Weekend in Budapest
Ewe's curd? Where am I supposed to obtain this? It could be more difficult, I guess. At least the recipe's not asking for ram's curd.
"Make the table attractive with meat balls made from minced meat or soya mince," another photo caption states. "Filled salami rolls...bite-sized open sandwiches, olives and crisps?or whatever takes your fancy." Everything in the photographs is held together with toothpicks, and I find the suggestions right out of the 1950s. I'm not exactly certain what I'm letting myself in for...
It's early fall in Budapest, buses are waiting to take us to the hotel. There's an endless delay, however, while the jet-lagged art crowd grows more and more irate. The buses refuse to leave. I spend the time eavesdropping: there are curators, artists, nieces and cousins, p.r. people, a kid with black and white hair who is 21 and throws parties in New York nightclubs...
Finally we depart the airport. Though it's a new tourist bus, the driver is apparently capable only of 25 mph...outside the city are little cottages, it's really countryside, or nearly, but as we get closer it's drab, stadiums, warehouses, all very 1950s...but construction everywhere, and McDonald's and Wendy's, which always amaze me. It's not just that they're everywhere, but in cities that are struggling to leave emerging-nation status or catch up to the 21st century, the American fast-food chains always appear unreal, as if they were telephone poles in a country without telephones, or elevators in a building without electricity...
We pass parks; a crumbling ruined palace on the Pest side of the river announces it will shortly reopen as the Four Seasons. Buildings are covered in blackened grime, no steam-cleaning has taken place yet here, a century or more of blackened pollution gives this city its mysterious Kafkaesque atmosphere; buildings are riddled with bullet holes from innumerable battles and wars. My great-grandparents came from Budapest, but I never knew whether it was the Buda side or the Pest side...
I've always wanted to visit, but I feel no genetic connection to the place. What I do have are memories, of food. My grandmother learned her Hungarian cooking from her mother?goulash, chicken paprikash with homemade kreplach; a version of cheese-filled palachinki, though closer to a blintz; I would stand beside her in the kitchen, in her apartment in Flushing, while she would tell me to add a tablespoon of sweet paprika, a teaspoon of red pepper flakes or a little more water to the soup. Somewhere recipes were written on cards in my great-grandmother's formal scrawl, but mostly she never looked at them. I never knew whether or not her recipes were accurately Hungarian (for one thing, since my grandparents kept kosher, milk and meat were never together in the same dish, or at the same meal, so there would never be, say, goulash with sour cream), but to me she was one of the best cooks in the world. Once I arrived for a visit and proceeded to devour an entire cake, unable to stop wolfing the buttery moist slices filled with tart blue fall plums... Memories of my grandmother's Hungarian cooking are to me the taste of my childhood...
The art'otel is totally adorable, on the Buda side, right on the river. It's not a grand place, but totally modern, four-star, clean, with a sculpture in the middle, a kind of fountain filled with water lilies. There's a ribbon-cutting ceremony about to start; first we're ushered into the dining room (down through a sort of glass tube that connects two buildings?the front side on the Danube is modern, while the back part includes four restored Baroque houses that date back to the 18th century), where a lavish buffet has been laid out, with each dish labeled. There's "venison roulade," smoked meats and fish, various kinds of cheese; in fact in appearance it resembles?a bit?the peculiar photos in the Malev Air magazine, old-fashioned 1950s presentation, which, historically, seemed to entail a lot of molding into various shapes. But it all tastes delicious?particularly when I grab a huge slice of dried fruit tart with nuts and am transported back to my grandmother's kitchen...
"My grandmother, your great-grandmother, was a fantastic cook too," my mother used to tell me. "Until she got very old, when she used to leave nutshells in the nut tart..."
There are no nutshells in the strudel here, but I'm too tired and dizzy to eat much, I miss the ribbon-cutting ceremony with speeches by the chairman and the artist and the ambassador's wife and stagger up to my room. Everywhere there are works by the artist, his colorful prints and paintings that assimilate influences from abstract expressionism, pop art and minimalism?butterflies and buttons, playing cards (the hotel dishes have been designed to match the playing-card series) and, though I'm not sure, I think the carpeting (it depicts giant safety pins and pieces of paper, as if the contents of one's suitcase have accidentally been dropped), and, in the nicely appointed bathroom, the most magnificent terry robe I've ever seen?brilliant red with royal blue belt, and the name "Donald Sultan" emblazoned over breast pocket.
That evening we're bused to the Ludwig Museum, to view a show (owned by a private collector), a mixture of 20th-century art?some by internationally renowned artists, Baselitz, Tinguely, others to me unknown Hungarian artists?and on serving trays, a variety of Hungarian wines and drinks?my favorite is "Unicum," a syrupy medicinal-tasting concoction similar to Fernet Branca, which tastes of herbs and spices, although immediately seems as if it would be best sipped while you're ill, as a tonic or curative. Along with tiny brandies each with a toothpick of fruit (prune in the plum brandy, a bit of pear in the pear brandy), which in this country are served as aperitifs. There's a dance performance on the main floor, it's fun to be at an event where everyone appears to be totally drunk (in reality it's just the jet lag), and then we're taken again by bus to a Hungarian restaurant called Kehli's.
I have to be honest: the big bowl of meat soup placed on every table (to be ladled individually by the guest), the slabs of beef or catfish entree?it's too salty, it's overcooked. But after years in New York dining out at art-world events, this stuff is real food. And I have the sense (and it's not just the gypsy music) that I've gone back in time; I may in a few years come here and find this place transformed into some place no different from a restaurant on the Upper East Side. At my table I'm dining with Christine Mortimer Biddle, who's organized the press trip?she's totally beautiful, blonde, elegant, with an aura of calmness; John Connelly, a crazy Brooklynite ex-cop who now writes screenplays, books and articles and is totally sharp; Christopher Idone, the celebrated food and cookbook writer; and Jim Ballinger, the director of the Phoenix Art Museum. It's a nice group; I can't believe you could throw a bunch of strangers on a plane and, 20 hours later, find them dining together in an Hungarian restaurant, all laughing and talking. The waiter has a huge potbelly and a bushy beard, he flings the food around and disappears, he might have stepped out of a novel by Dostoevsky, not Kafka...
The party continues back at the hotel, but as usual my stamina gives out and I'm longing to crawl into my comfortable bed. The next day I hear the party continued for most of the night, but even going to bed early, it's 10:30 before I make it downstairs. There's another hotel buffet, again with meats and fish, yogurt and pastry, cucumber salad and pickles, it's old-fashioned but all wonderful quality. Tours have already departed: one for a village 45 minutes away, another to tour the museums, another to walk through the old area?but I've already missed them all. I tell the concierge I want to go to the flea market?there's another couple who also wants to go, and we share a cab.
Twenty minutes or a half hour outside the city I find the flea market of my dreams?shabby, rundown, old Hungarian skirts, embroidered shawls, tin windup toys, old teddy bears, ornate colored cut-glass tumblers of blue and mulberry and battery-acid yellow, old rugs and blankets, jewelry, leather jackets, old Russian binoculars and cameras. But as is my wont, while traveling I only acquire things that are either a) very heavy, such as books or giant rocks, or b) breakable or c) preferably both.
This time I bargain and end up with a large metal epergne, a rather hideous sharp fragile candelabra-shaped object reminiscent of a palm tree topped with a large crystal bowl probably once used to hold fruit. It's from 1910, the people who run this stall write down the year for me (though they don't speak English, we somehow communicate), and my epergne appears to be straight from Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management. How could I have lived until now without a bulky fruit bowl on top of a palm tree? Until now I had no idea that I so desperately needed and wanted an epergne. Of course, one half of me doesn't actually want an epergne?but I know that if I get home without it, I will deeply regret this forever.
Later in the day, too weak to go to the Geller spa (where one can attend the real old-fashioned Eastern European-style baths and get a massage for five dollars), I wander around the castle, eating quark ice cream (sort of like cheesecake) at the konditorei and buying various kinds of paprikash and alcoholic beverages?a big bottle of something a little yellower than vodka containing a large pepper; a bottle of plum brandy and some Zwack Unicum (Zwack, I think, is the brand) to take home.
Back at the hotel the manager tells me about the hotel menu, a work in progress since the hotel has only just officially opened. Appetizers include marinated matjes herring served with fresh mango, a goose-liver terrine with Tokaj wine jelly and a pineapple-apple brioche. He rates the Hungarian foie gras very highly?and also has a wide variety of regional Hungarian cuisine that he's done his best to revamp, to the extent of teaching the chefs not to use too much salt, and not to overcook. There's mushroom soup with sour cream; an appetizer of "hortobagy" crepes (stuffed with paprika and ground veal); catfish paprikash with homemade dumplings. There's a rather small selection, thus far. The quality of the food is fabulous, he says?the vegetables and produce, the meat, there's good local fish and foie gras, and local wines are finally beginning to come into their own. He gives me the names of three other restaurants he would recommend?but I'm not in town for long enough.
Then he sends in Attila, the Hungarian sommelier, a no-nonsense youth with a shaved head who describes the wine list, all Hungarian wines listed by the names of the vintner. Some are available only at the hotel. Most people, he explains, know Hungary only for its Tokaj, but in fact it comes as a shock to see a wine list, several pages long, with wines he highly recommends that, according to Attila, are all of excellent quality and range in price from approximately six to 60 dollars. In fact, the house white really is dry and delicious and produced only in limited quantity, specifically for the hotel.
For the final bash that night, great steaks and slabs of pork are grilled outside. The steak, local, really is amazing, so soft for a moment I think it's kobe beef. There are beautiful cakes of marzipan, at the bar Donald Sultan has introduced the martini to Budapest and a tray of huge pink prawns has been arranged to spell out the word "art'otel."
So it's not Paris or London or New York. It's something more interesting, a place in transition, the moment that's happening there now is its own place, Eastern Europe crashing into the modern world, maybe for the first time. If you wanted serious cuisines you'd be in London or Paris or New York?isn't this something a little more unique? In a year or two it may all be gone, there may be only serious restaurants or tourist restaurants here in Budapest, now is the moment when you can watch a cuisine take its first grownup steps?in a sense it's perhaps no different from being in restaurants in New York in the late 1960s or early 1970s...
The next day most of us fly home; I'm shattered, but pleasantly pleased. It seems as if I've been gone for months, how wonderful to think, really, it's possible to take a chunk of time and stretch two days into so much more. And though, when I get home, I'm worn out, not a single item?not my 2-foot tall silver metal-and-glass epergne, or my two bottles of Zwack Unicum, or my Paprika Palinka, or my plum brandy or my pepper-shaped ceramic jars of sweet and hot paprikash with which I plan to attempt to recreate the Hungarian cuisine of my great-grandmother?not a single thing has been broken.