They maintain very specific traditions about keeping things "Roma" separate from things not Roma. Such as grave space. And so they erect these huge glass houses over their graves. Some of the graves had Roma-specific symbolism like horses carved ointo the stones: this person,with the very Lovari name of "Raffael" was nicknamed "Benga" - "devil". Lest we forget...I dont really miss Halloween - the trick or treating thing has never caught on in Europe and I don't really miss it, but the costume party aspect of the holiday has been growing. Hey - who doesn't want another excuse for an office party? But I really respect the Hungarians' strong hold on the tradition of All Saints Day. You may be gone, but you ain't forgotten.

the National Cake of the Year! Flóra Cukrászda, Zugló

By now, summer has definately left the building. It lasted a nice long bit into October, but right now Budapest has grey skies, howling winds, cold rain, and we face another six months of that grey, noxious east European cold that reminds one that as regards climate Hungary is, essentially, the European equivalent of the US' midwest. Think Ohio or Indiana in winter. OK, you can now stop thinking about it. Sorry. That ends our happy routine of a daily coffee break at neighborhood outdoor cafe. Until last week, we had wonderful, warm fall weather, and we would often stop by the nearby Flóra Cukrászda on Erzsébet Királyné utja in Zugló for a coffee and a slice of cake. Not just any cake, but the National Cake of the Year! The Flóra is only one of our neighborhood pastry, ice cream and coffee parlors, but since it is near and has a couple of outdoor tables, it gets most of our custom. And it features the last few years worth of "national cakes." Such as the "Szatmar Plum Cake" seen above, winner of the 2009 National cake award. Apparently, each summer the National Pastry Bakers Association holds a competition for the best cake to represent a national birthday cake on the national holiday of August 20th, and our local cukraszda features these prominently on their top shelf.

And these are goooood... given that pastry and cake baking are something Hungarians do very well, it is frightening to see how well they can outdo each other on a yearly basis. These babies go for about FT 400 a slice, which is not bad compared to downtown cakes or anything you might encounter in any other European city. You are getting the best slice of cake in the civilized world (outside of Milan, I mean) for two bucks. You just can not beat that. Even if you don't like cakes. I don't know where the Flóra gets its cakes - they are certainly not baked on the premises - but they do take pride in their quality and they are always fresh. Fresh cake and coffee is something we absolutlely take for granted in Budapest and something we always miss when we go abroad. We're spoiled. We know it. We like it.

We don't actually eat cake that often, but when we do we like to do it outside in the late morning, taking out time and enjoying a sunny day. Well, that's over with until next May, it seems. Around this time of year all the outdoor cafes pack in their tables and Budapest goes into Arctic Explorer survival mode, huddled down in their heated ice dugouts waiting for the next planeload of supplies to be dropped onto the icy wastes of McMurdo Sound. For the next few month we will gnaw on our hard rations of seasonal beigli and kifli until the sun comes out, the tables return, and the new cake of the year returns to reign again.

On another note: Fumie posted a video she took from our MuPa concert on her youtube page. She had full permission to do photography at the hall, so she stuck her digital camera in video mode on the edge of the stage during the encore. Since we both only use our little Nikon Coolpix digital cameras for video, we aren't going to win any cinematography awards soon, but this is what we have - way too many Jews, Magyars, and Hutsuls singing and playing at once.

Big Night in Budapest: The Naye Gig with the Técső Band

Our concert of Di Naye Kapelye with the Técső Band at the Budapest Palace of Arts on October 1 went well - considering the logistics of getting everybody together, rehearsed, and playing while speaking in in six languages simultanesously. The operative languages in this group are mainly Hungarian and Hutsul Ruthenian, although I speak rudamentary Romani (Gypsy) with Ivan, the Técső fiddler, who is the only member who doesn't speak Hungarian. Yankl speaks a bit of Magyar, but since he hadn't been in Hungary in four years it was justifiably rusty. Six languages per rehearsal or gig. Just try that in your local bluegrass band.

It was a blast just leading a band of this size - something I have only experienced while teaching Klezmer music workshops, in which case it isn't like you are really fronting a band as much as leading the High School orchestra in band practice. I think this was also the first time the Técső Band played a full blown concert hall - they usually play folk festivals and bars, but they were mighty impressed with the hall's acoustics and the blue ribbon treatment that one gets backstage at the Palace of Arts.

When you have that many musicians - and none of us play from music notation - you've got to get a rehearsal in, just to shake out the bugs and eliminate those awkward surprises. When I was just starting out in music there were bands that I played in where everybody would just stop onstage and look at each other when somebody missed a cue or made a mistake. A professional musician is not necessarily guaranteed to not make a mistake now and then - he is paid to act like it never happened.

The evening before the concert we had an open rehearsal in the basement of the Siraly in the seventh district, mainly to run through the tunes we would play together. After a while friends drifted in and we ended up playing for a full blast klezmer dance session. Veteran Klezmer dance teacher Sue Foy led the freylakhs, and it wasn't surprising that Joska joined in seeming to know the dance already. We also had both of our clarinet players along for the ride. When you really want to blow an audience away, use two clarinetists and two lead fiddlers. Works like a charm. Our main man when playing internationally is Yankl Falk, from Portland Oregon. But Yankl can only get to Europe for the longer tours, so a lot of the local work is taken by Janos Barta, who was one of our first clarinetists and who now leads the Veszprem Klezmer Band.Our next gig (without the Técső Band, alas, but with the guest appearnce of New York Klezmer fiddle prodigy Jake Shulmen-Ment whose new CD "A Redele" is now out) will be in Bucharest on November 4 at the Museum of the Romanian Peasant concert hall. (Clubul Țăranului la Muzeul Țăranului Român, Şos. Kisseleff, Nr. 3) A little taste of what Jake does: with Raoul Rothenblatt (bass) and Pete Rushevsky on tsimbl playing a set of Klezmer fiddle tunes from collections I gathered in Iasi fifteen years ago. Jake does my stuff better than I do!

Di Nayes and Técsői Banda at the Budapest Palace of Arts: Thursday October 1

On Thursday, October 1, Di Naye Kapelye plays a concert with the Técsői Banda at the Budapest Palace of Artists. This is a pretty rare event - due to the arcane atmosphere surrounding anything involving Jewish music in Hungary, we rarely give public performances in Budapest. Our last formal concert was, I believe, in 1998. We tour all over Europe, we play for local Jewish community events (Hassidic weddings, brisses, call for special rates!) and we sometimes play the unadvertised Budapest seventh district underground club networks. We do play an occasional festival or concert gig outside of Budapest. But Budapest itself... well due to circumstances far beyond our control, is kind of off limits to us. Buy me a beer sometime and I can explain it in person. It's... Hungary... It is a surprising and convoluted tale. So this particular concert - at the grand and fancy "MuPa" - is a welcome chance to play for our home town fans and friends who otherwise only know us from our packaged digital CD selves. Yes: we actually do exist on an analog plane. It is kind of neat to walk around town and see your face on a poster on every downtown street corner - sort of a minor rock star moment. Very minor. A little unnerving too - Budapest is not a place I want to be seen as a celebrity. Anytime I show up on some recycled TV folk music show taped a decade ago my whole neighborhood goes into ga-ga celebrity mode and suddenly i walk into the butcher shop or try and buy asparagus and I get confronted with "Mr. Artist! (yes, this is how they address you, without any sense of irony and with full celebrity awe) I saw you on the TV last night!" I cherish my local anonymity. But standing in front of paying audiences playing fiddle is what I've done my whole life. People keep asking if I get nervous playing concert halls. My usual answer is: no - stick me behind a fiddle and I am fine - but if you ask me to take the controls of a small airplane and land it after the pilot has had a heart attack, that's where I would get nervous. Playing rural Moldavian Jewish fiddle is what I do, whether in my living room or in front of six thousand screaming drunk Belgian folk music hippies (a distraction factor equivalent to playing for twenty talkative and drunk Vizhnitzer Hasids.)Playing with the Técsői Banda is a thrill - these are traditional musicians who still play in a context in which their music isn't "folkorized." I have to mash the two ensembles together at a rehearsal tomorrow night and fine tune the beast, but it should be noisy and ragged but right. When we recorded the newest CD, "Traktorist" I had the idea of using a couple of the Carpathian Jewish tunes that I had learned from the Técsői Banda, and then suddenly they showed up in Budapest so I took them into the old Hungarian Army Choir studios and we recorded the pieces that are used on the CD. It was the last time I played with the tsymbaly/cimbalom player Misha Csernovec, who passed away a few months later. The band has been working as a trio ever since, but will be using our cimbalom player a bit at the thursday concert. But Misha is sorely missed - he was one of the best traditional hutsul tsymbaly players, and they aren't making them like they used to any more.I have to run out and pick up Jack "Yankl" Falk at the airport in the morning. Yankl lives in Oregon, in the far distant USA, and when we have a major gig we fly him in. He's been busy the last two weeks - as a freelance hazan, a cantor specialized in singing Jewish liturgical music - he usually travels to sing at Jewish congregations for the high holidays of Rosh Hoshanna and Yom Kippur. This year he just finished a gig in Indiana, and in the past he conducted services for the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland: Anchors OyVey! Yom Kippur ended yesterday, so Yankl first flew back to Oregon and then hops on a plane to Budapest. I expect he's gonna be run ragged by erev shabbes. And what do you feed an observant Jew? Kosher cold cuts and sausage from the Orthodox Kosher butcher on Dob utca, of course. Having traveled all over Europe on tour with Yankl, you eventually get the knack of feeding your furry frum friends. We have made pit stops at virtually every kosher food shop in Europe during our many tours, and even fended off the dreaded "kolbász Maasai" in the town of Gouda, in Holland. (It was actually Árpi Bácsi, our 73 year old guest cimbalom player from Transylvania. The nomadic Maasai of Kenya believe that all the cattle in the world belong to them and that by raiding other tribes' cattle, they are simply reclaiming what is already rightfully theirs. Uncle Árpi felt the same way about kolbász. Any and all kolbász.)I found this little video on Youtube lately - a bit that wasn't used in the final cut of the film "The Last Kolomeyke" - me and the Técsői Banda singing Michael Alpert's song "Chernobyl" together at the Castro bar a few years ago. This was in a bar late at night. Now you can see why I never, ever allow myself or any of my band members to step onto a formal stage after having had anything to drink. It really doesn't make the musical experience noticeably better... A little bit of the film - which has aired on Hungarian TV and is actually a very well done documentary, is the cut below: