Hi Friends,
The next book that popped up on my list was a little book I have called Hungarian Cuisine. It is a book specifically written for tourists to pick up while they are visiting Hungary, so they can perhaps make some of the delicious things they ate on their trip when they return home! My parents picked it up for me when they were visiting Hungary, along with another cookbook called Budapest, so I decided that since these two were fairly similar in content, that I would try to kill two birds with one stone as it were. More recently, this lovely woman has been coming to our farmer’s market and slowly selling her cookbook collection. Ellin is really a gem of a human being, and I am so honored when I have the opportunity to chat with her. A few months ago I picked up a book from her collection Hungarian Cookery Book. This book was printed in 1976! It’s in very good condition & was really fun to browse through while I was already looking through two other Hungarian cookbooks. So I decided that I would actually kill three birds with one stone, or in other words, cross three books off my list at once & consider cooking from all three this past week!
When flipping through the books to try and decide what I wanted to make, I knew I would have to make stuffed cabbage at some point. There’s a recipe for it in all three books & it is one of my favorite dishes of all time (and my husband loves it too). I’m going to tell you the story now of how I decided I wanted to become a chef. I promise it will tie in to stuffed cabbage.
When I was 16, I had to have reconstructive jaw surgery. I was born with an offset jaw & in order for my teeth to not be completely deformed as an adult, the orthodontist & dentist thought the best course of action was jaw surgery. Since I was 16, of course, I hated the idea of it. I had already had braces for many years (maybe five at the time), and knew that I had another impending oral surgery as I was born without two of my adult teeth & would eventually need implants. But I couldn’t argue with three medical professionals who knew this is what would be best for me (and my parents were on their side). I decided to schedule the surgery for the first day of my spring break that year. Our spring break was two weeks long, and they claimed I would have to have my jaw wired shut for at least a week and a half, if not the whole two weeks. So I thought it would be best to do it when I wasn’t going to be in school.
The surgery went as planned & I came home to a fridge full of yogurt smoothies and a wired shut, swollen jaw. They gave me a specific style of re-fillable ice pack that wrapped around my whole head to help with the swelling, and painkillers that I refused to take (that’s another story). We had heard that frozen peas were a good insert for the ice pack, but I thought… what about frozen corn? Sure enough, corn held the freeze longer than the peas. For the first couple of days I laid in my room, depressed. I couldn’t do much activity-wise, as I was recovering from a fairly major surgery. I couldn’t call my friends and speak to them because my jaw was wired shut. A few days in, I was flipping through the TV looking for something to watch and ended up on The Food Network. This is really at a time when TFN was mostly cooking shows and less competition shows (save for Iron Chef). I ended up watching this channel for days. My energy shifted. I started to write down the recipes I was seeing on TV & look them up on the internet. One day, one of the chefs made a cream of asparagus soup and I thought, “I can probably sip that through a straw!” I even remember scrawling the ingredients on my mini whiteboard (used for communication) and begging my parents to buy them so I could try to make it for myself! The next day I made & ate the best cream of asparagus soup I have ever had (Wish I still had that recipe). I learned so many tips and tricks from watching that channel for two weeks, it was almost worth it to have nothing better to do! I already enjoyed cooking, but now I was falling in love with cooking! I started out feeling helpless, and purposeless… but I came out of it with a newly developed passion!
When I went to my check up after the first 10 days of recovery, the oral surgeon was astounded. He claims he had never seen a patient heal so quickly from this surgery before! As I remember it, they unwired my jaw & took my stitches out EARLY because I had healed so well (and if you recall I took zero painkillers once I left the hospital). I still had to stay on a liquid diet for another week, but was trying to think… what can I eat when I can eat solid food again? The answer was simple. Stuffed Cabbage. Finally the day came when it would be safe for me to try eating solid foods again, and my mom picked up our favorite Stuffed Cabbage from a little restaurant by our house that specialized in Eastern European foods (unfortunately it closed during the pandemic). I took the first bite and immediately danced around the house. Oh what a treat it was to bite into that delicious sweet & sour & meaty & starchy & vegetable-y dish! I will never forget this moment, and think of it every time I make and/or eat stuffed cabbage. And this is why I decided to become a chef.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming: Hungarian Cuisine.
One of the most famous dishes from Hungary is Chicken Paprikash. Hungary is known for paprika production & it is an essential ingredient for this dish. I was excited, however, to find a recipe for Wild Mushroom Paprikash in one of the books, as a vegetarian alternative! For meatless Monday (not a thing we celebrate every week, but a good reminder to eat less meat) we decided to make the Mushroom Paprikash. We purchased most of the mushrooms from a vendor at our farmer’s market, Sev. He grows many kinds of oyster mushrooms & sometimes has lion’s mane mushrooms, and often shiitakes. The recipe called for some mushrooms that maybe don’t grow in North America, so I purchased some oyster mushrooms & shiitakes from Sev & supplemented the rest with creminis from the store. A family friend of ours is from Hungary and has family who lives there. Whenever her family comes to visit, we always ask if they’ll bring us some paprika. So I am very lucky to have paprika from Hungary. The Mushroom base came together fairly easily. Once all of the ingredients were prepped & measured out, it was only a matter of minutes before everything was in the pan bubbling away.
Since this recipe comes from a cookbook that is not really translated so well, I had to sort of fill in the gaps with my culinary knowledge & look at the pictures printed in the cookbook with a chef’s eye. There is some kind of noodle-y looking dumpling in the photo of the mushroom Paprikash, I assume it is Spätzle although that word isn’t used in the book. I don’t have a spätzle board, but remembered watching someone in culinary school push it through a cheese grater with larger holes to get the same desired result. It worked! We both really loved this recipe. It had great flavor, great texture, a little heat from the green pepper (we used an Anaheim chili, not sure what they meant by “green pepper” but the photo certainly isn’t of a bell pepper), and best of all: we didn’t miss the meat (who would? We had spätzle!). I think this would be a great dish if we are having some mushroom-loving vegetarians over for dinner (although I think next time I’ll just make potatoes as a side).
Before I get to the cabbage, I decided I wanted to make a different stuffed vegetable recipe. Stuffing meat into vegetables seems to be a fairly common thing in Eastern / Southern / Central Europe, and I have to say I’m a fan of the concept. The recipe I decided to make was Stuffed Marrow with Cream & Dill Sauce. We can’t really find Marrow squash (which is like a more mature version of a zucchini), so I just used some Zucchini, and the recipe calls for pork, but I subbed turkey since I rarely eat pork. Again this was a fairly straightforward recipe to follow. It requested that you use bread rolls soaked in water to create the breadcrumbs, I used some of an old challah loaf I had in my fridge & probably soaked it in milk because it tastes better (and I had milk that needed to be used up), but other than those changes I pretty much kept to the recipe as written. I decided that I wanted to cook them in the oven instead of on the stove and it worked fairly well! We really loved this dish, the texture of the meat & squash both came out beautifully & we enjoyed them for several days afterwards as lunches. I think I would definitely make this dish again as it came together rapidly and painlessly on a weeknight.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, all three books have recipes for Stuffed Cabbage. The recipes were all fairly similar in ingredient lists, preparation methods, and quantities, but I found myself not really desiring to make stuffed cabbage how the books were suggesting. First off, I don’t know where to buy already soured WHOLE cabbage leaves, and I wasn’t about to make them myself (limited time). Second, bacon & pork as part of the filling (and bacon in the sauce too) are really out of the question for me. I was happy to see that none of the recipes called for tomatoes (since I am technically allergic to them and shouldn’t eat them… but often do), and that any red-ness from the sauce came from the addition of paprika! I was also happy to see that all three recipes called for the rice (that you mix into the meat) to be par-boiled. The last time I made stuffed cabbage, I stupidly thought, “it’s going to be in liquid, I don’t need to parboil this rice,” and boy was I wrong about that. Nothing like thinking you’re going to be biting into something soft, only to be stopped dead in your tracks by a hard, undercooked, grain of rice to ruin that bite, or entire batch of something, for you. Stuffed cabbage isn’t strictly a Hungarian dish, in fact a quick search for “stuffed cabbage” or “cabbage rolls” will produce a wide variety of options for making this dish. The wiki article for Cabbage Rolls lists 40+ variations and their countries of origin! There isn’t really a dispute so much as to who invented it originally, but rather a thought that many cultures came up with the idea around the same time!
I decided to use the recipes from the books as a guide and make the cabbage rolls with my own little twists. I bought a raw green cabbage and started by removing the core (this is a trick my aunt taught me, I can’t really figure how to describe it, but you are basically cutting a cone out of the bottom of the cabbage where the core is). I plopped the whole head of cabbage into a pot of boiling water and let it hang out there for a bit to soften the leaves. Slowly the leaves loosened from the outside layer, and CAREFULLY with tongs and a small paring knife, I dislodged them from the head and set them out to cool on a baking sheet. In the meantime I parboiled my rice, and made my meat filling, using mostly beef with a little bit of turkey that I had extra of from another recipe. Once all of the cabbage leaves had been removed from the whole head, and were cooled, I started to fill and roll the leaves. Any leaves that were too torn to be filled, or too small, I set aside to chop up to make the “sauce”. I ended up with some leftover filling, so I just rolled that into meatballs to cook alongside the cabbage rolls. In my widest pot, I sautéed the chopped smaller & torn cabbage leaves with some onions & added a ton of Hungarian paprika (if you wanted to, you could add some chopped bacon here and I’m sure it’d be delish, but it’s not for me). I then laid out my cabbage rolls and meatballs over the base of the “sauce” and poured some of the water I had used to boil the cabbage in the first place on top. I covered it and cooked it until the meat was cooked through & the rolls were completely soft! This made a lot of cabbage rolls. We actually didn’t eat them the night I cooked them, I just packed them up to store until we were ready to dig in. When we finally ate them, I reheated them and added some other gravy that I had extra from a client, and they were delicious! I still have some leftover now, and I haven’t decided if I want to eat them tonight for dinner, or freeze them for a rainy day. Either way? I am glad they are there for us to enjoy.
Love & Happy Spatulas,
Alyssa