The Year in Pork. Part 1.

Hungarian Products!

This year has been a very, very good year for pork. Mr. Pig, the provider of the other white meat has provided us with may excellent meals spanning many widely divergent cuisines this year, and as my budget allows, all of them have been in the affordable to dirt cheap category. I like pork. There, I said it. I like pork with the like that dare not speak its name, the affection that only comes from having avoided pig meat for something like fifteen years because, well, God told me not to eat pork. Yes. I was a deist pork avoider for many years. I am not a religious man. I am a basic simple Jew. For years I shuddered at the mere idea of eating pig meat. I don't observe orthodox practice. I rarely square off on questions involving "faith" although in my case the main modern theological questions consist of "should I order the ham sandwich?" and " you mean like, no bacon?" For many years I did not eat pork. I wasn't exactly kosher, but like a lot of my tribe, I drew the line at piggus scrofus, the lowly porker. The pig was off limits.

At the Szimpla Kert Sunday bio market.

That changed when I moved to Hungary, where pork is the main meat, eaten three times a day and in the afternoon there is even a snack called "bacon time" in which guys pull out long pocket knives and hack away a slab of smoked bacon to get in the mood for a bit of evening drinking. If you go to Heaven, you eat what the Angels eat, right? In Hungary, the Seraphim and Cherubim chow down on sausages and smoked back fat. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, if God did not want us to eat pork, then why did He make it taste so good? And why would he give us such a wide selection of pork products to choose from? What kind of perverse and vengeful deity would dangle jionts of smoked pork hock and juicy links of Debreceni sausage in front of your face and then tell you not to eat this? Forget all those vexing questions of "why art thou forsaking me"... just answer me this: why did you make Spam such an addictive snack?

Buapest's Bosznyak ter Market just before Easter

So there, I admit it. I am no longer eating kosher. Nope. Like those Sephardic Marrano Jewish poets of the fifteenth century, I extol the dripping lard that runs down my beard and gives me away as a sausage eating Jew. I admit it. Actually, a brief skim through the earlier entries of this blog would also confirm my rather public consumption of pork, but... heck, I have come to appreciate a juicy bit of khazzerei. And where else but Hungary will you find \pig meat in all its glorious porkographic splendor? Another good thing about pork: it is cheap. Maybe not in the chiochi places you eat, especially in the US where pork was relatively rare outside of the south and Puerto Rican neighborhoods until recently, but in east Europe pork is the lunch meat of those of us who want to go carnivorous for lunch on a budget.  Let's start with the normal stuff: this is what I ate for lunch for many years while working in downtown Pest. Pork stew on galushka dumplings at a stand up lunch window in the Rakoczi ter market.

The default option for lunch!

The Hungarian forint has inflated, but at dollar rates it remains the best three dollar lunch in Europe. Three bucks is also the going rate in next door Slovakia for a lunch plate of halushky. Notice the linguistic proximity to the Hungarian galuska. Yes, they are both pronounced almost the same way. Yes, they are both basic pastas made of flour and eggs. But the Slovak national lunch means dumplings covered in sheep cheese and bacon. Yes, fry the bacon bits and pour the hot grease and bacon all over the melting cheese. It's good for you!

Big Plate o' Slovak goodness!

This is lunch. In Slovakia. For three bucks. There are many reasons to love Slovakia. The fact that it is nearby and offers good trout fishing is the main draw for me. Buy when I am there I manage to both fill up my trout quota and my bacon quota for the year. Slovak food is closely related to Hungarian cuisine, with an emphasis on honest, peasant starch based dishes featuring potato and pig. If it consists of spuds and porker, you can be sure the Slovaks will make a hefty dinner out of it for under five bucks. But the best local option for a good plate of pork is to make it at home, and this is when I really appreciate living in a neighborhood with a good market. Pigs head is a regular offer at my local market, which has two butchers who specialize in offal and bits of animals that would normally be offered to cat food manufacturing concerns. This wonderful slab of snout and head went into a home made souse last winter. Total cost: about four dollars.

One of the first things I notice when I come to Hungary or anywhere in east Europe after traveling to the United States is that the pork here... tastes like pork. To which my American friends can argue about artisanal pigs, and free range pigs and all kinds of pigs but the pork uniformly tastes like cardboard in the USA - in the states I stick to beef. This summer I will be back in Romania, which offers some of the best pork in the world: similar to Hungarian pork, and often prepared by Transylvanian Hungarians themselves, but somehow porkier, piggier, somehow more swine-a-licious in flavor that the stuff we eat in Budapest. This is a plate from the incredible cabbage and pork specialty restaurant in downtown Cluj (in Hungarian: Kolozsvar) in central Transylvania known as the Varzaria, or "Cabbagerie" This is one of the best plates of food available in Europe - by a mile - and that includes Northern Italy, Paris, much of Portugal and Fife's place in Split, Croatia. This is what Jiro would eat if he wasn't dreaming about making sushi in a Tokyo subway passage. This is Pig heaven for under five bucks.

May Day: An International Celebration of Commies and Pork

Remember the Working class? Those hard toiling, repressed masses that were supposed to rise up and overthrow their top-hatted Mr. Monopoly slave masters in a Glorious Revolution of the Proletariat? Arise, ye trodden masses and all that? Somewhere along the road that is the history of progressive movements deriving from the mind of Hegel, the Workers of the World seem to have gone the way of the buffalo. Where once great herds of organized workers covered the industrial earth, today only consumers and interest groups graze the denuded plains. Today the majority of people you meet would never identify themselves as "workers."  Today we know them as Employees. Or "Consumers" and occasionally as "voters". But never Workers.

The last stand of the mimeograph machine. 

Well, you should have been out at the May Day celebrations in Budapest's City Park last weekend. May Day - which is celebrated as International Workers Day in memory of the Haymarket Riot (which occurred on May 4, 1886 in Chicago and, apparently, involved Workers. And Police shooting at them.) is celebrated in almost every country in the world, with a few exceptions including the United States, which celebrates Labor Day in September instead, just so we can avoid that awkward, nasty bit called "solidarity with the Workers of the World." Elsewhere it is a great day for strolling, as unions and political parties set up tents and festivals in an effort to show that they, and not some other, more honest or efficient organization, should truly represent the Working Man of Today.

Lenin advising the stockbrokers.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Budapest City Park. Traditionally, the post 1989 Hungarian left has chosen the park to host their celebrations, while the various center and right wing parties, of which only the right and far right exist today, go elsewhere. (Jobbik, the Neo-Nazi wannabe Party holds its celebrations out on the Boat Factory Island in the Danube. For three days, which kind of goes against the idea of a holiday called "May Day" but they are not really into that whole "rules" kind of thing.) Traditionally, Hungarian May Day was celebrated by party organizations offering free beer and hot dogs (virsli) for the workers, obviously based on the opinion that Workers could not appreciate a nice aged steak, a plate of chilled oysters, a  healthy tossed salad, and a vintage bottle of French red wine.

Swine-o-licious!

Today the beer is not really free unless you have a union card that gets you into one of the special tent areas, and the hot dogs have been replaced with all kinds of other pork products. It has become, essentially, a festival of the Capitalist Pig. The Cholesterol-a-thon of the spring season, if you will. Now, don;t get me wrong, I like eating the other white meat. Yes, it goes against everything that has defined the culinaria of my narrow ethnic confines for millenia, but if you have to swallow swine, this would be the place to put away your religious concerns - jump on in, the lard is fine!

Lard bread:  Hello Lipitor!

If you are on a budget, or simply not that hungry, there is the old standby of Hungarian bar food and student snack stands: lard bread. Pure pig fat spread with red onions and paprika. If you want a vegetarian option, there are langos, the fried potato dough treat that gets far more respect than it deserves. Other vegetarian options include french fries (pre-frozen for your convenience!) and the ever popular plate of pickles. That is it.

Pig knuckle ham: meaty chunks of greasy goodness!

If you need any pork, however, there are dozens of stands to accommodate you. Those ham chunks? They are pork knuckle. They are fatty, fully of chewy skin and cartiledge, and if God eats pork while sitting in front of television - and face it, why else would He forbid us, His chosen people, from eating it if He weren't keeping all the good stuff for Himself - this is what He eats. Sausages, ham steaks, and dozens of stands offering a new food fad, the soggy flat bread called lepeny served as a Hungarian version of a taco. No, it isn't traditional, or historical, or even creative. But they are cxheap, and if you know what the Workers want, they want cheap. I will devote an entire other post to these quasi-tacos as well as other fast festival foods blatantly masquerading as "traditional Hungarian specialties" sometime in the futre. Now, of course, the real reason we are here is to celebrate the workers. In the corner of the City Park near the castle is the area traditionally set aside for the old time, hard core, Communist Stalinoid left.

The Workers Party: Still searching for meaning.

This includes the Hungarian Workers Party, the party that refused to admit defeat in 1989 and has since been run by Gyula Thurmer, a hard line old believer in the principles of Lenin and Marx. They garner dozens of votes each election year and have been at this for years. But they do put on a good party, and their May Day areas are one of the few public places that Gypsies feel comfortable celebrating in public, which is a rather telling symbol about the state of ethnic relations in Hungary today. Just down the road was the "Janos Kadar Circle of Friends" which is a club of old time Commies (and I think they would prefer we use that particular term) who enjoy ticking people off by supporting one of the most unpopular slugs in the history of Hungarian politics.

Are we attractive yet?

Think of it: with these guys in charge our future would be so much brighter!  Living up to the ideals of Janos Kadar, the man who betrayed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 and led the Hungarians into their grumpily mediocre "Goulash Communism" period. What lofty ideals could these evidently vertebrate minds be hiding? Just in case you were not sure who the Janos Kadar Circle support, they were offering match boxes emblazened with the likeness of two of their favorite contemporary world leader.

Yes, that's right. Hugo Chavez and... Bashir Assad. Somebody sat down and decided that the butcher of Syria would be a great poster boy for a Hungarian celebration. And you wonder why the progressive world looks at Hungary and weeps?

Táncháztalálkozó 2014: The Unpronounceable Power of Music.

Spring came to Budapest in full force this weekend with sunny days, high temperatures. The Hungarian elections are happening in a week, and that means the weekend was marked by mass marches and election rallies featuring stump speeches by cognitively challenged baboons who display the moral compass of Nigerian email scammers. But,alas, I digress... We all know the genuine harbinger of Budapest spring in March is the national folk festival, the Táncháztalálkozó.

An intimate context for traditional culture.

Held in the uniquely inappropriate venue of the Papp Lászlo Sports Stadium (formerly Népstadion, for all of us Comrades who remember the old days.) As festivals go it does the best it can given the circumstances, that circumstance being a huge cement salad bowl Arena designed for just about anything but a folk festival. The organizers - the Guild of Dance Houses - have a lot of experience finding innovative work-arounds for the shortcomings of the venue, mainly because the crowds converging on the festival are so ravenously enthusiastic that they would enjoy a festival in a septic tank as long as folk musicians were playing in it. You probably get my drift by now: I hate being inside the frigging stadium almost as much as I hate being inside an Ikea. I may not be alone in that opinion, but I think I am definitely not in the majority.

Stock up on all your Moldavian instrument needs!

Heck, a lot of people like folk festivals inside an Ikea, wandering though the maze of Blögg and  Sündqvist and Duda and Koboz browsing for something that suits their personal taste. (Ikea, at least, has meatballs.) Anyway, I had my say about the festival back in 2009, and now I go simply to meet old friends and hear good music, which the Táncháztalálkozó has in spades.

Two Generations of the Csóori Family band, masters of music from Szék

I live in Budapest, where you can find a Hungarian dance house pretty much five nights a week, so I can seem pretty jaded about the folk music scene here. For younger enthusiasts, especially those who live outside of the capitol city, this festival is the high point of the year. You can browse the crafts market for quality items for your folk dance costuming needs, or even pick up hard to find folk instruments as well as the teaching materials you will need to master them. The main arena area is given to mass dance teaching during the day, with bands taking the main stage for shorter sets of dance music.

 Márta Sebestyén and the Vujicsics Band

When we got there the legendary Vujicsics band was burning through some of the local Serbian minority (bet you didn't know that the northernmost Serbian ethnic settlements are north of Budapest!) repertoire when suddenly the world famous and perennially cute singer Márta Sebestyén appeared for a quick photo op. And who was in the front row snapping the photo but our old friend Béla Kása.

Béla Kása 

Béla Kása is a photographer whose dedication to the traditions of Hungarian music is legendary. He has been tramping the back roads of Transylvania in search of the roots of this music since the early 1970s, and his work has found a home in galleries the world over. Kása didn't just document the tancház mevement: he was a part of establishing and spreading it. This year the Hungarian folk dance movement lost one of the key personalities that launched the revitalization of folk music in the early 1970s when Béla Halmos passed away. Bélabácsi was honored with a photo exhibit in one of the upstairs concert rooms depicting his decades of untiring work to propagate the tradition of Hungarian instrumental music. It was fitting that the same room hosted a special event celebrating the publication of Muzsikás 40, a new book looking at the history of the band Muziskás after four decades of music. Muzsikás was one of the first bands to form in the early 1970s under the influence of Béla Halmos and the dance house movement. They were also the most innovative and attracted a huge following, rising to pop star status without ever abandoning their roots in village music, and were eventually the band that broke through to international fame.

Writer Béla Szilárd Jávorszky has collected their histories and anecdotes and put together a fascinating portrait in his new book Muzsikás 40, which is highly recommended. The all too brief Muzsikás session was followed by a blazing set by the Buda Folk Band, comprising of some of the young hot shots of the folk music scene and featuring no less than two offspring from the original members of  Éri Márton and Csóori Sándor, Jr.

The Buda Folk Band

This is the most innovative and enjoyable band I have heard in years, and I will write more about them and their new CD Magyar Világi Népzene. in the near future. It is the Cd to buy this year: traditional, modern, but most of all, tasteful, well thought out, and it sounds like a bunch of guys having a heck of a lot of fun. But I had yet to wander about. Jam sessions are what make a festival for me. Alas, the festival layout leaves only the bar as a suitable area for jamming, which is located in a semi outdoor area that is, in real life, part of the underground parking lot of a bus station. Ideal for noise, not so much for music. The energy level is high, as is the decibel level, but nothing cuts through the ambient noise like a set of bagpipes.

Hungarian Bagpipe jam session

These two younger pipers were playing without their drone pipes attached, which is common when more than one piper plays. Traditionally, Hungarian bagpipes - the duda - were never played in pairs. There is even a saying in Hungarian that "two pipers do not fit in one tavern." But modern innovations have improved the instrument to the level where they can actually be tuned, so tradition be damned. Of course, the folk bar area has the best and most spontaneous music if anything like a traditional context for this music can be found inside a cement bus-station-sports stadium, it will be where booze can flow, and that is where we found our friends the Codoba family band from the central Transylvanian village of Palatka playing.

Lőrincz and Florin Codoba leading the Palatka Band.

The Palatka band is probably the most active of traditional style gypsy bands still working in full form. They still perform using two lead fiddles and two kontra violas, and maintain the old style of harmonizing modal melodies using major chords which characterizes the band music of central Transylvania. Presently the leader of the band is Codoba Lőrincz, whose brothers Marton and Bela were the double fiddle pair that defined the style for a generation of Hungarian folk fiddlers, but Florin, the son of the late Marton Codoba, has been taking front man honors more and more of late, and often comes to Budapest to guest with local bands playing in the Palatka style. This is the music that I love, the stuff that brought me here so many years ago, and the stuff that keeps me here. This is the reason I drag myself into the cement sports stadium. This is the sound of life itself.

I like Small Fish and I Cannot Lie.

Barbunya: Not a political debate.

So much going on in our little corner of the world that I have been neglecting to comment on my blog. I had wanted to express an opinion on the Ukrainian situation. I wanted to write about the serious threats the Crimean Tatars are now facing. I wanted to examine the current Hungarian election campaigns and the controversies surrounding the Hungarian Jewish community's decision to boycott the FIDESZ led government's revisionist Holocaust Memorial Year plans. And maybe I will - but this blog has remained a politically conflict free zone as much as possible. In the meanwhile, I will address something much more positive, domestic and closer to home. Hamsi var!

Fresh anchovy and tiny fish who will never see adulthood. 

We have fish. Fresh fish. Anchovies! In Budapest! I like small fish and I cannot lie. Right after we got back to Budapest last summer I found a small video documentary on the web about Hungary's Muslims, and part of the story focused on the opening of a new Turkish market in Budapest. We had never heard about it. I pretty much know all of Budapest's limited ethnic food offerings. Budapest has a number of smaller Mid-Eastern grocers and a few halal butchers. Hungary has a population of Turks and other Muslims, mostly involved in business and transport industries, and so for the last two decades at least had some local butchers and markets to provide halal foods and a taste of home, but never anything as extensive as the Turkish markets in Germany or Austria. We tracked down the market and found it: The Troya Supermarket, in Budapest's 8th district up near the old Teleki ter market, is a full service modern Turkish supermarket that seems to have been airlifted from the suburbs of Istanbul and dropped into the eighth district. Our lives have changed.

Troya gets a fresh delivery of fish every week from Turkey - bright-eyed, red-gilled not smelly fresh fish. And even better, not expensive fish. (Hot tip: ask the butchers when the fish are being delivered and go early before the Middle Eastern Diplomats buy it all out.) Fish in landlocked countries is never cheap, but check them against other markets offering smellier, pre-frozen fish. Yes, it is entirely affordable. If you live in Hungary, you know how outlandish this sounds. Fresh ocean fish? Nawwww... can't happen. Hungarians eat lake fish: carp, catfish, perch. Most Hungarians find the taste of ocean fish strange and dry. Believe me: I have traveled all over Europe with regular, non-yuppie Hungarians in places like Portugal and had to learn to say things in Portuguese like "Excuse me, Chef. I see you have prepared a perfectly cooked fillet of sole for our dinner tonight, and I appreciate this sincerely, but my colleagues would like you to return their servings to the fryer and fry them until crisp and dry and stiff like the fish they are used to eating in Hungary? Thank you!" Yes. I can say that in Portuguese, because I had to say it every day. Twice a day for a month. So, after decades of following rumors of fresh fish in Budapest that always led to a freezer full of packaged hake, we were skeptical. But stepping into Troya was like stepping off the ferry in Kadikoy. All our favorites were there.

Istavrit (above) and bream 

Fresh çupra or gilthead bream (dorado) as well as istavrit,  (scad or horse mackeral) well known to anybody who has hung out with the fishermen on the Galata Bridge. There has been fresh palamut (bonito) and even barbunya, the small red mullet that are one of the Mediterranean's most elegant and pricey delicacies, although here they were priced the same as any other small fish - meaning we bought a half kilo without argument and were gobbling them down that night.

Fried red mullet and anchovies.

And how do they keep these babies fresh? Turks know something about this. For one thing, the fish is already gutted and mostly scaled. They also dowse the fish in fresh ice water regularly. There is not much you can teach a Turk about fresh fish. They already know. Winter is the season for the Black Sea anchovy: hamsi. When hamsi season arrives, its party time. Muslim Turks don't usually drink in public. Instead they eat anchovies in public. Hamsi isn't just a fish. Hamsi is news.

Hamsi is more than a food to Turks around the Black Sea - including Istanbul. It is a regional national symbol. Think wine and France. Wurst and Germany. Hungary and paprika. Sinop and hamsi. Trabzon and hamsi. Ordu and hamsi. Rize and hamsi. Ardeşen and hamsi. We traveled around the Turkish Black Sea coast some years ago, and yes,they do eat a lot of hamsi. A lot of restaurants in towns like Trabzon or Rize served only hamsi while we were there. When the hamsi arrive in late autumn there are hamsi festivals and hamsi eating contests and hamsi dances. I have CDs of local Black Sea pop bands playing the addictive fiddle music of the kemenche and singing endless verses about either hamsi or tea. Singing about tea? Really? But I can understand singing about hamsi. If you only know anchovy from the salty nubs packed in cans and tossed on pizzas you don't know anchovy at all. Fresh hamsi do not have that oily, fishy flavor that a lot of people recoil from. You can eat them whole or easily fillet them using only your fingernail before cooking, leaving little finger length boneless butterfly fillets. Turks eat them fried, boiled, baked, made into hamsi pilaf, baked into corn bread, pickled, or even dried.

Hamsi pie

We like them fried into a hamsi pita, or hamsi pie: boned fillets fried on a skillet, flipped like an omelet onto a plate and then slipped back into the skillet and fried crisp on the other side. We also made some pickled hamsi. Raw, boned hamsi is marinated in vinegar and salt, rinsed and them mixed to marinate with onions, (in this case, some wild ramps as well: Hungarian medve hagyma which are the first fresh wild veg of the season and available now) and diced hot pepper in olive oil.

Anchovy ceviche with wild ramps

The flavor of fresh anchovy was enough to transport me to the Mediterranean enough so that I hardly remembered that I was in the middle of East Central but Mostly East in Fact Awfully Close to the Balkans Europe in the middle of a mudslinging electoral campaign while Putin annexes the Crimea. So much to worry about. But here in our little reserve on the edge of Zuglo we were happy. But there is something that makes me even happier: meat. Lovely meat. Lamb. 

Sorry, but perfectly  roasted lamb is not an open source resource.

Hungarians don’t produce a lot of lamb anymore, and what we have bought here was pretty tough and tasteless. When Hungary lost 2/3 of its real estate after the First World War a lot of that territory was highland where the Magyar sheep raising tradition was strongest. If you want good Hungarian lamb or mutton stew or sheep cheese today you are best advised to head to Slovakia or Transylvania for it. Over the years the Hungarian taste for lamb and sheep cheese (in fact, the entire cheese making tradition) have shrunk to an afterthought, and butchers don;t really know how to treat mutton except as a fluffier, less bacony version of a pig. Search no more. 

Perhaps the best butcher in Hungary.

The Troya Market has brought in expert butchers from Turkey to produce some of the best lamb and beef you can buy in Hungary. The young Hungarian guy working with them is probably one of the most skilled and knowledgeable professional meat cutters I have met in Hungary, full of accurate tips on the preperation of lamb liver and lamb meat balls. They actually have a farm here where they are producing top quality lamb (as in not imported from New Zealand.) And so… for my birthday… Fumie treated me to a leg of lamb. Garlic, rosemary, spuds… an hour and a half roasting in the oven… pink, juicy, delicate, lovely lamb. Troya Market: teşekkür ederim! 

TROYA Török Élelmiszer Üzlet
1081 Budapest, Népszínház utca 40
Open daily 6 am - 10 pm
http://www.troyamarket.hu/

BUÉK = Boldog új évet kívánok!

Time to stock up on necessary items!

For those of you still dependant on the Gregorian Calendar, I would like to wish you all a belated Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, or as we say in Hungary, BUÉK! Hungarians love abbreviations, and BUÉK stands in for "Boldog új évet kívánok" a clattering shower of Uralic syllables meaning "I wish you a Happy New Year." The Holiday season in Hungary is a bit different that the one we are accustomed to in the English speaking world (or the Prime Fringe Universe, if you wish.)  For one thing, Santa Claus comes on Dec. 6, but it is the baby Jesus Himself who puts out the children's gifts on the morning of Dec. 25. The traditional Christmas roast turkey is replaced by the traditional Hungarian carp soup and slices of beigli, a dense poppy seed or nut roll cake that is related to a bagel on only the most distant verbal terms. Don't like carp soup? Too bad. You are going to eat carp soup. 

Fresh carp, $6.00 a kilo. 

Not only do Magyars love carp, they like it as fresh as possible, so they stand in line at outdoor markets waiting for the live carp trucks to deliver the swimming, living goods. You can buy it filleted, but why not take it home and let it swim around in the bathtub for a bit? As you can guess, at our house we are not big fans of carp. there are other fish available, such as these small sterlets (mini sturgeons) and farm raised trout swimming around in some murky tank. I am a trout fisherman. A fly fisherman at that. Tie my own flies and everything. Seeing a trout in a fish tank carousing with sterlets... is scandalous. I would rather eat a sardine. 

The love that dare not speak its name.

And you know all those public safety alerts that warn you to avoid Christmas tree fires during this season? Hungarians put real candles – burning candles - and firework sparklers in the branches of their very real fir trees. As far as I know, their trees never erupt into flame. And mind you, when they do this they are drunk. Either they are such skilled pryrotechnicians that they can avoid catastrophic fires while drunk or else our public safety officials have been lying to us about putting candles in trees. 

What Hungarians do really well is shopping. Christmas markets pop up all over the place, offering the usual low to mid end offerings of scarves, bags, CDs, crafts and folksy kitsch to make your holiday giving so much easier this year. And of course, there is always a lesson to be learned, although sometimes we are not sure what. The Budapest Police - always a bunch of fun loving, creative guys - had this tableau set up in the middle of the Moszkva tér (oopsie! Széll Kálmán tér!) Christmas market. 

Budapest Police Communication Strategy in action!

Apparently, the boys in blue (grey, actually) want you to avoid drunk driving, or perhaps they are hoping to get a wrecked car for Christmas, or else they just didn't have any place to park this. I'm sure they had something they wished to communicate. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. The important thing is that they were thinking. They were alive and cognizant, reason enough to celebrate, no? The Budapest Police have always had a bit of a communication problem. All around are more traditional gift ideas. 

Fishing socks! Why have I never owned a pair of these? Everywhere I turn there is some new discovery! The Moszkva tér book kiosk - once the main distribution center of democratic underground samizdat literature during the late communist era - now specializes in right wing crap. Don’t like the cards you were dealt by history? Choose from a broad spectrum of right wing and reactionary Hungarian literature! We’ll find convoluted explanations and name conspiracies and enemies you never even dreamed about! And it is an election year! Don't let a little lack of historical relativism ruin it for you!

I want to answer the question "Why did they hate Hitler?"

OK. that is Moszkva (er.., Széll Kálmán) square. Which is a huge metro station. Let's take the old red metro across to Pest and see what is happening in the downtown.Pest Christmas market at Deak ter!

I love bustling around Budapest at this time of year: everybody is out with pretty much the same purpose: to buy cheap plastic crap. And to eat things. All outdoor markets offer a range of foods designed to warm you up. Hot spiced wine is everywhere. At this time of year a shot of strong palinka is nothing to turn down anytime after lunch! While you browse the stands try dome Transylvanian hot sweetbread kalacs! But honestly, the downtown market is priced to serve tourists. 

This should form the basis of a very healthy snack! Salami and hot brandy! Why, yes, I will!

Ten dollar hot dogs do not appeal much to hungry Magyars who just blew their Christmas gift budget on a boar skin throw rug or a retro Lenin coffee mug. What makes those folks happy is a simple market meal, such as the bistro in the back of Bosnyak ter market out in my district. The holidays were heralded with specials such as ... fish soup... made with carp! Bosnyak tér market is always there to take care of you, any time of the year.

Fish soup FT 950. And that is a langos on the shelf.

This market snack bar may well be one of the most distinctive restaurant experiences in Budapest. We eat there quite a lot - they recognize us by now and can anticipate our orders. First of all, they serve dishes that are all but forgotten on posh downtown menus. Things like stewed lung in cream sauce with bread dumplings. Beef heart stew with dumplings. Scrambled eggs over galushka dumplings. Breaded fried anything. These were the old peasant staples of the Communist era factory lunch meal. Every day - but especially on weekends - there are interesting specials that often involve ingredients you may never have considered as "food" or never expected to see outside of a zoo. And there is nothing "fusion" going on, unless you consider somebody named Mariskanéni to be a fusion pioneer in the kitchen. And prices? Almost everything is less than FT 1000 (about $6) You may be sharing a table with some old pensioners, but the food is top notch. Also: lángos!

El Bulli has closed, but we still have the Zuglo market!

Zuglo celebrates with its own Christmas market adjacent to the main one. Complete with Barvarian oom-pah music, the beat of the future in our very own Papcsakistan! Have a good new year!

2013: The Year in Ramen

While Budapest can boast a million wonders, ramen noodles are not one of them. The Queen of the Danube lacks ramen-ya, the classic Japanese ramen shops that specializes in ramen noodle soup and gyoza, the little meaty dumplings that accompany them. I can't understand why that should be the case: Hungarians love noodle soups, and they love dumplings. They are fascinated by anything Japanese. How could they let this get away from them? There are about a dozen sushi shops around town serving raw fish to avid Magyars - a people not known for stuffing raw fish into their mouths - not to mention at least a thousand ex-pat Japanese who, to be objective, would eat Japanese food all the time if given their druthers. Yes, the Japanese are as provincial about their tastes as any Hungarian. A Magyar wants a taste of paprika in everything they eat, a Japanese expects everything to taste of sloy, fermented fish and seaweed. The world is a big and wonderful place, is it not? So no ramen in Budapest for the foreseeable future. However, by a freakish stroke of luck, we spent much of the the summer in Teaneck New Jersey. Teaneck, which is affectionately referred to by many of its native sons as "Jewtown, USA" is conveniently located near the nuclear epicenter of the western hemisphere's ramen noodle production: Sun Noodle. Sun noodle is a Japanese-Hawaiian noodle manufacturer that makes a noodle that some say are among the world's best. A few years ago they set up shop in Teterboro, New Jersey to supply the demand for high quality fresh noodles among New York's booming ramen scene. Ever since Chef David Chang started the neo-ramen shop craze a decade ago with his Momofuku Ramen in New York's east village (named after the inventor of the instant ramen noodle, Momofuku Andoh, who founded Nissan Food Products) ramen shops have sprouted all over New York. You think those chewy, springy ramen noodles were carefully crafted by hand in the back of a tiny noodle shop in Greenwich Village? Think again. They were made in New Jersey. Everything is made in New Jersey. By now, most of the better Japanese ramen franchises have set up shop around the New York area as well. Pop out of a subway station or pull into a suburban strip mall and you can usually find a decent ramen-ya waiting for you.
A good ramen-ya is like a good deli: it serves a limited menu of a comfort food but it can take a fierce pride in doing that task as close to perfect as possible. Ramen is to Japan what pizza is to New York: a slightly foreign dish (Chinese vs. Italian) that has been taken to heart, improved on, and made a central pillar of the local identity. New Yorkers are adamant about pizza (as anybody who watched Jon Stewart's Daily show pizza rant knows) because in Italy pizza is just a food. In New York it is The Food. The Japanese feel that way about ramen. I like ramen. Maybe not as much as my Significant Tokyo-born Other, who would take a train to Vienna in search of a bowl of "real" noodles. Vienna, incidentally, no longer has its two classic ramen shops, meaning that the closest decent bowl of ramen would be in Berlin, or possibly in Cracow.

Handsome Guy Gourmet Tofu stand

But a summer in New York means we can get our fill of ramen. Now, I do not drive. I don't like cars. Cars do not like me. Automobiles want to kill me, and they have tried and failed many times, which makes living in a Jersey suburb pretty much impossible for me. In order to get into New York from Teaneck I have two choices: hike up to Route 4 and catch the cheap "Spanish Bus" mini vans that run into northern Manhattan, or else the NJ Transit local bus at the end of our street, which takes us to the Mitsuwa Mall

You can have Santoka Ramen or Information, but not both.

in Edgewater, NJ, from where we can catch the Mitsuwa shopping shuttle bus to the 42nd St. Bus terminal. Mitsuwa is a full size Japanese shopping mall - complete with a giant supermarket in which you can buy Japanese toothpaste as well as fermented squid guts - but it also means I am pretty well sure that my day starts with a bowl of ramen from Santoka, which is only one of about seven different restaurant window choices on offer. There is a place offering Japanese-Chinese rice plates (hamburger and gravy on rice! Gyoza dumplings! Omrice!.) Another does udon noodles, another does tonkatsu and fried food, yet another "Kaiseki" set menus. All around ten bucks, which makes the food court a major draw for Japanese families in the New York area on weekends. Not to mention the location: Mitsuwa's food court looks out over the Hudson onto the Manhattan skyline, which alone makes it one of the more stunning dining options in the metro area.

Best panorama view of NY City available for $7.00

Santoka is oneof the leading Ramen chains in Japan, and for Fumie perhaps the main draw is the side dish of a bowl of rice with a whopping helping of salmon roe dished on top - an extravagant luxury in Japan, but here in the USA it is treated like sprinkles on an ice cream cone.

Shio Ramen, spicy miso ramen, and salmon abortion on rice. 

After picking up a few (yes, there are quite a few) of the Japanese expat and local community newspapers at Mitsuwa Fumie decided to go for the trifecta: let's try all the high end ramen-ya in the area. Next stop: Setegaya Ramen in Fort Lee. Named after a Tokyo neighborhood, this is located across the street from our favorite Japanese coffee and pastry shop, a place where you can get green tea cake and cold spaghetti sandwiches. Setegaya is a tiny place that serves only ramen and gyoza, and for lunch everybody gets the combo of... ramen and gyoza.

Setegaya set lunch.

You can order the shio (salt broth) ramen, shoyu (soy) or miso broth ramen, as well as the tsukemen ramen - ramen where the broth and noodles are served separately and combined by the diner. A bit pricier than Santoka, but still cheaper than any New York ramen-ya. How do I know that? Because the next ramen-ya on the list was New York's upscale Ippudo Ramen. Ippudo has been wowing New York's yuppoisie with its ramen noodles specializing in... noodles that are not curley.

Mo' noods.

Basically, capellini in broth. And as a special added treat, you can get a second helping of noodles plopped into your bowl after you finish the first, if you wish. Go on, make your banker happy and order the extra noodles! It was good, but I don't do posh well. Here you had to take a number and wait for a seat and eventually we were taken upstairs to the semi-industrial extra dining bar above the main floor. Good noodles, but Fumie had to have the special steamed bun with pork belly "burger" ...

Present Holy grail of New York foodies.

And what's better, I get big boyfriend points for taking Fumie to a posh midtown eatery.The big news in ramen noodles this year is something that English speakers probably don't even know about. The new thing in Japan is... a new kind of ramen noodle that comes "fresh" but you can make it at home. The days of the old dried package of ramen, and the styrofoam cup'o'soup are numbered, and Fumie has been getting care packages of these new fangled ramen noodles sent from home. Not only that, but Japanese business visitors have taken to bringing packages of these along as gifts, knowing the delight that will light up the faces on their clients and tech help when they get these "nearly fresh" ramen noodles. And yes, they are pretty darn good.

Pork belly and spinach ramen. Home made. In Hungary.