Hungary

Another delicious Zwack cocktail to add to your repertoire. Sweet, strong, and complex this makes for a great pre-dinner or after-dinner drink.

This Apple-Nut Cake is a super simple one bowl cake from Hungary. It is incredibly moist and a wonderful combination of apple, walnut, and cinnamon flavors.

A plant-based Hungarian main dish — Mushroom Paprikash — with onions, sour cream, and dill.

With shredded cucumbers and a punchy herb kick from the fresh dill, this dip is perfect for dipping potato chips and works well with sturdy vegetables like carrots and bell pepper.

Another lovely approach to a Zwack cocktail. This time a Rye forward but well-balanced cocktail with orgeat and lime juice.

Kossuth Kifli are a simple butter cake with a little hint of lemon, topped with chopped walnuts. Sliced using a basic biscuit cutter into crescent moon shapes and dusted with powdered sugar to make for a lovely presentation.

The flavors in the fritters and the side salad are infinitely flexible to what you have on hand or is in season. Just roll with what you have and enjoy it!

This soup is simple to make and packs a nice amount of umami flavor. It definitely needs generous seasoning with salt and pepper, but with the freshness of the tarragon and creaminess of the sour cream it turns into something lovely served with a thick slice of rye or other crusty hearty bread to dip in it.

Zwack is one of my favorite discoveries through this process of exploring recipes from around the world. It is an herbal bitter liquor that adds complexity to any cocktail it finds itself in.

Hungarian Nut and Poppyseed Rolls are a lovely treat. They are not too sweet and are perfect with a nice cup of coffee or tea. I enjoyed making the two different fillings as they each had unique characteristics, but went very well together and look beautiful stacked up ready to be devoured.

This dressing is inspired by a Hungarian cucumber salad recipe. I think it goes equally well on a mixed chopped salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, and radishes. You could add greens if you like, but this crisp, crunchy, and juicy combo is pretty great as is.

This Layered Cabbage Casserole (Rakott Kelkaposzta) is hearty and rich with warming flavors coming from the paprika, braised ground meat, and creamy sour cream topping.

These hit all my dessert buttons too. Not too sweet, flaky and soft, texturally interesting with the filling of ground nuts, and great with coffee. 

For Hungary I perused a number of books, but Flavors of Hungary by Charlotte Slovak Biro was the clear winner. I found a lot of little gems in this cookbook. Including lovely recipes for Chicken, Potatoes, and Peas. A perfect trifecta in my world. 

A clean drinking, on the sweeter side, aperitif.

For this year’s race, we made some Hungarian classics from a local library find, an excellent 1970's Hungarian cookbook: Flavors of Hungary by Charlotte Slovak Biro. 

Zwack Unicum is a Hungarian liqueur known for its sweet-bitterness and herbal notes. Great in a cocktail!

I love the names of Hungarian dishes: goulash, paprikash, balushka. They sound so warm and comforting. This dish definitely met those criteria. Since we have a great beef source we went with a nice beef stew for this year's race. So easy, and so much flavor. The long cooking time develops the flavors nicely and the paprika really shines in this stew.