Fiddling up a Storm in Budapest

It has been a couple of years since I was last seen in the United States, but tomorrow I am boarding a plane out of Budapest and heading to New York City. Hungary will be the featured national culture at this year's Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC from June 26 to July 7, and I have been asked to perform some Hungarian Jewish and Carpathian Jewish repertoire. My band, Di Naye Kapelye, will not be travelling with me, however, and I am looking forward to doing some concerts with the capable band of violinist István Pál, also known as Szalonna - the Hungarian word for 'bacon." Here is your chance to catch a concert of Jewish music with a band named after a tasty smoked pork product! (This will not go over well in Williamsburg or Boro Park, I can assure you.) Among the other musicians going are the Tukros Band and three of Transylvania's best Gypsy fiddlers: Istvan "Kis Csipas" Varga from the Kalotaszeg region, Jambor Istvan (the original 'Dumnezeu') from Szaszcsavas, and Florin Codoba from Palatka. 

Florin was in Budapest last week for some concerts and played a dance at the Picasso Point Bar on Hajos utca in the sixth district. Spring tends to bring out the best in music in Budapest, and after catching Florin;s set at the Picasso Point, we biked over to the New Godor Klub in Kiraly utca to catch some of the Athe Sam Roma festival.  

These guys were busy playing a burning Gypsy-Ska-Jazz set to the crowd. The next day it was over to the Gondozo Kert bar in the ninth district for a Moldavian tanchaz with Jam de Strune ("String jam" in Romanian) who play very hard core old time western Moldavian music on fiddles and koboz lutes.  

The session is on every Sunday, and attracts a small but dedicated crowd of dancers. Musicians are encouraged to play in the older style of Moldavian Csango music - no jazz chords, no chromatic sax runs, just foot stomping fun music. Last month was the 40th anniversary of the first tanchaz - folk dance house - and a festival was held to celebrate on Ferenc Liszt ter in Pest. I caught one of the last sets, featuring Bela Halmos on fiddle.  

Bela is one of the founding fathers of the Hungarian folk music revival movement, and still manages to get out to a lot of tanchaz events and fiddle late into the night alongside the younger generation. In other notable events, the Danube flooded at record levels this year, and came dangerously close to overflowing its upper banks and making downtown Budapest look like a swimming pool.  

This was the scene on Saturday night when the river was at its highest level - that is the stairway leading down to the river, usually about eight feet down below this level. In other  news, it has started to become hard to find a pack of cigarettes in Budapest, or at least harder, especially for some of the more widespread brands.  Here is an about-to-be-opened "National Tobacco Shop" at Kalvaria ter. 

Starting in July, all cigarettes will be sold by the newly re-nationalized government cigarette shops. All concessions for the shops seem to have been given only to supporters of the ruling coalition party, so you can imagine a lot of small businesses are not happy about this at all.  Below: Drinks, No Tobacco, Candies.

The word "scam" has been flying around a lot concerning the whole deal, and rather than dwell on the consequences I will simply congratulate myself for having made it through one year as a non-smoker. I gave up cigarettes last June after spending a weekend chain smoking in the company of Taraf des Haidouks, the Tecso Band, and the Kocani Orkestra at the Tilburg Gypsy Festival. By the time I got home I was pretty burned out on butts. And now I can pedal a bike uphill at full blast without effort and ... I noticed that almost everything smells bad. I'll be posting a bit more often during the summer: I always do when I am in the USA. Next  stop: The Fish Market in Washington DC with Transylvania's best Gypsy fiddlers!

Hungarian Spring: The Morel Dilemna

Sometimes you get the bear...

Global warming, Greenland's ice caps melting... whatever the reason this winter was long and dreary in Hungary. Spring hit only a week ago and already it is shorts and t-shirt season and - that rarest of sights - Hungarians walking sprightly in the streets, smiles on their faces not a complaint to be heard, enjoying the long awaited spring days that we thought might never arrive. Nowhere is this more apparent than in our local market at Bosnyak ter. Usually the dire epicenter of Magyar culinary pessimism, the Bosnyak ter market undergoes a transformation with the coming of spring as shoppers greet the arrival of fresh fruit and vegetables and revel in watching the prices drop before their eyes. (The fresh veg? They will probably stew and freeze or pickle it. The shoppers at Bosnyak ter are not a salad eating folk. Far from it. Fresh is not a necessary value attribute for vegetables around here.)

And sometimes the bear gets you...

Ramps - wild onions called medve hagyma or 'bear onions' in Hungarian" dropped from FT 900 ($4.00 USD) to Ft 150 (85 cents) in two weeks. And last week we hit the motherload of market delicacies: fresh wild morels. Called kucsma gomba in Hungarian (kucsma is a squat fur hat made from fetal lamb's pelts) morels are among the very first mushrooms that appear in the spring, and the season is usually very short - two weeks at most. We saw these for sale on the tables of the mushroom sellers - people who pick wild mushrooms, then bring them to the market where they are checked by official mushroom inspectors at a truck parked at the market entrance. There is very little chance of buying a poison mushroom in a Hungarian market. In Transylvania, where wild mushrooms are - or were - even more commonly eaten, people used to buy in open markets from trusted sellers - usually Gypsies from families who specialized in following the mushroom picking seasons around the country - until widespread poverty in the 1990s led many rural amateur mushroomers to try their hand at the mushroom business. Of course, this led to a good number of people in Romania being poisoned yearly. With EU membership influencing what you can and can not do in markets these days, wild mushrooms any more are pretty much gone from Romania's markets (but... maybe not entirely... Daca cunostiţi cineva...)

The morel of our story.

Morels are often classed just one step below truffles in the hierarchy of posh fungi. Fumie remembers having a soup at the Gundel restaurant that was a small bowl of beef consomme with a single morel floating in it. Madame Squid in Paris told me that a kilo of morels in Paris is going for around Euro 90 this week (that's about $125 or more for all you sad $USD addicts.) These babies were FT 2500 a kilo - again, if you are reading this in the US that is about ten bucks for more than two frigging pounds of fungus. Good tasting fungus. I bought several kilos and, using the balmy spring weather in a magical manner, dried most of them. Fumie has this Japanese drying net she won in a contest drawing in Tokyo.

The agro-industrial complex on our Zuglo terrace.

Why she has it here I will never know, but it is basically a box frame covered with netting and has several net shelf levels to hold your drying shrooms (or small drying fish or squid or fruit or whatever it is that the Japanese dry.) In four days you have dried morel mushrooms. Place them in a jar and we have morel risotto for the rest of the year. From the remaining morels, we feasted on fungus. I made a steak with mamaliga and a cream of morel sauce that made both of us very happy. One thing about morels: they are slightly toxic for some folks. Never eat a raw morel. They won't kill you, but you don't want to experiement with what they might do to you. Cooking neutralizes whatever it is in morels that causes Wikipedia to warn us about them. Cooking morels neutralizes the toxins. I come from New York City, where wild mushroom gathering is not one of the more commonly taught street arts, and there is a similar looking shroom called a "false morel" that you do not want to mess with. Luckily, all Hungarian open produce markets have mushroom inspectors, and they really do know their fungus, so I trust what I buy there.

De-tox!

What to do with fresh morels? They have a flavor like concentrate of mushroom... so they go well with a nice bit of beef. Steak is a rarity in Hungary, where unwanted or used-up dairy cows tend to be summarily hacked up for use in stews and for gulyas soup. But we have a couple of butchers at Bosnyak ter market that sometimes - in spring and summer - offer beef that can be fashioned into an acceptable steak. Some years we get decent beef, some years (last year) none at all. There has to be more to life in Hungary than pork and chicken... so we treat visits to the market as a Beef Quest. Hungarian steak usually has no fat marbling, and is often very fresh, both making for a tough bit of meat. These are not Angus or Hereford steers - they probably were making milk for a couple of years before they found themselves on the no exit ramp of the goulash highway. Of course we have no grill on our 1947 era not-quite-up-to-code kitchen stove, so preaparing a steak has required years of careful research and practice.

Re-tox!

The secret is to pan fry a thick slice of deboned steak (hatszin or rostelyos) in butter on a very low heat setting for a long time (7-10 minutes) on each side, then let the still rare steak sit under aluminium foil for ten minutes. If the steak slice is thick, I prop it up with some kitchen tongs and let the sides of the steak brown in the pan for about five minutes as well. With a sauce of morels filled out with brown champignon mushrooms, onions, and cream poured over mamaliga we were among the best fed paupers in Budapest this week. Leftover sauce found its way into a pasta lunch the next day. And with a second trip to the market supplying us with even more morels to feed to the mushroom dryer, I made the world's most luxurious breakfast: loose scrambled eggs with morel mushrooms on toast.

Morel season is now coming to a close in our part of the world, but with luck the cepes should be coming in soon. Huge "chicken of the woods" fungus - the big yellow things that grow on the side of trees - usually come in about now as well. I have a lot of local buddies who are avid mushroom hunters. It is a lesser known fact of the Hungarian folk music scene that the members of the band Muzsikás are all avid and experienced mushroom hunters, who often spend their down time on tour prowling the woods in search of rare edible fungi. During shroom season my fungus crazed Hungarian friends often lay huge bags of sárgagéva which we know as  Chicken of the Woods on me at this time of the year. As a food, these huge meaty shrooms are kind of insipid. They do not really taste like chicken at all... but... they are edible. I'd normally look forward to porcini season in Hungary during the summer... but... I will be in the USA for most of the season. More on that later, as soon as I can tame the new and annoyingly unwieldy Blogger dashboard to bow to my commands.

In Budapest, But Dreaming of Istanbul.

No, the blog is not dead yet, just resting. If I have to blame anything for the sparse posting of late, two things come to mind. First, I have to finish a couple of book length works for a publisher in the States, people who actually contribute to me paying the rent and eating and other worldly functions necessary to the running of an Ethnomusicological Empire. Second: my camera died. My beloved Nikon Coolpix has reached the age (two years) at which digital cameras remember that their owners should go out and buy a new digital camera, preferably from the same maker who produced the last camera that died at the age of two years… So without fresh visual aids to spur me on, I haven’t been posting pictures of freshly caught trout, fiddling ethnicities, or Japanese food made from Slovak ingredients. But then I realized I was leaving all you readers out there in Blog Land in the lurch. I have a hard drive stuffed with photos.

I don’t have to blog my latest lunch each week. I can blog lunches from ages ago and you would never complain. And so I shall. My last Nikon Coolpix did not actually die on me. It was stolen in Istanbul in 2010. Luckily, Fumie was there with her Nikon, which did not get nicked.  So these photos are from Fumie... which kind of explains why they are so frigging better than photos taken by me. And since our favorite food blogger Robyn at The Girl Who Ate Everything is headed to Istanbul soon, I figured she could use a heads up on where to chow down in Byzantium.

First, Istanbul is all about lamb. For the best lamb, the Siirt Market in Fatih, right next to the Aqueduct that crosses Ataturk Bulevard. We visited during Ramadan, and each evening devout Muslims broke their fast at dusk with the special iftar plate on sale at the tandoor roasted lamb places that ring the market. Buryan kebab, a whole lamb hung in an underground oven, is thought of as a winter food, but the market places serve it all year long, as well as perde pilav, a chicken pilaf baked inside a pastry shell that has never lived up to its reputation.

During the daytime the Siirt Market is one of the best traditional food markets in downtown Istanbul. Most of the vendors come from Arab speaking area of South Turkey around the town of Siirt, and the salgam suyu is some of the best to be found. Salgam suyu is a sour pickle juice made from fermented red turnips, carrots and beets. Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?

It is a common drink to chase raki when drinking at a kebab house, and in the summer heat I found kit to be the most refreshing drink around – until I discovered what drinking two liters of beet juice a day does to the color of your natural waste maintainance sytem. Blue! The rarest color in nature… and it came out of … me! I use a modicum of restraint after that. It is nearly impossible to say which is the best kebab joint in Istanbul. There are so few bad ones.

But my favorite was the Kardesler Kebabci inCihangir. And I always suggest that when visiting the Karakoy neighborhood, nose around the old Arap Dzami Mosque until you find the kebab place in the cement market. Of course, there is always a fish sandwich available from the boats which used to line the ferry docks at Eminonu.

Lately these have been regulated out of the city proper. Only a couple still work the ferry docks, and word is that most of the fish (bonito) is imported frozen. But it is still a cheap option for seafood. OF course, so are the fish markets. The famous one in Beyoglu is in the Cicegi Pasaj, supplying the meyhanes nearby. Originally Beyoglu was the Pera neighborhood of Ottoman times, a place where westerners and Jews lived and freely drank alcohol, which in the Mediterranean always means eating and music as well as imbibing.  And since a poor man's penny is as welcome as a rich man's, the vendors have something for every budget, including bulgur stuffed kofte shells of the most intimate sort.

 Unfortunately, we may not be able to get to Istanbul this year. We traveled there quite regularly for a decade - waiters and tea shop owners would expect us back and usher us to our favorite table on our return. And although I have tracked down the best Turkish restaurants in Budapest (and Berlin and Vienna and...)  here are some basic things that just do not travel - like decent kofte or good stuffed vegetable restaurants. But... somehow we will survive. Until we get back to Turkey.

2012: The Year in Awesome.

Well, its done. 2012. Gone, over, vanished, blown away in the winds of time. Kész, slussz, vége... şi gata. And it was a year of not very much blog action here, due, perhaps, to the realization that if somebody is paying me for writing then maybe I shouldn't be penning 2000 word odes to Balkan grilled meat products every afternoon. Not to mention those who did not pay me for my writing... and I'm looking at you local tourist-oriented publication hijacked by avaricious Hungarian publishing pirates! Now, 2012 was not a stand out year for many. Not like, say, 1998, or hey, 1963. Like its boring yearmates (1977, 1985, not to mention 2003!) this annum had little to commend it. While the year 2012 had about as much character as a bowl of cereal, there were moments of awesomeness nevertheless. There was this bowl of Chinese hand pulled noodles with pork from the warehouse area of Budapest's Four Tigers Chinese market:

Awesome!

Yes, it was awesome. Readers may have noticed that I do not post much about fine dining in Budapest. That is simple to explain. Such dining may possibly exist, but I don't know about it. Eating out in this city has become wildly expensive, and so much of what you are paying for is mediocre and made from the same ingredients you can buy at Tesco, so why bother? Most of what we eat out is food from nearly anonymous lunch places, such as those in the Chinese market. We also discovered the Turkish kebab joint near the Chinese market that serves as a weekend hostel for Turkish bus and truck drivers on Orczy ut near Orczy ter. Fresh baked pide and lahmacun! Baked fish! Look at the faces of these Anatolian truck jockies. Awesome!

Awesome!

This year involved a lot less travel than most years. I got to take Fumie along on a fantastic short trip to the Netherlands for the Tilburg Gyspy festival. She stayed with our good friends Hans and Vera and was able to experience a lot of what makes the Netherlands one of my favorite places in Europe: cheese.

Awesome!

I, on the other hand, stayed in a cinder block hotel along with all the other musicians. Sure, a lot of you may think that sitting in a tiny garden smoking area with Taraf des Haidouks, Kocani Orestar, Lajko Felix, and the Manyo Band chain smoking and drinking coffee is the high point of a life well spent. For us, its just life. So much life, in fact, that when I got home I bought some nicorette (which is awesome!) and quit cigarettes. On the other hand... you can get free espresso coffee in Dutch supermarkets. If you are a Gypsy drummer from a Hutsul village in the Ukraine you would definitely have to label this social advancement as... awesome!

Awesome!

We were also in Romania this year for the Negreni Fair, and got to visit our friends in Cluj. I need to visit more often in Romania. The country has so much to offer a visitor. I feel sorry for anybody who travels there and does not leave the bigger cities to enjoy the rural people and their culture. Not to mention enjoying what Transylvanian cuisine has to offer:

Awesome!

Not to mention that our freinds from Cluj came to visit us during the summer, including one very small Transylvanian bagpiper. Perhaps the smallest bagpiper on earth. Well maybe not a piper yet... but someday...

Awesome!!

Personal triumphs were not lacking during 2012. Aron graduated from High School and entered University. He participated in that very special Hungarian assault on teenage personal dignity known as the ballagas, or graduation procession. Of course, he's the one nonconformist in his line.

Slightly goofy, but awesome!

Wedding vows were all over the effing joint in 2012. Tom Popper finally tied the knot with somebody exponentially more intelligent than himself, Amy, during their temporary exile in the US. They are promising to retie the knot when they return to Budapest. We salute you, Amy, for daring to do what so needed to be done, no matter how messy and unpleasant it may seem to others of weaker stomach and fortitude! All kinds of awesome!

Awesome!

Long time readers of the blog will be familiar with our Croatian representatives: Captain Squid and Mamselle Fifi la Squidette. They tied the knot on the island of Vis in March, which was a wonderful trip that officially ended our experience of Winter, 2012. Fumie was a witness at the ceremony, which was held on the island of Vis in the spirit of Marshall Tito and his Partizan forces, and celebrated with a twelve hour Croatian feast at the Pojoda restaurant. Simultaneously epic and... awesome!

Awesome!

Then they promptly moved to Singapore leaving us here in the Northern Balkans (yeah, that's what I called it. So there!) without our trained personal fish chef and vacation base. This made us very sad. While the Squid Clan was halfway around the world gobbling Perankan pepper crab and laksha noodles, all we retain are mere memories of jumbo squid and green fish bones.

Ça le fait grave!

Elsewhere in Hungary, awesome moments were sparse and hard to find. Often, our friends from abroad had to get on long transatlantic flights in order to import elements of awesomeness to our awesomeness-deprived adopted homeland. DJ Socalled - Josh Dolgin - finally made it to play a gig at the Akvarium Klub in downtown Budapest, but when local channeller of awesomeness Flora Molnar took the challenge to rap on stage with Josh, our quota of Judeo-awesomeness (awesomekeyt in Yiddish) was filled for the year.

Awesome!

After the gig we took the band for a dip at the Szechenyi Baths, which, if you are a touring musician with a free day off in your schedule, meets most of the qualifications for awesome! One of the best things about Klezmer musicians is that they do not live in terror of taking a bath with a thousand other people. Try that with a bluegrass band someday.

Awesome!

And afterwards we enjoyed a meal of the very best shnitzel sandwiches in Budapest, served across the street from the baths at the snack bar attached to the old bar next to the circus. Its a dump. And the bench we were sitting on fell apart while we were sitting on it. Awesome!

Awesome!

Let me see... what other outstanding moments have come to fruit in the year 2012? Oh! Of course. The disovery of beef-based Polish Spam for sale at the Bosznyak ter market! At the horse meat sausage and salami stand, no less! Awesome! Given the relative scarcity of fresh ocean fish around these parts, lovers of colloquial Okinawan-Hawaiian teriyaki spam sushi jumped for joy with the ready availability of spam musubi!

Awesome!

What? You do not think that spam belongs in sushi? You are wrong. This is possibly the national lunch snack of Hawaii. This is why you see huge earthworklike piles of spam at Asian supermarkets. There is something about spam and seaweed and soy sauce that says "processed meat is gooood for you" like noth else. And this summer's big awesome surprise was meeting up with Rick Goldstein and family on their way to an enjoyable vacation of flinging themselves off of cliffs in Slovenia.

Awesome!

Rick was my old high school buddy and we hadn't seen each other since the late Neolithic era. We backpacked together around Hungary and Romania for a couple of months back in 1973, getting serially arrested by the Romanian securitate as spies, albeit only slightly post-pubescent spies (three times, in fact.) I promised to show them the best of Budapest. And I did. I took them to the Chinese market. Awesome!

Better than awesome!

Further evicence of 2012 awesomeness is Matzoh ball soup. Not just any Yiddish yukh mit kneydelekh, this is what I eat almost weekly, made from pure chicken or mixed chicken and beef broth prepared by Fumie (who also makes a separate Asian style broth for our Fake Vietnamese pho or our less than fake but still pretty iffy ramen experiments) and my masterful matzoh balls. The secret? Do not use matzoh meal or mix. Simply crush whole matzoh (paszka in Hungarian. They use it to stuff chickens.) mix with egg and some chicken fat from the soup, salt, pepper, parsley... form into balls and boil. Awesome!

Negreni 2012. A Whole Bunch of Gabors!

It has been a couple of years since I was able to make it to Transylvania for the annual Negreni Fair (known in Hungarian as Fekete tó vásar.) Unlike most similar events in East Europe, this peasant fair has not become a quaint festival of folklore performances and nationalistic speeches and film crews parading their celebrities around. Negreni is the real thing. A muddy riverside field in a small village that becomes – on the second weekend in October every year, rain or shine – a sprawling market, selling everything from antiques to embroidered cloths to used shoes to sixty gallon cauldrons to sheepskin hats to and Chinese pink plastic hair bows. If you travel a lot around Transylvania  Negreni’s annual Fair is a time to meet up with people. It seems that everybody is there. Thousands of peasant, city folk, visitors, curious folks from Bucharest and Budapest descend on this nondescript village every fall to buy, sell, and just say hello to each other. (I have covered Negreni in other posts as well.)

Traian Ardelean and Dorel Kordoban, Negreni, 2008

This year was a bit sad for those of us who love this region’s wild, vibrant folk fiddle tradition: the vioara cu goarna music that is played in the villages around Negreni and Bihor county. The fair was one of the annual gathering places for the makers and fiddlers of this unique “trumpet fiddle” (actually a homemade resonator violin with a horn to amplify the sound.) But this year saw the passing of two of the local masters. Dorel Kordoban, master fiddle maker and musician from the village of Lazuri passed away last spring. And then the elder Gypsy fiddler Traian Ardelean was murdered in nearby Alesd in the summer. I did get a chance to meet with Mircea Roastas, but his health is not good and he wasn’t able to spend much time at the fair. I would not worry about the tradition dying out, though.Although there were less local fiddlers at Negreni this year, I found one, Gutu from the village of Balnaca, at one of the beer tents, and he was in fine form.

Fiddler from Balnaca

I have heard a lot from people who ask “What about that big Gypsy festival in Transylvania?”Well, if you want Gypsies, you can find them at Negreni. A lot of them. But it is not q Gypsy festival as much as a homecoming where different families, clans, and tribes touch base with each other year after year. Some refer to themselves as Roma, some do not. Some keep to a strong sense of Gypsy moral code and law, some less so. Appearances can be deceiving.

Metalsmith Gypsy

You can be sitting next to a family of Gaboresti Roma who proudly wear the broad cowboy hats, handlebar moustaches, the women in flamboyant skirts, that one anthropologist called “a hyper-gypsy sense of dress” and then find a blonde guy in a smart business suit chatting with them in Romani about a shipment of plastic shoes arriving at the airport from Istanbul.

Young Gabors in pin stripes

The Fair attracts a lot of Gaboresti - the clan known as "Gabor Gypsies." Why? They are descended from somebody originally named Gabor. Most of the family names are "Gabor." Don;t let it worry you. They know which clan is related to whom, and who they will marry, even though you can often wind up with people named "Mrs. Gabriella Gabor Gabor Gabor." Gabors are mostly Seventh Day Adventists: they don’t drink (much – beer doesn’t count) and they work in retail and market selling. They are active in Adventist church organizations and educate their children in Gabor run schools. A lot of them are, in fact, blonde.

Gabor gypsy girl.

That may reflect that the orginal extended families that congealed into the Gaboresti “nation” came from southern Transylvania in the area where Saxon German settlers have lived since the thirteenth century. There is an almost Germanic sense of “ordnung muss sein” about them. That lifestyle has led a lot of Romanians to contend that “Gabors are not Gypsies” because they are clean, hard working, all the things that define the negative stereotype of “Gypsy” in East Europe. This being Central Transylvania (on the road between Oradea and Cluj) you get not only the Gabor Gypsies, but any number of Kalderash clans who affect the Gabor style (big hats mean high prestige) but without the Gabor’s businesslike moral demeanor. But big hats and pin striped pants do not a Gabor make. If you want to live in a huge tin roofed palace, you need to do business like a Gabor. And that means a social network that the Gabors have built up through links of kin, religion, and pure hard work. There are areas of the market that seem to have been populated by differing groups of peasant and Gypsies.

Rudari: wood carvers 

The Rudari – wood carving families who do not speak Romani among themselves – set up tents and busily set about custom carving the whatever wooden implements of Transylvanian peasant life that you can’t buy at the Metro in Cluj: buckets for sheep cheese, milking stools, pig killing troughs. Hungarian Peasants from the village of Szék colonize a road on the northern edge of the Fair. They are also conservative in their dress: the costume acts as an advertisement for their presence and their business of selling folk crafts to (mostly Hungarian) customers. Across the river, women from the nearby Kalotaszeg region monopolize the antiques fair. Honestly, after decades of working with Roma and various groups of Gypsies all over east Europe, these people do not seem the least bit exotic to me anymore. Yes, I have learned to speak their language, after a fashion. I have traveled with some of these families, played music with them, toured abroad with some, gotten to know them as people, and one of the reasons I have rarely written about Gypsies is that they seem... just so normal to me.

The Valley of Cauldrons

Not exotic at all. Once you get to know the inside working of any group of people, what is exotic about it? Talking about family? Business? Travel? Marriage prospects? A lot of my better friends are convinced that I am an American Gypsy: my nickname in one village is "Bob o Amerikano" but I always start by telling them that I am not Gypsy. But once you say this in Romani language, well… you just passed the boundary between what defines a Gypsy and a non-Gypsy (gajo). So I fall back on my time honored proverb: Me som rom mashkar e romenge, taj me avav gajo mashkar e gajenge. I’m a Gypsy when I am with Gypsies… and a Gajo when among Gajos. [For more amazing photos of Negreni and Romanian Roma in general, visit Fumie Suzuki's facebook pages here and also here.]

Büfé Đăng Mười: City wants to Close the Chinese Market? Dang! The Best Eats in Budapest.

Just as soon as I get inspired to update the blog with news of authentic Asian foods available in Budapest at the Four Tigers Chinese Market, along comes the Hungarian daily newspaper the Magyar Hirlap (once a truly great newspaper but since 2004 a shabby rag not worth wrapping fish with) with a story about how the eighth district Mayor and city council would like to shut the whole market down. For those of you who don’t read Hungarian, it seems that there was an altercation between two Arab guys attacking a Vietnamese stall keeper and his wife with swords a couple of weeks ago. (For some reason, all the weird crimes in Hungary tend to involve swords – usually of the decorative samurai variety. Mother-in-law murderers, angry truck drivers, drunken farmers, Arab money changers - all seem to have inexplicable access to a supply of samurai swords.) This altercation led to an investigative piece by the Hirlap reporters describing the market in hair-raising terms as a hotbed of crime, tax evasion, illegal weapon sales, customs transgressions, and all – around scary non-Hungarian badness. Needless to say the details in the article are shaky – the reporter claims that he encountered guys hawking fake tax receipts, brass knuckles, butterfly knives, and shock tazers as he entered the market. We have been going to the market two times a week for over ten years, and I have yet to be offered anything more than fake tax receipts, which have a far better market in tax-phobic Hungary than hand to hand weapons ever would. You don’t go to the Four Tigers Market for weapons. You go for rice noodles.The main reason I go to the market is to eat real, authentic Vietnamese and Chinese food, and to shop for Asian vegetables and groceries. Occasionally I buy some cheap blank DVDs, but mostly I purchase things involving rice noodles. And I am not the only one. My favorite Vietnamese spot is the Dang Muoi Bufe, located inside an ersatz Vietnamese grocery stall in the back of the Four Tigers Market (directly opposite Gate 3 – the “middle gate” of the Market. Pass the fornetti stand, the telephone sellers, and the little Chinese bufe by the entrance and march straight directly to the back end of the rows of stalls to the food shacks.) The Dang Muoi may not look like much – heck, it looks a lot less than much – but it takes my vote for the best restaurant in Budapest.The best Vietnamese for sure, but also the best soup, the best atmosphere, and definitely the best bargain of any eatery in town. You can argue with any of those points, perhaps rightfully so, and I simply don’t care. I like it. And so do Hungarian bloggers who have discovered it. The family who run this place have placed Xeroxed copies of Hungarian food blog reviews on the three picnic benches set up inside the tented grocery shack to advertise their fame in the Magyar food blog world. Almost every time we have been there this summer there has been a gaggle of curious Hungarian foodistas trying out the Vietnemese soups and slathering fish sauce over everything in sight. The Dang Muoi is all that is left of the row of Chinese and Vietnamese snack and soup shacks that once ran through this section of the market.There used to be the Chinese dumpling Lady and the hand pulled noodle shack, but now the area is completely Viet. The Chinese seem to have moved across the street to the wholesale market, leaving the Vietnamese (and in other section of the Market, the Turks) to feed the workers and shoppers who swarm here daily. The lunch shacks here are really not for the faint of heart – if you are obsessed with prissy concepts like neatness or table reservations do not bother making the trip. By some kind of quiet agreement, no restaurant inspectors ever seem to make the trip to the market shacks, and so it should stay. You are here for the pho - the Vietnamese noodle soup of the Immortals, the potage equivalent to the Vision on the Road to Damascus, the Alpha and Omega of Rice noodles and Sriracha sauce. I used to look for the stands that had Vietnamese signs lettered on cardboard scraps “pho” soup… but Dang Muoi Bufe (Büfé Đăng Mười) has a large poster illustrating all of the nearly twenty options on offer. Pho bo is the classic Vietnamese meal in a bowl, full of flat rice noodles, beef, coriander, and a tangy broth you can add to with chili sauce or vinegar and hot pepper sauce from jars on the tables. A big serving comes in a bowl that would sit nicely at the center of any Hungarian family’s Sunday lunch table, and probably holds more tender beef as well. There is no dainty way to eat pho. You can use forks and knives, you can try chopsticks, but basically the “attack and slurp” method works best. Vietnamese are famous in Asia for their sloppy chopstick technique so there is no reason for you to feel self conscious about the orange cloud of broth materializing around your head as you dig in. Rice noodles are not designed for easy eating. Try the bun bo hue if you want thin rice noodles in spicy beef broth – not for the rice noodle beginners.The rice plate (com phan) consists of a choice of about twelve options you point at and have loaded onto your plate: BBQ pork belly, fried sardines, curry chicken, tofu, marinated hardboiled eggs, fried spring rolls, Asian greens, pickled cabbage, salad… just point and hope for the best. But the real choice to make on the hot days of summer is bun cha – fresh barbecued pork slices served on a bed of cold rice noodles and salad with plenty of mint, basil and coriander, topped with crushed peanuts, accompanied by a side dish of a plastic bowl filled with tangy cold broth made from fish sauce, vinegar, sugar, and water.You wrestle a mess of noodles and meat onto your chopsticks and dip it into the sauce or you can take it easy and just dump a bunch of the noodles and shrubbery into the broth and alternate bites of cold brothy noodles with grilled meat. Bun nem is the same set up with crispy Vietnamese spring rolls – nem – instead of grilled pork, and happens to be my favorite.Pricing is usually around FT800 for a small plate or bowl (which is pretty large) and FT 1000 for a large serving (including the bun cha/nem sets.) Dang Muoi also offers a selection of Asian cold drinks, such as lotus nut drink, sickeningly sweet lemonade, and black bean drink.Black bean drink is one of those things I can never quite wrap my brain around, but everybody else likes it. Think of it as a cold, sweet black bean soup in a glass of ice. On a hot day, it is quite filling in itself. They also offer Vietnamese iced coffee – cà phê đá – which is a shot of super strong French espresso served with condensed sweetened milk AND sugar over ice. Personally, I prefer to wander over to the neighboring shack for my coffee, where the guy at the “deli” window offers the choice of “sweet or bitter” (edes vagy keseru.) Bitter means your iced coffee is only condensed milk sweet, not diabetes-inducing sugared sweet. Either way, it is the best iced coffee in a town where iced coffee still means a hot coffee with an ice cube tossed into it. If you do check out the Dang Muoi, remember that it is a small place serving a lot of people – take out within the market is a big part of their business – so don’t expect to stroll in and get a table for six easily. Its best to go just before the lunch rush or just after, but after 2 pm you run the risk of no more bun cha or much left on the steam table (so you go with pho.)The tables are picnic tables you share with everybody else while sitting beneath crates of ramen noodles and bags of rice. When you are done, you can even pick up all the Vietnamese ingredients you need to reproduce your meals at home – from fish sauce to coriander. We usually shop at the market stall next door. The guy two stalls down speaks English and his fish freezer sells the cheapest shrimp in Budapest and – if you can convince him to let you dip into his restaurant stocks – restaurant quality frozen squid, bigger than the small one-kilo squid you can usually find in Chinese groceries.And now the Magyar Hirlap wants to take all this away from me.And the Mayor of the eighth district (last famous for criminalizing homelessness in his district) chimed in saying the city council should close the entire market down and replace it with a “green belt” park featuring skate board ramps and basketball courts and… a lot less Chinese businesses. Making this stretch of Budapest into a green belt is a project only slightly less realistic than, say, terraforming Mars or cloning a triceratops. We’ve seen this all before. Hysterical news articles about the imminent demise of the Chinese market have been appearing for years, and yet they are still there, selling kitchen wares, slurping noodles, minding their own business while making sure the underpaid proletariat of the world can continue to clothe themselves in cheap underwear. I’m sure that an amicable solution will be worked out between the city and the management of the market in the traditionally accepted manner: over drinks and with big suitcases stuffed with cash pushed across a table. I’m not too worried that the market will be disappearing soon, but you never can tell when dealing with the eighth district. I may have to up my pho quotient this fall. Just in case.