Hungary runs on paprika, pork fat and sour cream, and it is more varied than the international reputation suggests. The cooking splits between robust peasant food and a serious pastry tradition, with a wine list most visitors never get to. Start with these.
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A beef and paprika soup with potato and tiny csipetke pasta — a soup, not the stew that is served abroad under the same name.
The name comes from gulyás, the herdsmen who cooked it in a cauldron over an open fire on the plains. The paprika goes in off the heat: burned paprika turns bitter, which is the single most common way a home version fails.
Deep-fried flatbread, rubbed with garlic, spread with sour cream and piled with grated cheese. Street food, eaten hot.
It was originally a leftover dough cooked in the fat after baking bread. The classic topping is tejföl and sajt — sour cream and cheese — with garlic rubbed on while it is still hot enough to absorb it.
A river-fish soup, red with paprika, made with carp and served with bread. Fiery and eaten at Christmas Eve.
The paprika is cooked into a roux base before the fish goes in, which is what separates halászlé from a plain fish broth. The Baja and Szeged versions differ in whether the fish is passed through a sieve, and both are argued about.
Chicken simmered in a paprika and sour-cream sauce, served with nokedli dumplings. The most approachable dish in the cuisine.
The sour cream goes in at the end and off the heat, or it splits. Nokedli are made by scraping soft dough through a späetzle press straight into boiling water, and they are what makes the dish.
Cabbage leaves stuffed with pork and rice, cooked with sauerkraut and smoked meat. A winter dish and a Christmas one.
It is built in layers in a pot and cooked slowly, with the sauerkraut underneath and around. The sourness of the kraut is the point — it cuts through the pork fat — and it improves if reheated the next day.
Savory pancakes filled with veal paprikash and covered in a paprika cream sauce. A dish invented for restaurants, not villages.
Despite being named after the Hortobágy plain, it is a restaurant creation rather than a peasant dish. The pancake is thin, the filling is fine, and it arrives swimming in sauce with a dusting of paprika.
Chimney cake: dough wound around a spit, rolled in sugar and baked until the outside caramelises. Transylvanian in origin, Hungarian in practice.
The sugar on the outside caramelises into a crisp shell while the inside stays soft. It is baked on a wooden spit over coals, and the spiral is created by winding a single strip of dough. Sold at markets and festivals rather than in restaurants.
Tokaji Aszú is the sweet botrytised wine, graded by puttonyos; pálinka is the fruit brandy, often homemade.
Aszú is made from grapes affected by noble rot, which concentrates the sugar and adds a honeyed, orange-peel flavour. Pálinka is distilled from apricot, plum or pear, and a home-distilled bottle is stronger than anything sold in a shop.
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