This week, we went with Hungarian food, full-immersion style. The recipes for Chicken Paprikash, Hungarian Dumplings, and Cucumber Salad with Sour Cream came right out of Christopher Kimball’s November-December 2022 issue of Milk Street Magazine.
https://www.177milkstreet.com/magazine
Our chicken paprikash didn’t look quite like the pictures in the magazine, but it was very good, especially with the dumplings. For those, you make a batter of egg, flour, nutmeg, and water, ladle it onto a cutting board, and cut dribbles of it into boiling water. It is similar to a recipe Phil’s paternal grandmother made.
I picked a cherry clafoutis for dessert to go with the Hungarian dinner, because when we were in Hungary over 30 years ago, Phil and I both have strong memories of drinking fresh, delicious cherry juice.
Cherry Clafoutis
3 eggs
1 pound pitted cherries (ours were jarred)
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla
1 1/4 cup whole milk (part can be cream for a richer dessert)
- Preheat oven to 350º and grease a 9 inch pie plate.
- Place cherries in a single layer in pie plate.
- Blend eggs in blender until foamy. Add sugar and blend again. Add remaining ingredients and blend again until batter is smooth.
- Pour batter over cherries and bake about 50 minutes, until the top is puffed and brown.
Serve warm or cold, with or without a sprinkling of powdered sugar.
This meal got us remembering our trip to Eastern Europe, and how impossible some languages were for us to navigate. The Berlin Wall had come down a year before our trip, and businesses were finding their way, sometimes with shaky baby steps. We had “limited cash holdings” but a spirit of adventure, so we saw, ate, and did a lot of interesting things. Don’t get me wrong, the internet is magic. But before we held the world in the palms of our hands, Google at the ready, we had to figure it out with affordable books that fit in our backpacks, and that was the adventure.
As chief navigator, I told Phil on one of our bus trips, that we would be getting off at the next stop, or maybe the sixth. “It starts with a B and has no vowels.” (They all start with a B and have no vowels.)
In Hungary, using translation books, we tasted our first caviar and ordered a salad that was just an unadorned quarter wedge of iceberg lettuce. We walked for miles to find the demitasse cups I couldn’t pull the trigger on the first time we saw them. We stayed in the home of a woman who had dipped her toes in the free market pool, but did not care to swim with the refuse (us) who had paid to use the facilities (her spare bedroom and only bathroom).
When I asked Phil what he remembered about Hungary, he said, “There was a very large and interesting beetle at the castle. We took a photo. There was a grotto. And the cherry juice. Remember the cherry juice?”
I remember sitting on a bench in a town square. For lunch, we had gotten a baguette and a hunk of cheese. Phil spied a kiosk across the square selling only one thing, cherry juice. We marveled, the two of us, at the pure cherry flavor. We tried, for the next week, to find it again, but it never happened. Sometimes it is a time and a place and a traveling companion that make an experience impossible to replicate. Wegmans has everything, but they don’t quite have that – a bench in a town square in Hungary with the person you are really happy to grow old with, and cherry juice. Remember the cherry juice?