Three Minutes from my Door: Klauzál Market, Budapest

The boundary of my universe.

If you have been keeping up with the news lately, you have probably worked up an vicious appetite. Nothing gets me in the mood for lunch like reading about the evaporation of democracy in Hungary, the land in which I have lived for nearly three decades. Last week our feisty Prime Miniature got his ass handed to him by the EU after deciding to shut down CEU University. The Hungarian news is overwhelmed with the Prime Munchkin lashing out at billionaire philanthropist George  Soros, echoing Orwell "Snowball is the Enemy! Four legs good, two legs better!" Meanwhile, back in the Old Country World Wrestling Federation sponsor Donald Trump kayfabes his way into a de facto coup against American democracy. I have no place left to run. At times like these, it is good to shrink one's perspective. If I can't run, at least I can hide! I've become very local. Like what is within a few minutes of my front door local. If I don't have to, I don't leave home.

The pickle shop has, alas, closed down.It was... upstairs...

Luckily, I live in the seventh district of Budapest, in Klauzál tér, which means that I live in the exact center of the universe. Klauzál tér (tér means square) is traditionally the center of Budapest's Jewish community. The neighborhood was walled off into the Budapest Ghetto in World War II - the last remaining bit of wall is located down the street beneath my bedroom window. Today Bollywood and Kung Fu films shoot their "European" scenes on the street below me (Jackie Chan's crew was out last weekend!) where at night French hippie tourists scream and howl while crawling from bar to bar. Unlike many of Europe's touristic Potemkin Village "Jewish Neighborhoods" (Kazimierz comes to mind) we still are a Jewish nabe full of living, breathing Jews, although there is little to show tourists if you don't know what to look for. There are Hasids living along the street, a mikvah nearby, about four shuls with five blocks, and the kosher butcher is just down the street - I get my beef hot dogs there.

The Kosher stamp of approval.

And the building I live in, like most of the buildings around here, was designated a Yellow Star building during WWII, meaning that Jews were allowed to officially reside in it. The park across the street offers a bit of open space, a playground, a dog walking area, and a mass grave dating from the Arrow Cross massacres of 1944.

The Jewish spirit of the area do not mean that you can't find anything unkosher: this is Hungary, after all, and Hungarian Jews are probably the largest illicit Jewish comsumers of pork outside of... well... Brooklyn? And besides, Hungarians live here too, lots of 'em, especially Roma people, who have no - absolutely no - aversion to pig meat. After WWII a lot of the local apartments were left empty - their Jewish owners had been killed in Auschwitz or survived and left Europe for good. Roma from Eastern Hungary were brought in to do the heavy drudge labor of clearing the bomb rubble from the streets of the city and were allocated the newly empty flats: before 1945 Gypsies were not given residence permits to live within the boundaries of Budapest itself, with the exception of Roma employed as musicians (which explains the large Roma communities in the suburbs just outside of Budapest in Fót or Pomáz) This led to the unique social mix of the seventh district: a Jewish-Gypsy social alliance (that means they fucked a lot)  that played out in music, family ties, food, and a particularly Budapest subdialect that layered Hungarian syntax with mixed Yiddish and Romani vocabulary.

Right across the street from us is the Klauzál tér Market. We have been shopping daily there since the day it reopened in 2014. The lower level shops and fresh vegetable stalls do a brisk business, while the upper level is a hopeless life-sucking black hole for small businesses. Local politicos seem to be involved in the operation of the place, which explains why many of the smaller businesses that open up here seem to fail within a month or two: The "Specialities of Békes County" shop that offered bags of shitty dried noodles and paprika, the Fresh Squeezed Expensive Juice shop.... lasted a week, the World's Saddest Fish Store not even that long. A promised poultry retailer was represented by a single xeroxed paper stuck to a wall announcing "Poultry Store opening soon" before  it gave way to a shop selling pillows, which lasted a week. The Lángos stand seems to be the only thing that has managed to stay open upstairs, inexplicably popular with the howling French hippies we mentioned before. A new place opened up in the Invisible Corner of Retail Death on the upper level, a butcher shop from Debrecen offering quality meat and house made debreceni sausages and other butcher goodies to take out or eat in: I haven't tried it yet, because to get there you have to pass by Palibácsi's Étkezde, the lunch place that has stolen my heart.

$5 light lunch for two. 

Palibácsi- "Uncle Paulie" - is a real, old school Hungarian butcher, the kind that has strong opinions on what makes a good kolbász or a hurka and what a Magyar likes to have for lunch: meaty, greasy, fatty and delicious, The difference is that  he produces certified organic meat, which he used to sell in the weekely organic market in posh Buda. In Klauzál market he runs an étkezde in the far corner of the first level offering a selection of the traditional Hungarian lunch house fare: stews swimming in paprika red sauce, funky peasant noodle dishes that would never soil the menus of a fancy downtown restaurant, and best of all, real artisanal hurka.

Egy májas és egy véres - a liver and a blood sausage, please.

Hurka are the meaty link that tied me to Hungarian identity while I was growing up in New york. Every few months or so my mom would take us to Yorkville, the now vanished Hungarian neighborhood of Manhattan along the east 80s on Second Avenue, to stock up on paprika and other essentials at the legendary Paprikas Weiss Hungarian delicatessen shop, and while there we would visit one of the many Hungarian butchers in the neighborhood, bringing home goodies like kolbász and hurka. Besides my Mom, I was the only one who would eat hurka. Fun fact: the two things that brought me to Hungary back in the 1980s were essentially unlimited supplies of hurka and goatskin Hungarian bagpipes. I wasn't in search of high culture.

Hurka comes in two forms: stuffed with either liver (májas) or blood (véres) with rice and spices, or in the case of German Schvab style hurka, with bread crumbs.The problem with hurka these days (and yes, there is a problem with hurka) is that nearly all places selling it get it from one of the giant meat processing plants, and almost all taste the same and almost all are crap. You have to search the markets to find butchers who make their own and take some pride in their product. I have nearly given up on finding an edible debreceni sausage in Budapest anymore: the modern product is a mere orange hot dog, nothing like the meaty, spicy sausage I remember from my youth in 16th century Hungary. 

The thing we love about the Klauzál market is that we have gotten to know almost all of the folks we buy our food from. We are in there nearly every day. The vegetable sellers know us, the butchers inquire as to our health and take our special orders for oddball cuts to use in Asian recipes, and the bakery knows our daily order even before we get to the counter. 

One day Palibácsi came to our table to ask us what we thought of the next day's menu: did we prefer meatballs in vegetable and sour cream sauce (NO!) or beef stroganoff (YES!). The next day both were offered. Like a lot of the places around Klauzál tér Palibácsi's Étkezde is only open for lunch. Almost next door to the market is the legendary Kadar Étkezde, and on the other side if the fantastic Serbian Cevapcici and Pleskavica shop Pola Pola. We will be revealing their secrets in short order as well. I realize that while I travel a lot, there has been less info on this blog about what to eat well in Budapest itself, For that you have to know the butcher's secrets. How, you may ask, do I know the guarded secrets of the Hungarian Butchers. Well.... my grandfather was one, my uncle was one, and my brother is one. While I can't actually dismember an animal myself (beyond peeling the skin off a goat for bagpipes) a lot of my family members could. My Grandfather was a quartermaster - a regimental butcher - in the 19th Jasz-Kun Husszar Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI. Yes, WW One. You ate what you could find and you liked it, even if it was a moose shot someplace on the frontline in Galicia.