A few weeks back, at the end of February, it was cold and snowy and I had a craving for a very specific kind of comfort food. Years ago, when I was a teenager, a Hungarian woman named Georgie (I am fairly certain this was not her given name, rather the Americanized version of her name that people in the States could pronounce – I wish I had thought then to ask what her real name was, but as a young adult, she was introduced to me as Georgie and so that’s what I called her without any further thought) came to stay with our family for a few weeks to learn from my dad about how to manage a specific type of non-profit business that she was interested in starting up back in Hungary and that my dad ran in Texas. She knew some minimal English, but we didn’t know any Hungarian, and so a lot of communication happened through hand gestures and piecing together words in other languages that my parents knew (German, Polish, Russian, French, etc.) that Georgie also knew. If my memory serves, her husband spoke more English than she did, but I recall a number of conversations make up simply of laughter, body language, pointing, gesturing, and words in any language that we all seemed to understand.
I don’t have many memories of Georgie’s time with us in Texas, although I know we must have taken her around and shown her all the fun and unique Hill County and San Antonio sights to give her a true taste of Texas. But one specific memory I do have is of Georgie in our kitchen back at the house I grew up in, making Hungarian Chicken Paprikash from scratch for dinner one night. I remember she made and rolled each spaetzle-like noodle by hand, or perhaps with some small noodle-forming hand tool she had brought with her. Either way, these noodles did not come from a package and the work was a labor of love. She cooked the chicken and made that savory sauce, authentic to her family recipe, and without a printed recipe altogether. I remember it was a sunny day and she was standing at our kitchen island. I also remember how incredible that Hungarian Paprikash tasted. It was bursting with flavor, piping hot, a beautiful shade of red-orange, creamy, sweet and a little smokey, served atop these perfect little noodle dumplings, and a dish I would dream of making myself for years to come.
A year or two later (the timeline is a bit fuzzy) Georgie and her husband invited us to Hungary to stay with them at their home in the countryside for a few days, a trip that we took during the summer between my freshman and sophomore year of college and combined with a visit to Budapest, followed by Germany, where my brother’s family was living at the time. I have much clearer memories of touring Hungary with Georgie, her husband (who’s name escapes me entirely, although he was lovely and I really enjoyed being around him), and their warm and welcoming family.
They took us to gorgeous lakeside towns with roadside craft markets and picturesque chapels, past ruins of castles in the hills, to a large pottery studio where we saw artisans at work and enjoyed a fantastic afternoon tea, into cities to see the statues and architecture, to water-front restaurants with an incredible fish stew I can still vividly smell and taste in my mind to this day served with plenty of bread, bubbly sparkling water, and red wine, and – of course – Georgie’s cooking and Hungarian Paprikash in their beautiful backyard, with her garden in fragrant bloom, the paprikash cooking in a cauldron over an open the fire, and their adult children and their grandkids playing in the sandbox and with toys and games in the grass, as we all cobbled together conversations however we knew how. I remember a long, jet-lagged nighttime drive from the airport to their town, morning breakfasts on their patio overlooking the small garden with baked beans, tomatoes, and sausage and coffee, Georgie cooking in her kitchen, dogs and cats aplenty around their sweet home, and a marvelous triangle attic room I occupied as my guest room during our stay – warm, comforting, cozy, and intriguing. I can still see it in my mind. It was a very special trip. Even as a grumpy and hormonal teenager who was likely not always pleasant to be around, I remember so much of this experience and the love, warmth, beauty, vibrance, and smells and taste of Hungary.
But something about that paprikash has stayed with me and I had been craving its warmth and comfort lately in the midst of a deep winter and strange world. So I looked up a number of recipes, and found the most authentic one with the highest ratio of authentic Hungarian ingredients, highest user ratings, and most reviews from old Hungarian grandmas who were born and raised in Hungary that argued over this or that minor little thing in the recipe (because every family has their way and does it slightly differently) but ultimately said this was the real deal. And that’s the one I made. And though I don’t know if anything will ever taste like that first bite did back in our old house, or that first bite in their rose-scented backyard on a summer evening in Hungary, it was pretty darn close and just what I had been craving. This is the recipe I used: https://www.daringgourmet.com/chicken-paprikash-paprikas-csirke/.
I took a shortcut and did not make the dough for or roll out my own individual spaetzle noodles, which this website also had an authentic recipe for and I had considered doing (and may still do in the future), but I found a noble substitute in the imported food aisle – packaged spaetzle noodles from Germany. I also realized while everything was simmering on the stove that evening that I wanted some sort of side dish with it – a vegetable or salad of some kind. Nothing I thought of seemed like the right choice or complement to the meal until I opened up the veggie drawer in the fridge and saw an English cucumber – cool, crisp, refreshing…the perfect pairing and contrast to that ultra savory paprika, in color, texture, temperature, and flavor. Perfect. It wasn’t until a few days later when I was browsing through our Hungary trip pictures that I looked closely at a photograph from the dinner setting in Georgie’s backyard and realized that a cucumber salad was what Georgie had also served with her paprikash and spaetzle and I had forgotten about it entirely. A happy accident.
Here are a few pictures from our time in Hungary I found:
