HUNGARIAN COOKING
FOR BEGINNERS
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THE NEXT WORKSHOP WILL BE HELD IN ENGLISH: 2020.10.11 (SUNDAY)
5:00 Pm to 8:00 pm
What does Hungarian cuisine mean to you?
As a local, the answer is best found, when one moves away from the parent's house and suddenly realizes that one cannot make any of one’s favourite comfort foods. This is what it meant to me in my twenties. What it symbolizes to me is a need of communicating my culture through dishes. First in London, then years later in Tokyo, I wanted nothing more, than my new friends to get to know me, and it was unimaginable without them tasting my favourite dishes.
As a traveller, memories of a foreign land can fade. But being somewhere new, and really experiences life there, it has to be also through food and diving into the local cuisine. This is what I am offering, and had been perfecting in the past 5 years!
I never knew I had a soft spot for Hungarian cuisine, till it hit me! In our family for generations, "sick soup" has been tomato soup! It always arrived, warm, sweet into bed, with “letter pasta", and sometimes with rice. Realizing how much I love cauliflower casserole, was also a shock. It just set quietly in the back corner of my brain until I cawed it 2 in the morning, and immediately called mom (at 2 EUR per minute) from Japan!
The point is that even if you don't know this about yourself, everyone carries a good deal of nostalgia for the food of the countries they visited, 'This has little to do with culinary clichés and checkered tablecloths, for me, it's more about the personal, sensory experience of food. The kind of experience we want to relive ourselves and share with others.
When I invite my new friends over for dinner, whether they were from India or England, I am rightly expected to try to reveal to them the secrets of my own culture trough some Hungarian food, as food is an intercultural language. When I came home from my long travels, I often tried to recreate some of the most memorable meals, while also passing my photos around, to make people part of the experience.
At class, we will not only learn how to prepare some of the regio’s most iconic meals, but also talk about the history of ingredients, the importance of seasonal ingredients, and local sources of supply.
For example, who knew that organic rice was grown in more than 400 paddy fields in Nagykunság, Hungary? We will also learn how to identify "fake primary producers" in the market? : D - I also provide more useful advice to those who come to class.