Kalács and Beigli

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Once a year at Christmastime, my mom (as her mom did before her and her grandmothers did and great-grandmothers did before them) makes what we call kalács (pronounced kolach). Kalács, as it’s known in Hungarian, is actually a sweet brioche-type bread commonly served at Easter, but somewhere along the line, Slovak-Americans and Hungarian-Americans smashed a few different holiday breads together and what was once known as Beigli (and still is in Hungary) is now usually known as kalács in English. The reason for the confusion is that the word  kalács (despite being a Hungarian word) is Slavic in origin. But let’s get back to the deliciousness.

 

While the breads can be filled with a variety of ingredients, the standards are walnuts, poppy seeds and apricots. My mom doesn’t really like poppy seeds, so our  kalácses have walnuts and apricots. So we mix up pulverized walnuts with a little sugar and condensed milk. It’s not too too sweet, but you wouldn’t want to eat a cup before getting your blood sugar levels tested. In a second pan we boil down the apricots until they are like jam.

 

This was my first year making the recipe (under my mom’s direct and strict supervision, of course). As she did when I was a kid, she scraped the dough from my fingers because she was worried I had too much margarine on my fingers and not enough was getting into the dough. Don’t worry though, Internet, she only scraped me with the sharp side of the knife a few times.

Dry margarine-coated ingredients are mixed with egg yolks, yeast and sour cream.

And pretty soon a rollable batter can be turned out onto the table.

We form them into dough balls, which then have to rise. This is fun because while over-kneading is discouraged, you can slam the dough balls onto the table. It’s quite satisfying.

After the dough balls rise a little bit, you can roll them out and spread on a layer of nuts or apricots.

After spreading, it’s roll up time, after which the rolls have to rise for another hour before baking.

Then it’s just a short thirty minutes before  kalács/beigli perfection!

Beaufort and Gilbert

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On Wednesday we went into Beaufort, which is less than ten miles from Dataw Island. We took a historical carriage ride tour of the town and learned a lot about the area. Plus the Belgium draft horse, Gilbert (who plowed fields up in Amish country Ohio as a youngster) was absolutely adorable. He moved about as slow as southern molasses, but had a relentless amount of charm.

Brief history:

The area around what is now Beaufort was actually the second European-discovered parcel of North America (after Ponce de Leon’s St. Augustine), though it has inhabited for nearly two millennia before that by American Indians. Beaufort is a French name (bow-fort), though most Beaufortonians pronounce it the good ol’ fashion southern way (bew-fert).

Plantations are far and wide here. And before the Civil War, all landowners grew Sea Island Cotton (courtesy of their slaves), which was, at the time, the second most profitable crop in the world (second only to opium). It was longer, silkier and finer than even the best Egyptian cottons. Of course a few decades after the Civil War, the fields that hadn’t been burned were eaten up by the boll wheevil, and the crop went extinct.

The town and surrounding areas were quite rich, due to all that cotton. But then South Carolina seceded from the Union and the Civil War began. Beaufort was lucky, however. With advanced warning of incoming Union warships, the whole town up and left (the newspapers up north called it the Great Skedaddle). So when the Union soldiers arrived in 1861, there was no point destroying the town. They used it as a medical base and marina. And a few years later, when Sherman went on his burning rampage, there was no point burning a Union-controlled town. So Beaufort is still one of the most nicely preserved antebellum towns.

We took a lot of pictures of the great Live Oak trees and their sweeping Spanish moss, the wonderful antebellum architecture and of course, the star of the day: Mr. Gilbert.

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Piggly Wiggly Turkey Trot

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This morning at 5:30 a.m. my dad, Györgyi, Brandy, Jeff and I left Dataw and headed over to Hilton Head for the 23rd annual Piggly Wiggly turkey trot 10K. It was an absolutely gorgeous morning and we (along with 1,400 other runners) joyfully trotted through the island. Getting the t-shirt (above) was our primary motivation, but we all ended up having such a wonderful race and early Thanksgiving morning.

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Thanksgiving in Lowcountry

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I’m sitting at the edge of the marsh on Dataw Island, South Carolina. The tide is just retreating and in the distance, in deep water, three shrimp boats lower their nets. It’s raining, but only hard enough to unhinge a few leaves, annoy the alligators and disturb the piles of oyster shells that the raccoons dragged in last night, from the marsh, and struck open with rocks to access the silky nectar inside.

We arrived to my aunt’s home among the great sea islands of South Carolina yesterday. We’ll be here through Thanksgiving, then spend a week in Hilton Head.

Even though I grew up a true blue Yankee, my family has spent a lot of time in the last fifteen years down South. And this part of the country, with its straight-trunk wild-haired palmettos, humid breezes and tidal waters is what I miss the most when I’m away from the States. It’s true I’ve come to romanticize the South, which probably really set-in when I lived in Georgia, but I can’t help it. I’ve lived in a lot of places in my life, but my heart is really at home here.

New York City

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Woody Allen said, “There is no question that there is an unseen world. The problem is, how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?”

Last week, Gyorgyi and I were in NYC. We stayed with my awesome cousin, Brandy in her Gramercy apartment. We experienced a true, NYC Halloween, toured from the Bowery to Spanish Harlem. We saw the fantastic Addams Family on Broadway, calculated inches in the tenements, stalked Jennifer Aniston, ate bagels on a tour bus, and experienced as many must do’s (like Shake Shack, Gray’s and Dim Sum in Chinatown) and we could.

New York City hides so many unseen alleys that I wish we had a year to investigate. But in the time that we did visit, we certainly felt the prowess of a super-city. The quiet and the vocal. Times Square and Curry Hill. An elevator to the 80th floor and a simple, Sunday dumpling.

I’m a European blogger, so maybe I have no say whatsoever. But if you’re considering going, go. Eat, explore, indulge. Walk fast across the avenues and slow through the parks. Go to NYC as Kurt Vonnegut says: “…to be born again.”

(click on the picture for our NYC slideshow)

The Colonel Comes to Szeged

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There are some stories that are so vital, so momentous, so crucial in forming a town’s legacy, that they demand telling and retelling– the shouting from rooftops– the clamoring of newsies at the ports and tram stops– the etching down of details so as they are never to be forgotten.

This is not one of those stories.

It is, however, one of the bigger news stories of late. A story to rise above the local black and whites with news of Europe’s potential double-dip recession and Hungary’s Swat teams confiscating Brat Pitt’s prop guns for World War Z.

Drum roll…Kentucky Fried Chicken has finally made its way down to SE Hungary, which is sort of a big deal, but not quite the harbinger of the dawn of Szeged’s Golden Era, as you might think was the case from reading local news reports and various frenzied social media postings.

Still, when the new mall opened last week, we decided to go and see just how Colonel-crazy people here would get.

On Thursday evening at about 8:30 p.m, there must have been 1,000 people in the food court. Every tray was scattered with little chicken bones, and each line was still 10-people deep. Would I be exaggerating to say that half of the city was in the new mall’s food court? Maybe. But I bet almost that many visited throughout the week. I would say the crowd was similar to the one with people waiting for a burned coffee from the new Starbucks in Budapest last year (now there are FOUR in the city!)

I’m sure someone on some other blog will write a scathing social critique about American fast-food globalization, how we export all of our worst qualities, how it does this and that to economic zones x through x. But the truth is that no one in this little European town was complaining. They give free refills on soda, for God’s sake, which is just about as close to a miracle as you can get in Hungary.

It was not with any journalistic intention that we ordered something as well, and I felt a little guilty pride for America’s first Colonel of chicken. I suppose the spicy wings, which are pretty damn good no matter where in the world you order them, taste a little extra special when you’ve been away from home for so long. So thank you, Harland. Love, Budajest.

On the 13 Martyrs of Arad (and not clinking beer glasses for 150 years)

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One of Hungary’s three national holidays takes place on March 15th. It commemorates the country’s failed revolution of 1848-1849 against the Austrian-Habsburg rule.

Hungarians often return to this date. Much more in spirit than perhaps the failed revolution in 1956 against the Soviets. So many national heroes come out of the 1848/49 revolution. Among them Lajos Kossuth: President-Regent of Hungary and freedom fighter whose fiery speeches were read aloud throughout Europe. Who had to flee Hungary, was taken in by the Ottomans, and then ferried to safety by the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Mississippi.

And of course the bard of the revolution and poet most closely associated with the Hungarian national identity: Sándor Petőfi, whose poems are still memorized today by Hungarian school children. Petőfi’s pre-existentialist stoicism, entirely typical of Hungarians, put forth by his perfect 12-syllable anapaestic line:

Elhull a virág , eliramlik az élet.  The flower will wilt—fleeting life fades tomorrow.

So why am I writing about this today? Because was on this day in 1849 when 13 of the Hungarian generals were executed in Arad, Romania. Four were shot and the rest were hanged. And the Prime Minister, Lajos Betthyany, was executed in Pest in what today is Szabadság Square. The entire Kingdom of Hungary went into silent, passive resistance for an entire decade.

It is said that while the generals were being executed, the Austrian generals were drinking steins of beer, loudly clinking their glasses together in celebration of their victory over Hungary. From that day, Hungarians vowed to not clink their beer glasses for 150 years. Though the time frame passed in 1999, it’s still considered bad manners to clink beer glasses in Hungary.