Meggyes Muffins

Recently I've seen a lot of fruit that had previously existed to me only as names. At our market there have been gooseberries, red currants, and the star of this post, sour cherries. I bought some of them out of curiosity and discovered that they are rather sour. As I was awash in sweet cherries, I didn't want to eat the sour ones raw. And so, I made muffins. I used my normal oatmeal muffin recipe, with one exception: I separated the eggs and beat the whites, and I think it made the muffins especially light and fluffy. This makes twelve normal-sized muffins.

• 1 cup flour
• 1 cup oats
• 1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons sugar
• 1 tbs. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 3/4 pound sour cherries
• 1/4 cup (4 tbs.) butter, melted
• 1 cup milk
• 2 eggs, separated

Preheat the oven to 375 and butter a muffin tin.

Combine all the dry ingredients except for one tablespoon of sugar and mix. Mix in the butter, the milk, and the two egg yolks.

Pit the sour cherries, put them in a bowl, and combine them with the remaining tablespoon of sugar. Add them to the batter.

Beat the egg whites till they hold soft peaks, and fold them into the batter. Put the batter into the muffin tin and bake until the muffins are brown on top, a bit more than 20 minutes.

Spinach and Inedible Mushroom Salad

Two of the first signs of spring in Hungary were wild mushrooms and spinach. And unlike the spinach I bought in September, this spinach raw didn't cause a burning sensation in my throat. I washed the spinach, cooked the mushrooms with some wine, combined them, and dressed it all with a soy sauce dressing like I'd seen my aunt use on a spinach salad. The results were excellent.

I wanted to find out what kind of mushrooms I had used before I posted this recipe. The old lady who sold me the mushrooms told me they were called szegfűgomba. I googled this to find the mushroom's latin name, marasmius wynnei. A bit more googling told me that in English it went by pearly parachute and violetter schwindling. It also informed that this mushroom is inedible. Luckily for me, the same mushroom in Hungarian is a "[j]ó ehető gomba, amelyet - bár kicsiny - érdemes gyűjteni"--a good, edible mushroom, which though small is worth collecting. The Hungarians are onto something because it was indeed good, with a deep, meaty flavor. Just to make all you people stuck in the U.S. jealous, let me mention that wild porcini--vargányagomba--are only $4.32/pound here, and chantarelles--rókagomba--are just $6.61 a pound. But then you have dryers, which starts to make up for it.

I'm giving weights for the spinach and mushrooms, but I'm not sure of them and you should just use your judgment. But take into account that mushrooms really shrink a lot when you cook them. My amounts for the dressing are also guesses because I can't remember how much of everything I ended up using. But that's probably good, since some soy sauces are stronger than others and you'd have to adjust anyway. This is for two people.

• 1/3 pound spinach, washed
• 1/3 pound mushrooms, cut into one-inch pieces--if the mushrooms are small, like szegfűgomba, you don't have to cut them at all
• 2 tbs. white wine
• 1 tbs. olive oil or butter
• salt, pepper

Dressing:

• 1 tbs. soy sauce
• 1 tbs. lemon juice
• 3 tbs. olive oil

In a big pan, heat the oil or butter and add the mushrooms, wine, and salt. Cook over high heat until all the liquid--the wine and the juice that the mushrooms will release after a few minutes--is gone, which will take about 15 minutes. Once the mushrooms are cooking in fat, turn down the heat a bit, stir occasionally, and let the mushrooms brown. Put them over the spinach.

Mix up the dressing. I always do this in a jar. Taste, adjust, and mix it into the salad.

Spareribs

I'm moving to Seattle next year, where I will be attending the University of Washington in pursuit of a Ph.D. in mathematics. So, goodbye to túró, goose fat, and lard, and hello to oysters, salmon, and goat. But I'm still in Hungary now, and a year's worth of sparerib experiments have finally led me to this recipe.

Most recipes I've seen for cooking ribs in the oven tell you to cook it for about two hours at 300 degrees. I hoped that by lowering the temperature, I could make ribs that were more like barbecue. The result may not be smoky, but it is tender. This recipe makes enough for seven or eight people, and it takes about 6 hours.

• 4 pounds spareribs

Dry rub:

• 1 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1 tbs. brown sugar
• 1 tbs. paprika
• 1 tsp. cumin
• 1 tsp. black pepper

Glaze:

• 3/4 cup black currant jelly
• 4 tsps. mustard
• 1 tbs. vinegar
• 1 tbs. ketchup

One day before you plan to cook the ribs, mix up all the ingredients for the dry rub and rub it all over the meat. Let it sit in the refrigerator overnight.

Cook the meat for five hours in a 225 degree oven. (200 degrees would probably be better, but 225 is the lowest that my oven can maintain, besides room temperature. If you do lower the temperature, cook it a little bit longer.)

After five hours, mix up the glaze and put it on the meat. Cook another 20 minutes. Turn on the broiler (or if you don't have one, like me, just turn the oven up all the way) and cook until he glaze begins to bubble. You should be paranoid about not burning it. Let it sit for at least 15 minutes before you cut the ribs apart. Eat with your hands.

Other flavors of jam work fine too, especially apricot. The ribs are also good with no glaze at all.

Csurdítás

Finally, here's a Hungarian recipe, as demonstrated to us by the Fehér household. It's really easy, so long as you have an open fire and a some big hunks of smoked fat from the belly of a pig.

• slices of bread
• sliced tomato, cucumber, wax peppers, hot peppers, and red onions
• smoked pork fat (füstölt szalonna)

Put the hunks of fat on skewers. Hold them over the fire till the fat begins to drip. Let it drip onto the bread. Repeat until each slice of bread is thoroughly covered with fat. Put the vegetables onto the bread; they should only overlap a little bit. Drip more fat on them. Consume.

When we were done with the fat, we watched as the Fehérs dipped it still smoldering into a bowl of water, cooking it through. We cut it up and put some of it on the bread as well. It tasted something like the fat on the side of a piece of duck breast--first you get the crunch from the toasted exterior, and then you get soft, rich fat.

Barley!

The weather here has turned warm. The last laggardly trees finally have some leaves. And yet the only culinary signs of spring are some pretty heads of lettuce. Instead of strawberries and asparagus, I'll give you a recipe made up entirely of dry things that have been sitting in your pantry for months.

Poor barley! Everybody's pantry contains rice--probably several varieties, even--but nobody's contains barley, except maybe in the form of beer. Plain boiled barley is every bit as good as plain rice. It takes about twenty minutes longer and you should use three times as much water as barley. This recipe is a bit more elaborate, but not very. It takes an hour or so and serves four. And it makes better leftovers than rice.

• 1 cup barley
• 2/3 cup dried mushrooms
• 3 cups water
• 1 large onion, chopped roughly
• 1 tsp. plus a bit more salt
• 1 tbs. duck fat or olive oil

Bring the water to a boil, turn off the heat, and put the mushrooms in it. Let them re-hydrate while you chop the onion. Choose a pot big enough to hold all the ingredients and heat it over medium-low heat. After a minute, add the onions and some salt, and cover the pot. Cook for about ten minutes, stirring every two or three minutes and making sure the onions don't burn. After these ten minutes, add the oil or other fat and turn the heat to medium-high. Cook the onions until they are very brown, stirring nearly constantly to keep them from burning. (I heard that cooking onions initially without fat causes them to carmelize more quickly, but I don't really know if it's true. If you don't believe in this, then just cook with fat from the beginning.) Add the barley and cook for another minute, stirring. Add the mushrooms along with the water to the pot. Add the tsp. of salt. Cover, bring to a boil, and then turn the heat down. Cook until the barley is tender, 30-40 minutes. You may need to add more water.

Sunday, March 23, 2008

• breakfast: challah
• lunch: ham & cheese burek; cabbage strudel; squash and poppy seed strudel; layered strudel
• dinner: fogas (pike-perch) with mushroom sauce

This day's burek, from Rétes Háza, was good but didn't compare to yesterday's. It just didn't taste as fresh. The cabbage strudel tasted like a spring roll. The squash and poppy seed strudel, on the other hand, was a dessert, and a good one. Try some poppy seeds in your pie at Thanksgiving! At the very least you'll get a colorful dessert.

The place next door, Virág Cukrászda, was a highly touted bakery. I tried their layered strudel, which was made of all the greatest hits of Hungarian pastries: sour cherry, poppy seed, and túró. They combined to exactly the sum of their parts, which was enough. The bakery had a sign advertising "cooked ice cream," and we were expecting something like baked Alaska, but it turned out just to mean their ice cream was homemade. Giovanna had some, and it was top-notch.

For dinner we went to the Roosevelt Téri Halászcsárda for some more fish. My fogas--a mild white fish always translated as pike-perch--wasn't very good. I didn't know then that fogas isn't a river fish! Giovanna did better with catfish, which was delicious and must have come from the Tisza, the river that flows through Szeged.

Addresses:
Roosevelt Téri Halászcsárda
Roosevelt tér 14

Rétes Háza
Klauzál tér 2

Virág Cukrászda
Klauzál tér 1

Saturday, March 22, 2008

• breakfast: túrós burek
• snack: fruit and poppy seed candy; apple-cinnamon mulled white wine; orange mulled red wine
• lunch: chicken soup with noodles and carrots (csontleves)
• dinner: peas and paneer; basmati rice; naan; a mango lassi; tea

As we studied the pastry case at Burek Pékség, a man walked in and ordered what turned out to be a burek. It was made up of layers of dough. In the burek's moist interior they tasted like pasta, but on its outside they were crisp and brown. They came in six flavors: túró (a fresh curd cheese), meat, ham and cheese, cabbage, sour cherry, and apple. We got túró, which unusually was savoury rather than sweet. It was an unusual pastry for Hungary. Not so atypical was the portion size: even though Giovanna and I shared it, it was about twice as much as I wanted.

We guessed that the burek was Serbian since we had never heard of it before and its name doesn't sound Hungarian (it breaks vowel harmony rules, for you linguists out there). Wikipedia informed me that the burek can be found in different forms everywhere that was once part of the Ottoman empire. It was good, rich, but at least for me a bit overwhelming at breakfast. We also bought a loaf of challah for future eating, since it seemed to be a specialty of the place. (Challah is ubiquitous in Hungary, and nobody associates it with Judaism.)

In town we found a spring fair with lots of booths. I made a bee line to the honey stand. The honey there was more expensive than my beloved Gyöngyösi honey, but it came in many intriguing varieties (honey from wild garlic flowers, anyone?). I got a little jar of chestnut honey. It's less sweet than most honey; in fact, you can even taste a bit of sourness in it, and the aftertaste is slightly bitter. At the same booth, I bought a bottle of squash seed oil. It's a traditional Hungarian salad topping that we had only ever had eating lunch with the Kiss family (their name sounds like quiche, not like a smooch). At another booth we got a candy made of fruit condensed till it weighed twice as much as you thought possible and covered with poppy seeds. It had a pleasantly sticky and chewy consistency and tasted really fruity even though I couldn't distinguish any one fruit. It was nice, though probably not worth the shocking 600 forints we paid for it. At the mulled wine booth prices reverted to the Hungarian norm, and 120 forints bought a glass of white wine mulled with apples and cinnamon that was the best mulled wine I've ever had. The mulled red wine was fine but nothing special.

Szeged is famous for its sausage and paprika, which come together at the Pick sausage factory's sausage and paprika museum. We ate lunch at the museum's restaurant. After some soup, which like all Hungarian soup was good, we tried to get a plate of Pick salami with toast. The waiter returned from the kitchen with the news that there was no toast. We reacted to this improbable news by telling him that plain bread would be fine. He looked sheepish and told us that actually they were out of salami. Luckily upon entrance to the museum, we were told that our tickets entitled us to a free plate of winter salami, Pick's most famous. The exhibit was much more informative than factory exhibits usually are. I learned that Márk Pick, the founder, was a Jew; that Hungarian meat consumption has doubled since the fall of Communism; and that winter salami is called that because before refrigeration, it could only be made then.

For dinner we went to a restaurant called Taj Mahal. The Indian food was as typical as the restaurant's name suggests (but still good!), and it was a wonderful break from Hungarian food.

Addresses:
Burek Pékség
Petőfi Sándor sgt. 27

Pick Salami and Szeged Paprika Museum
Felső Tisza-part 10

Taj Mahal
Gutenberg u. 12