What do Hungarians eat at the "beach"?

Hungary is landlocked. Their right-wing dictator in the 1920s and 30s called himself Admiral Horthy, but that’s because he had been in the Austro-Hungarian navy. Hungary lost its access to the sea (and a lot more of it's traditional St. Stephen's borders) in the 1920 treaty of Trianon after World War One, when Croatia was made part of Yugoslavia.

Perhaps it is this feeling of loss for their coastline that makes Hungarians crazy about water. From the baths (built by the Ottomans in their century and a half of ruling Hungary) to the thermal spas, swimming seems to be their favorite activity. We are now in the largest swimming hole, and largest lake in Europe, Lake Balaton.

It's not exactly a beach, but they call everything, including swimming pools, the beach. The most popular beachside treat is langos, which is a deep fried flatbread.

It most commonly is served with sour cream and cheese.

But you can get all kinds of toppings like Mexikoi, which has some type of red sauce, or salami and onions.

You would think langos would be good with sugar like a funnel cake but that isn’t too popular. For dessert they eat this cylindrical sweet bread called kurtoskalacs.

They roast it on a spit like this.

Then roll it in sugar, cinnamon...

To drink, like everywhere in Hungary, they love wine.

The promenade was lined with these little wine sellers. It was like Eger all over again but 250 km to the west.

To eat with the wine, since it is a lake, they fry fish.

But the favorite snack with wine is always these little toasts.

They usually just have onion, paprika, and some kind of fat (most likely lard); but we went with peppers and tomatoes too.

This is not for the beach, but it is a summer treat. It is mixed fruits cooked with cream or sour cream into a soup. Typically it is made only with sour cherries and called meggyleves. It is topped with whipped cream. It is not a dessert, it is a soup course.

Kendi is a real Bor

Normally I would say puns are a form of humor beneath this blog. This one was too easy though. Bor is Hungarian for wine and we are in Hungarian wine country at Eger.

They have all of these cellars built into the sides of hills.

Some of them, like this one, only sell wine to take out in big plastic jugs.

But in others they have decorated the cave and you can come in and have a taste.

It’s between 50 cents and a dollar usually for one deciliter. They dispense with the formality of bottles for this young wine and often pour your glass straight from the tap or from plastic bottles like these.

The main varietals are similar to those in Moravia, since we are just south of Slovakia. We are still about 100 km from the far northeastern corner of the country where Tokaj is made. The most famous wine from Tokaj, Aszu, is sweet and made from grapes infected with the noble rot, which were first used for making wine in Hungary. They are, however, starting to produce dry whites in Tokaj like Kendra’s favorite Furmint. When the Hungarian prime minister during the 1848 revolution, Szemere Bertalan, was living in exile after the failure of the revolution, he tried to gain patronage from Friedrich Engels by sending him two dozen bottles of wine from Eger, Tokaj, and Lake Balaton. Engels didn’t like it because it was too sweet. Szemere is responsible for the law that emancipated Jews in Hungary.

You can have a goulash cookout here, too (notice the hook for a bucket) to go with the large volumes of wine you buy. The whole experience is a lot of fun.

Finally, I’ve been thinking that I should start tucking in my shirts.

Tony Curtis is Hungarian

AKA Bernie Schwartz, just like Szilard and Teller who developed the A-Bomb, Johnny Von Neumann who pioneered the computer, some guy with a cube, and the founders of Paramount and Fox. But I bring up Curtis because his daughter Jamie Lee voiced a commercial where she advocated eating dinner with your kids to keep them off drugs. In it she says to have goulash and "whatever goulash goes with" like it's foreign to her even though she is Hungarian.
Anyway, it comes alone usually as a thin soup with a little bit of meat (not a stew like we think). It's not that amazing so I won't go into it here. So what else do they eat in Budapest?
This is a biscuit made with bacon called pogacsa. Actually you can get these on 2nd ave and 81st Street in New York, and they're just as good and greasy.
They also love their sour cream here (and cabbage). This is one dish I liked a lot possibly because it's one of the few rice dishes. It is called rakkott kel and is like a rice and cabbage lasagna. Below in the middle is kendra's favorite, stuffed cabbage.
For dessert this is somloi galuska which is sponge cake and a cream custard.
Here I'm getting ideas for how to run my chess club next year.

This is a monument in the center of town to Soviet war dead. It is surprising that they still have it up because there is a lot of anti-Russian sentiment here since they invaded to crush revolutions twice in 1956 and 1849.
It is right in front of the American embassy, which is why I guess they balance it with this statue in the same square of American Harry Hill Bandholtz.
He was in charge of American intervention in Hungary during the white terror that followed the short-lived 1919 Hungarian Communist government. He was also in charge of the US military's crushing of the 1920 miners' strikes in Mingo County West Virginia, which you might know from the film Matewan.

Finally, Kendra and I are coming back here for Veteran's Day.

The trouble with food writers

While I’m on the subject of New York Times critics, I should have a go at Mark Bittman one of their food writers. You might know him from that horrible Spanish travel show with Gwyneth Paltrow. Just before we went to Vienna he wrote a review of this restaurant there called Schweizerhaus.

This is the picture that ran with that article. My initial reaction was to think “what an unoriginal hack.” Of all the interesting food in the modern and cosmopolitan city of Vienna he chose this lame beer hall (with a terrible, macro beer selection btw). If he was going to choose a classic Austrian place, he could have gone to one of those Heurigen (wine bars) that I mentioned before. Anyway, I gave him the benefit of the doubt and went.

First of all, the place is in the middle of this horrible bootleg Disney Land amusement park.

Complete with live horse merry-go-rounds.

All he mentioned was that it was “in one of Vienna's large public parks.” Here is how it really looks (like an amusement park restaurant).

Now, although he ran a picture of Schnitzels, he explained how the specialty of the place is Schweinsstetlze. Here is my picture of that.

Maybe the Times thinks this is too unappetizing to have as their lead photo. But he explains that this is the specialty of the house and describes it this way "the skin is close to crackling in texture, with a thin lacquer, and unbelievably delicious; the meat is soft and juicy."

I don't think I would ever use the phrase unbelievably delicious, but especially when it isn't true. What he fails to mention, but my waiter did when he was convincing me to get mustard with it, is that it is very dry (not juicy). It helps you understand why Germans (ok Austrians) drink so much beer with their food, to wash it down.

Anyway, he is wrong about this place. It isn’t very good. It was an ok authentic Austrian experience I guess (like going to Coney Island if you came to NYC), but he should have been more open about the down side.

People say that I am negative when I describe my travels, but I just like to be honest instead of lying. If I pretend I had some amazing experience and transport people to a magical place that doesn’t exist, that will just leave them disappointed when they go there for real.

The one positive of the amusement park was that they had my favorite pinball machine, World Cup Soccer 94.

Here you can see that I have defeated Germany to win the World Cup.

Finally, this is a picture of Kendra in a very gay mood.

If you click on it you can see that people are on trampolines in the background. Regardless, perhaps I should have put that pic on my last post.

More from Austrian gay television

Kendra and I saw this movie the other day. As you can see we are limited in our English language options.I would be interested in what people think. I didn't think it was as bad as the reviews I read. A. O. Scott the reviewer for the Times (and son of Joan Wallach Scott) said it proved that that "lampooning homophobia has become an acceptable, almost unavoidable form of homophobic humor." I don't know if that's true, for instance with Stephen Colbert. In any case, I will try to avoid those pitfalls in the rest of this post.

Here are some hot guys.
Sorry they couldn't be blond and Polish.

Here is the ballet they watch outdoors on the big screen in Vienna.
Sorry I couldn't get a less blurry picture. The dancing was too fast.

Here is me eating a wurst.

Do you guys have anything to eat besides Wieners?

Turns out that they do in Vienna. Here is the lightest fare I could find. It's these little sandwiches open-faced on rye. This place is called Trzesniewski's and shows the diversity of the former capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The owner came from Krakow at the turn of the last century. They have places like this everywhere, but I like this place because instead of hard boiled eggs, pieces of salmon, or caviar; they have spreads made mostly of vegetables. This is (top to bottom) "wild paprika", tomato, and pepper.
This is maybe more what you expected from Austrian cooking.
It is Rindfleisch (beef) served with potatoes and pork with a side of cabbage.

For dessert these (in the front) are KNÖDEL. Although they look fried, there are not. They are dumplings steamed and then rolled in sugar.
Here they are close up. They can be filled with chocolate, plum, or other fruits.
To drink, you are probably thinking beer, but who knew Vienna was more known for its wine. They even have hundreds of acres of vineyards inside the city limits. You can go to one of these places called Heuriger, which are places to drink the newly-harvested wine. Here we are at one.
Like a beer garden, I guess, but for wine. The food here is good. The have like a buffet you can order from with mostly picnic food.
Like potato salad, pickles, sliced meats, cheeses, and slaw.

This is Kendra imitating a goose, which we have seen a lot of but not yet eaten on this trip.