Notes from Hungary

By Raul Dias 

Like any seasoned traveller, I have a non-negotiable set of ‘rituals’ that I need to perform when visiting any new place. Chief among those is to visit a food market to get a pulse of the quotidian life of the local people. I love nothing better than to see bossy grannies haggle their way though a purchase of tomatoes. In European markets, I greedily look forward to the generous samples cheese-mongers and charcutiers put out for gourmands like myself.

So, on a recent trip to Hungary, the minute I was done with checking into my hotel in Budapest, I sauntered down to the city’s Great Market Hall housed at the end of the famous pedestrian shopping street Váci Utca on the Pest side of Liberty Bridge at Fővám Square. And while I did get my fill of both bargaining octogenarians and some rather strange local charcuterie — particularly the lókolbász or horse meat sausage — I encountered row upon row of stalls in the market dedicated to a single spice. Paprika.

Revelling in all its sweet-n-smoky glory, paprika is the de facto spice of Hungary, where almost the entire cuisine pivots around the axis created by the spice. And paprika-obsessed Hungarians have a certain Mr. Christopher Columbus to thank. Originating in Central Mexico, the spice that consists of dried and ground chillies made its way to the far Balkans via Spain when the Turks introduced paprika to the Balkan Peninsula in the 18th century during the Ottoman rule.

Dash of heat

Interestingly, thanks to it being packed with Vitamins A and E and capsaicin — which is said to have anti-cancer, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties — paprika was first used by Hungarians as a medicine for treating typhus. It is also capsaicin that gives chillies their heat.

In fact, up until 1920, all paprika was super-hot. It was only when a hybrid variety of the plant was created in the southern Hungarian region of Szeged that paprika got its distinct sweet and smoky flavour profile. In fact, the Szeged paprika museum is said to be a very popular tourist spot where everybody is sent off with a 10-gram sampling of paprika.

Back at Great Market Hall, I soon realised there is no one paprika that fits into all dishes. A rather patient stall owner with much better English language skills than my non-existent Hungarian gave me the paprika 101. Apparently, the two most common types of paprika are either édes (sweet) or csipős (hot). But one could also go for the különleges deep red, finely ground paprika, which is mild. Or for those with a predilection for a dash of searing heat in their food, the rózsa, a dark red, medium-coarse paprika which tends to be very hot, is your best bet.

At lunch later that day at Zeller Bistro, a Budapest icon that regularly gets its share of ‘five star’ reviews for its wide range of paprika-rich offerings, Zoltan, an old university buddy, introduced me to a plethora of Hungarian classics that hero the spice. We started off with a cliché. Better known to most as goulash, gulyásleves is by itself a very basic meat and potatoes kind of stew that gets elevated to high gastronomic heaven when a dash of paprika and cream are added to it. Similarly, halászlé, the humble fishermen’s soup — made using river fish like carp or pike fished from the Danube — takes on a spicy hue when the warmer édesnemes variety of paprika is added to it.

By then, utterly obsessed with all things paprika, I found myself at Paprika Molnar factory, in the village of Roszke 15 kilometres from Szeged city. It is here I took a guided tour and learnt how things weren’t all rosy (pun intended) for paprika very recently, almost causing a national crisis.

In 2013, production hit a rough patch when Hungarian paprika exports slumped, as buyers across the world turned to cheaper supplies mainly from China and Latin America. This was in the wake of two years of unpredictable weather Hungary faced, resulting in the poorest yield of the paprika-producing capsicum annuum chilli in 50 years. I was told there was even talk of the possibility of Hungary having to import its very own treasured spice.

But in the last five years, things have taken an upward swing with production back on track, and once again, all is well in the land that literally worships its ‘red gold’.

(This article first appeared in the 2nd December 2018 issue of The Hindu newspaper's Sunday Magazine section on page 7 https://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/travel/notes-from-hungary/article25642593.ece)

But in the last five years, things have taken an upward swing with production back on track, and once again, all is well in the land that literally worships its ‘red gold’.