The brand new Blue Guide Hungary Food Companion is now out. A handy lexicon of Magyar food vocabulary, with a miscellany of culinary information (and a few traditional recipes) thrown into the pot alongside.

Hungary typically has blisteringly hot summers but curiously no real summer cuisine. A cold fruit soup made from strawberry, apricot or sour cherry, followed by stuffed marrow or stuffed paprika, is about as light as it gets in the traditional repertoire. Summer is also the season for “főzelék”. As the interwar court chef Sándor Újváry noted, “It is needless to list the types of főzelék that belong to the domestic culinary repertoire and which are prepared on a daily basis in so many kitchens: they are all universally known…and the perfect preparation of these well-known types of főzelék requires little effort and few ingredients.”

Sounds good. But what is a főzelék? The name roughly means a boil-up, which is essentially accurate: a főzelék is a dish of boiled vegetable, sometimes puréed and sometimes not, mixed with a roux and eaten with a spoon. Almost any vegetable can be used, from the humble potato (krumpli) to the more highly prized asparagus (spárga). On menus, you will commonly find cabbage (káposzta) főzelék, spinach (spenót) főzelék, pumpkin (tök) főzelék, green pea (zöldborsó) főzelék. In the market this morning we found yellow string beans (vajbab). So yellow string bean főzelék it was to be.

Here they are in their raw state:

And this is the recipe we followed to turn them into főzelék.

1. Wash and chop the beans, into sections roughly 2–3cm long. Cook them until tender in lightly salted water (we had some leftover chicken stock, so we used that instead).

2. Prepare the roux. With a wire whisk, combine flour and sour cream and powdered paprika. We used three heaped teaspoons of flour, one heaped teaspoon of paprika and two tablespoons of sour cream.

3. Drain the beans, retaining the water. Then gradually add the water to the roux, mixing all the while.

4. Put the mixture on a low heat, stirring until it thickens. Add the beans. Salt to taste if necessary. Serve.

This is what it looked like.

Simple but delicious.

István Czifray was the nom de plume of István Czövek, master chef at the court of the Palatine Joseph, Habsburg governor of Hungary in the early 19th century. Czifray’s book of recipes and household tips (including instructions for making perfumes and pomades) first appeared in 1816. Soon to be entitled Magyar Nemzeti Szakácskönyve (Hungarian National Cookbook), it went into numerous editions, the last coming out in 1888. It is an important landmark in the annals of Hungarian culinary history. Czifray includes a recipe for the signature Hungarian dish of paprika chicken (paprikás csirke). Since we had recently eaten this dish at Kárpátia, and old-fashioned restaurant in central Budapest whose opulent interior decoration is a sort of pastiche of the Hungarian Parliament and the Matthias Church, and where tourists’ eardrums are cheerfully assaulted by the squealing of a gypsy band, we were curious to see how Czifray’s recipe measured up.

The Kárpátia version of the dish looked like this:

Ours wouldn’t look quite like that. We weren’t planning to make galuska (that’s a subject for another post). The key thing to get right was the sauce.

Here is Czifray’s recipe:

“Pluck and draw a pair of young chickens. Wash them and cut into equal-sized pieces. Lightly salt these. Finely chop an onion and in a copper skillet fry in butter until translucent. Add the chicken pieces and half a dessert spoon of paprika powder. Cover and steam until tender, shaking periodically. Sprinkle with a little flour, add a scant quantity of meat broth and a few spoonfuls of sour cream. Leave to cook on a low heat, carefully skimming off the foam that forms on the surface. Then serve.”

As with many old recipes, it is hazy on precise quantities and gives no information about cooking time. This is something you either have to know from experience or guess.

We didn’t take whole chickens, we began with chicken legs, bought from the butcher that afternoon. Apart from that, we followed the initial instructions, chopping a bunch of spring onions and sautéeing them in a thick wad of butter in a heavy casserole pan (cast iron, we didn’t have copper). Half a dessert spoon of paprika powder sounded rather little, but anyway, we didn’t add much more (maybe a level dessert spoon). It was good-quality paprika, from Kalocsa.

Covering and steaming without the chicken pieces sticking to the pan is tricky. You might want to—as we did—add a little of the meat broth at this stage. We put in a large ladleful of chicken stock that we had made a couple of days previously.

“Cook until tender” is a difficult instruction. How long is that? To be sure that the chicken is cooked through, you want to cook it for at least 45 minutes in total. We reckoned half an hour at this stage, and then a further 20 minutes once the sour cream and flour have gone in.

Sprinkling with flour and then adding sour cream sounded like a recipe for lumpy sauce but oddly enough it worked fine. You really only need a scattering of flour. For “scant quantity” of broth, we read about 200ml. But if it starts drying out, add more. A good tasty stock won’t spoil the dish’s flavour. “A few spoonfuls” of sour cream we interpreted as three or four generously heaped dessert spoons.

We stirred all this in, left the chicken on the lowest flame for a further 20 minutes or so. We didn’t need to skim off any foam—none formed. But we did add a little more salt.

It looked like this (see below). And it was excellent. Even though the sauce didn’t look as flawlessly smooth as Kárpátia’s, in fact it tasted better. The Kárpátia version lacked the spring onions, which really make all the difference.

In some ways Ágnes Zilahy (1848–1908) is the Mrs Beeton of Hungarian cookery. Her publications of recipes, along with tips on household management, made her a household name in her own lifetime and her Valódi Magyar Szakácskönyv (Real Hungarian Cookery), a book of explicitly Hungarian dishes (i.e. not derived from other cuisines), went into a second edition within seven months of its release in 1891.

The daughter of a well-to-do lawyer, Zilahy was suddenly flung on her own resources with her father and all eight siblings died, leaving her alone in the world at the age of 18. Her first husband squandered her fortune; her second marriage was also unhappy and ended in divorce. She eked out a living as a glove-maker until persuaded by Count Sándor Teleky, a hero of the Hungarian Uprising against the Habsburgs of 1848–9, to compile her recipes into a book. This she did and never looked back. We decided to test one of those recipes out.

It’s late April and the markets are beginning to fill up with fresh produce. We chose Zilahy’s recipe for stuffed marrow. She in fact titles the recipe Töltött ugorka, “stuffed cucumber”. But we couldn’t really imagine stuffing cucumbers. Marrow it had to be. Her instructions begin as follows: You need a green “ugorka” as long as a span, well-grown and thick but still young and tender.

So far so good. Next step:

Remove its skin and cut it in half lengthways. Allow one “ugorka” per person. Remove the seeds from the centre.

That part was easy. Now for the stuffing. Zilahy recommends leftover roast pork or beef, which should be finely minced, seasoned with salt and a teaspoon of crushed pepper and mixed with 120g of “rizskása”. Here comes the perennial problem with modern cookery: we don’t make enough use of leftovers, or, when we come to pick something from a recipe book, we don’t have any leftovers to work with and have to start from scratch.

Why is this a problem? Not only because of waste, but because of flavour. Leftover roast pork, whose flavours have had time to develop and coalesce, would be much tastier than the fresh minced pork we had bought from the butcher that same morning. To make the meat more savoury, we sautéed it in oil with diced onion, salt and pepper, some dried sage and crushed caraway seed.

Now for the “rizskása”. This “rice gruel” is difficult to translate. It is essentially a dish of boiled rice flavoured in some way. Zilahy’s cookbook has two separate recipes: for rizskása with onion and rizskása with mushrooms. We chose the former as we had no mushrooms. All it involves is boiling up rice in salted water and mixing with glazed chopped onions and parsley. One thing to note: here, as for most Hungarian cooking, it is best to use medium-grain rice. Long-grain rice is not glutinous enough and the ingredients won’t combine and adhere properly.

Back to Zilahy’s recipe:

Mix the meat and rice well together, then fill the hollowed out marrow halves with this stuffing. Place the stuffed marrows together in a large casserole, with the stuffed side facing upwards. Then fill the casserole with warm salted water and immediately add to the liquid six spoonfuls of strong vinegar, otherwise the marrows will fall apart when cooking.

We did all this, the only difference being that instead of warm salted water we used warm chicken stock, again afraid that our this-morning’s meat would not be flavourful enough and needed some external help.

When the marrows are cooked, add a lightly browned roux made from an egg-sized amount of fat and a large wooden spoonful of flour. When the roux is hot and beginning to brown, add a cup of cold water to it, to stop it from going lumpy. Quickly pour this over the marrow and cook together for a few minutes.

Zilahy gives no indication of how hot the oven should be (or indeed if the marrows should be cooked in the oven or on the hob), nor how long the cooking will take, nor whether the casserole should be covered or not. We chose to bake them uncovered and—because we hadn’t followed her advice of removing the skins—the process took an hour at 200ºC. But ours is a very old oven. In a more efficient fan oven, it should take less. Not covering the pan meant that the meat stuffing went pleasantly crunchy on top.

Zilahy recommends serving this dish with sour cream (tejföl) and beef topside (sült felsál). We didn’t think we needed yet more meat with it. But the sour cream was wonderful.