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.