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 carbohydrate jewel of the Carpathian basin. Essentially it is gnocchi, but in a smaller, cheesier, and less orderly 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.