The culinary crossroads of Central Europe

We planted peas among our roses to improve the soil, and we actually are getting a nice little crop of fresh peas right now! The kids love to spot the chubby pods that are ready to pick, and they’re still at the age when shelling peas is more fun than work. This recipe is most delicious with the freshest peas you can find, but of course sometimes those will be ones from the freezer.

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There is not a mistake in the title – yes, it is Valeria. Valeria was my grandmother, who I never met, but I was named after her. Everybody in the family remembers her as an amazing cook and queen of Hungarian recipes.  During the war (WWII), she ran a small workers’ kitchen, and her cooking is still remembered by those who outlived her. The problem with my grandmother’s recipes is that she wrote them for herself. She did not write a lot about how to prepare this cake,  at which temperature to cook it, how long to cook it, what kind of cake pan to use. I tried to check online and asked some friends but when I mentioned the ingredients, they said “no flour? you must be missing a page!”. So I looked into early twentieth and late nineteenth-century cookbooks, and there it was. Potato torte,  at least 4-5 versions. Mr. Kugler (a Hungarian pastry celebrity from the early twentieth century) explains a lot about the cake, but my questions were still unanswered.  It seems that since then this recipe has been forgotten. So we had to experiment and bring it back. The main difference between my grandmother’s and Mr. Kuglers recipe is that my grandmother wrote it during or right after war, so she used a limited range of ingredients.  Her version of the cake is great not only for people with gluten intolerance but for people watching their fat intake and for people who watch their wallets. A great cake for hard economical times.

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Főzelék is a special category in Hungarian cuisine. It’s not  quite a soup, but neither is it a stew. They are made in many ways and provide a cheap source of nutrition and yuminess. There is a potato főzelék, green bean főzelék, bean főzelék, spinach főzelék, pea főzelék, lettuce főzelék, squash főzelék and many, many more. Usually they are served with topping like a sausage, hot-dog, meatballs, or boiled or fried eggs. In my family we used to serve them with pörkölt (thick meat stew).
This is the ultimate Hungarian fast food. If you will be traveling in Hungary, try one of these cafeteria-style places and have a főzelék with topping. You might spend around 600 Ft (forints – something like $3) and have a great, satisfying meal.

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Many of our recipes end with the sentence: “Enjoy with a good rustic bread”. Bread is the staple food of Central Europe. We eat bread with everything. One of the challenges of moving was to find an everyday bread -  frankly, supermarket “sandwich” bread here is pretty bad. Sorry my friends, it is the truth. It is full of preservatives, different crazy sounding items and of course, sugar (that is true about everything. Everything tastes sweet here. It is like non-stop candy time). On other hand there are artisan breads. Well, those are amazing! The only problem is they are not priced for everyday eating. A good bread, which our family polishes off in 30 seconds, is $4. If you eat it once in a while, yes, it is the right price for something “special/artisan”. But if you eat it as Europeans do, yikes!
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I had a great day in Sonoma tasting some wine. I specifically went to try out the Cline cellars, since I was very excited about trying their wine; I had it for the first time on the way to California on the BA flight. I love the idea of grapes grown on 100 year-old vines. The yield is low but very mature and sophisticated. I am a big fan of Cline and their Ancient Wines line. With a little luck you can get these wines from under $10, which is my comfortable price limit for a bottle of wine. After the tasting at their cellars, I could not come home empty handed, and I decided to share this gem with my family. Since good wine must be accompanied by good food, I decided to make a Czech classic: roasted duck with red cabbage and Czech dumplings.

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