Hungarian cuisine: fact and myth

As any Hungarian cookbook will explain, a good Hungarian recipe starts with onions slowly cooking in fat, with a healthy portion of paprika stirred in. It's a combination that gives off a distinctively Hungarian aroma.

But Hungarian food isn't all about paprika. Even though it is essential to many of the best-known recipes, there are many more that don't require any whatsoever.

Hungarian food is not hot. It may be heavily spiced with paprika, but not the hot kind. When Hungarians cook, almost without exception they use sweet paprika. There's always hot paprika available, but it's used to add extra heat at the table.

Traditionally Hungarians didn't use butter or oil for cooking, just rendered duck , goose, or pork fat. In this more health-conscious era, sunflower oil is preferred.

Hungarian food has a bad reputation for being heavy and greasy. Innately, it doesen't have to be greasy, and when prepared by good chefs, it isn't. Pörkölt and gulyás, for example, use very little fat.

Soups are thickened with either sour cream or a rántás (roux) of flour slowly browned in hot lard. Sour cream is a favorite Hungarian ingredient - in addition to soups, it's also added to stews like paprikás and székelykáposzta, vegetable főzelék, and even some sweets.

The most commonly used fresh herbs are dill and parsley, and favorite dried herbs are marjoram for seasoning meat, and caraway seeds, savory, and thyme for seasoning soups.

Vinegar is another favorite condiment, which is often added to soups at the table.

Throughout Hungary's history cooks were forced to be economical with ingredients, and they developed ingenious ways of doing things when little was available. This is still evident in the way that most people cook at home, which this is why you'll see animal parts like tails, necks, and feet at the markets in Budapest that ate rarely seen anymore at the butchers and markets in Noth America and Britain.