Gulyás

This was the Big Essay About Food for the semester. I'm not a person deeply involved with food, for the most part (although I miss having full access to a good kitchen where I currently live), but when this assignment came along I thought back to one of the finest meals I ever had, late night and very hungry(!) in Budapest.

Notice, if you will, the subtle insertion of a Lovecraftian line in an early paragraph. If ever an entire country was primed to be a Lovecraft setting, Hungary would be it.

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Writing & Rhetoric I
Essay #2: Writing to Explain and Support an Opinion or Belief
Final Draft: October 23, 2007 [3rd draft]

GULYÁS

Since arriving in Budapest, I've found Hungarians to be a baffling portrait of contradictions. Is it possible that a meal could be a metaphor representing an entire county and its culture? I look at the plate of gulyás set in front of me, smell the rich spices in the steam coming off it. I've heard stories of this country's history for the past few days, and yet I still can't figure out what I think about Hungarians.

Where the dark hills rise wild outside of Budapest, it is not difficult to imagine the herdsmen with their open fire-pits, boiling boar meat off the bone. The flames curling up around a huge black iron pot, a shank of boar stewing in water drenched with capsicum peppers, and if a caravan had come or gone through the area recently, salt and onions. The herdsmen would boil the spiced water for hours--until the meat melted off the bone--and then pick out the tender pieces leaving the water to boil down into a broth. The meat would be laid out and dried, then cut into small cubes and then reintroduced to the broth water. More capsicum peppers--dried and cut, called paprika--and the dish would soon become gulyás, the most commonly associated food with the Magyar nation. Ethnically distant from their surrounding neighbors in Central Europe, even the English name of their country conjures thoughts of food. Hungary. And their culinary staples reflect well their wild, and often extremely violent, history.

The Magyars came to this valley and began conquering the area and its surrounding regions, and have ever since been struggling to keep the place they carved out for themselves in the midst of Slavic people. I admire them and feel reviled by them at the same. I think this paradox I feel towards them is inherent in their own personalities. They see themselves as conflicted by opposing natures.

This becomes evident to me when I sit down to have dinner. Their food and drink reveals something of this paradox to me.

It's pronounced goo-yash, and in English it sounds much more frightful: goulash. Gulyás is a meal comprised of tender chunks of meat stewed in fat stock (cooking oils will not render a similar taste as fats will), spiced with salt, pepper, and the mainstay of Hungarian food: paprika. Along with garlic, onions, and red peppers, gulyás is served on its own or over pasta noodles. It is one of the simplest of foods to make, and one of the most difficult to get right. And the complex flavors it provides belie the simplicity of its preparation.

Paprika is a powdered sweet spice made from capsicum peppers, and can be found in almost every Hungarian dish. Most red sauces in other countries is formed from a base of tomatoes. In Hungary, the red sauce is a result of meat fat seasoned with paprika. Like the national character, the spice is both peppery and sweet at the same time.

Heavily spiced food and a history of brutal violence. If it were that alone, I wouldn't find Hungary so perplexing. The hook, as it were, in my opinion of them, comes from the sweet white wine from a region called Tokaj. Tokaji is a sweet white wine that differs from other desert wines in that fine Tokaji doesn't leave a sugary aftertaste. King Louis XV of France called it, "Vinum Regum, Rex Vinorum"; "Wine of Kings, King of Wines".

This leads me back to the paradox I see in the Magyars. Spicy red peppers and sweet white wine. Hungary is comfortable in this schism. It is a country which continually rates among the top ten in both sexual satisfaction, and in suicides. The passion and self-hatred struggling within. The Magyar people who came to settle this region have given birth to legends of ferocity and savage murder, from the fictional character Count Dracula (who was of Hungarian descent, just living in Romania), to the non-fictional "Blood Countess", Elizabeth Báthory, who killed perhaps more than two hundred young girls because she thought their blood might keep her youthful. Some of the most impassioned, powerful music I've ever heard comes from Béla Bartók and Franz Liszt, but there's also a signature song of lost love and suicide written by some almost forgotten Hungarian composer and made famous by Billie Holiday; "Gloomy Sunday".

Beauty and suicide. Gulyás and sweet white wine. Every nation has its share of violence and bloodshed, but few live so comfortably with it as the Magyar nation of Hungary.

After walking the ancient streets of Budapest, hiking in the mysterious hills outside of the city, and seeing a lot of the passion and anger of the people here, I think their food and wine speak of the country's sins, past and future. I smell beauty and passion in the scent of the chilled Tokaji in front of me and think of contrasts as I look at my plate of gulyás. I imagine the taste of bittersweet passion as I bite into a mouthful of history.


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