Wednesday, January 01, 2025

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!

Thursday, October 31, 2024

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. 

Sunday, August 25, 2024

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.



Tuesday, July 09, 2024

Zoe Aqua: The Romanian Synagogue Concert Tour

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

The Synagogue of Satu Mare. Not the Big One.

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

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

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

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

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

Sunday, June 16, 2024

Waiting for the Kádár Rebirth

Solet: The Jewish bean stew that launched and empire

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

Raspberry soda and beet salad with horseradish at Kádár 

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

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

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

Garay tér market

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

Satan's favorite burger

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

Play it safe: make your own!

Since the end of communism, however, lángos started to get creative: sour cream and cheese appeared as toppings, and a jizz of cloyingly sweet Hungarian Globus ketchup turned it into something of a "Hungarian Pizza." Ham and salami started showing up as toppings, and now the poor lángos has become a baroque satire of the simple peasant market snack it once was.
Downtown Budapest: USD $10-17 for a piece of fried dough

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

The Petro Butcher Shop- Szell Kalman ter. 

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

Lunch chez Petro

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

Monday, May 13, 2024

Istanbul 2024: Back for Buryan!

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

Surrounded by attractive people at Çiya Lokantaşı.

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

Rustem Pasa Mosque

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

Karalahana: Black Sea stuffed collard greens

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

Kadinlar Pazar: The Baby in the Watermelon Haunts my Nightmares

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

Çiya salad plate.

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

Fatih, Kadinlar Pazar

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

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

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

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

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