On my first visit to Hungary I was only driving through en route to Romania and I didn't get a chance to try out any of the local cuisine. Earlier this month I spent just over a week in the country and was able to sample some traditional Hungarian food.
Pastries and cakes seem to be very popular in Hungary. I had a couple of particularly nice pastries involving poppy seeds. One was a sour cherry and poppy seed strudel (meggyes makos rétes - sour cherries being another popular Hungarian delicacy). The other was a kind of sweet roll filled with a poppy seed mush that tasted like it also contained honey. Poppy seeds and honey also featured in one of the nicest ice creams I've ever eaten, which came from an ice cream parlour in Szeged called A Cappella.
Soups are a big part of Hungarian cuisine too. One type of soup that is popular there is a cold fruit soup, which is often served as a starter. I had a citrus one (lemon and lime) on a day trip to Budapest, which was immensely refreshing and very creamy. Another popular one is fish soup, of which there is a particular regional variety in Szeged, called szegedi halászle (literally, Szeged-style fish juice). I had a bowl of that as a starter for a meal in Szeged one evening and it was a bright red liquid (presumably due to the paprika, which is a very popular spice in Hungary, and possibly also tomato) with chunks of random fish and a delightfully peppery and not-too-overpoweringly fishy taste. It was served with a mountain of bread.
The Hungarian way of serving coffee seems to be small amounts but very strong. I think it's quite common there to drink it black, which is just the way I like it. I now have a working theory as to why Hungary has produced so many fine mathematicians.
Most of the local beer seems to be lager style. That is not
usually my beer of choice but the ones I had in Hungary were all very
tasty and extremely refreshing in the hot weather. One warm evening I
had a litre of Dreher, which looked something like this:
I believe that Dreher
is a Hungarian brand, although it is named after a Viennese brewer
called Anton
Dreher, supposedly the father of modern lager. The Dreher brewery
also produces another, fairly similar, lager called Arany
Ászok which was the main type of beer I had throughout the
week.
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