I found a cooking school in Budapest, but was debating whether I actually wanted to learn how to cook Hungarian food. I am soooo glad I decided to take the opportunity because it was great to learn about all the different influences that impacted Hungarian food as it is today. For example, many of their sweet foods come from the French influence (they have crepes, deep fried doughnuts and put cinnamon and sugar onto things) while many of the spices they use (such as paprika) are a result of Turkish influence on the culture. In addition, many of their main dishes have sour cream in them because the French often thought that traditional Hungarian food was a little to heavy and adding some sour cream helped to lighten the flavor. Personally it seems a little counter-intuitive to add something cream based to lighten it up, but that’s what they do.
The day of cooking started at the Grand Market, a large indoor market in Budapest located right on the Danube. Its location on the river made it convenient for transporting goods via the waterway. There were three levels: the top level had food to go and souvenirs such as scarves (I got out of there without buying one), the middle level had fruits, vegetables and meat and the bottom floor had all sorts of pickled items and fish (put in the basement because of the smell). They seem to pickle everything including small watermelons (before they are ripe at all on the inside) and green tomatoes. They also have temporary displays that feature goods from different countries, so there were Indonesian goods for sale while I was there.
I also learned that there are three main rows in the market which essentially used to signify one’s social status. One of the rows featured many exotic fruits that were imported from different parts of the world and only the richer people would be able to afford shopping in that row. Today, however, all the good are much more homogenous. The weirdest meat I saw here? Pig tail…and it was curled. I didn’t get a picture of it, but you can imagine what it looked like.
I was the only one in my cooking class, so I got a private lesson, which was really nice! My teacher and I had bought some amazing strudels at the market (I got apple and she got cottage cheese), so we enjoyed those before hitting the kitchen to make our meal.
The menu for my class was goulash (gulyásleves) as a starter followed by chicken paprikas (csirke vagy gombapaprikás nokedlivel) and ending with omlói galuska (vanilla and chocolate sponge cake with some rum and amazing cream). The chicken paprikas had a similar base to goulash, but tasted much different because of the addition of sour cream. It was very interesting indeed to learn the methods of cooking they used! The food was delicious and I am really glad I learned how to make the dishes. The use of paprika is something that I would have never thought to try, but was so great and made cooking the dishes fairly easy. I even got to take the leftovers for later!
In walking around after class, I even found the coolest street ever, for obvious reasons.
After an afternoon nap, I headed to the Opera House (a beautiful building where the opera and ballet are performed) for the Hungarian National Ballet’s performance of Anna Karenina. I decided to splurge and got row 14 tickets (since I know it will probably be some time before I could afford tickets that good in the states)! It was a great performance and very interesting to see the differences that exist between something you would see from the Pacific Northwest Ballet (PNB), for example. If you didn’t know, I minored in dance so have been to my fair share of dance performances since I often had to write critiques for classes (mostly more modern styles, but some ballet). I also love going to PNB performances. My goal last year was to make it to all of them, but I think I missed one modern performance (since that style is not necessarily my favorite).
It was interesting to see that the costumes for Anna Karenina were much more about the draping of the fabric and used heavier materials than what you would see in an American performance (which usually uses tulle for the skirts). There were also less than 1/10th of the amount of sequins that are normally used by the PNB. I also noticed that many of the dancers had more curves than American ballerinas and there were older performers as well. It seemed that the focus was more on the expression of the dancers, the dancing and telling the story rather than presenting simply a pretty picture. I guess that seems very appropriate for a performance like Anna Karenina which has a very complex story.
Afterwards, Stacy and I (one of my walking tour buddies from New Jersey…she is super fabulous) went to a cute little café for some coffee as we waited for Nicole and Jake, our other walking tour friends so that we could hit another ruin bar. I tried a grappiato…a macchiato with grappa. Not going to lie, it was pretty good and I loved the presentation.
