Meal 96: Liberia

This little slice of West Africa, internationally infamous for its brutal civil war and more recent Ebola crisis, has an unique origin story: it was founded by freed slaves who returned from the US.  (Note: A Liberian comments that this is the wrong way to portray it. To clarify I should say that the nation in its current political form was founded by those free slaves; indeed there were many people living there prior.) From what I can tell most of the cuisine is based on the locally available foods — which, unlike most of the rest of Africa but similarly to its immediate neighbors, is based on rice as a staple — but there are hints of the American legacy, particularly in the desserts.

Thanks to Jeff, Mark, and Heather, all folks who've worked in Liberia, for advice that translated directly into my choice of dishes. (Sorry none of you could make it!) And to Mama Pauline's, the African market that's a short bike ride away, for having everything I needed and plenty of friendly advice!

This was our first-ever meal where we didn't know any of the guests, and it was a great success! We met an astrophysicist, a Portland Police detective, and a caterer from Hood River, among other fascinating characters. Thanks to Jia, Daniel, Katie, Mary, Dave, Courtney, Emily, Brynden, Bonni, and Geo for coming, and for donating generously!

Kanyah | Peanut snack | Recipe

A really simple treat made from just peanuts, rice, and sugar. To avoid turning it into peanut butter, I crushed the peanuts by hand in my big mortar and pestle, which was easy enough. (You could use a Ziploc and a rolling pin to similar effect.) But crushing toasted rice grains by hand was getting mighty tedious, so I just threw them into the food processor. The resulting mix of the three ingredients is like slightly wet sand and hence quite crumbly; I used a measuring cup to create the forms. It’s reminiscent of halva or those other crumbly sweets from the heart of the Near East.

Palm butter | Recipe and some advice

The rich sauce extracted from palm nuts can be found all along the coast of West Africa, and it’s typically prepared in the same way, as a stew. When we’ve cooked this dish for other countries, it has one type of meat, if any at all. But Liberians seem to revel in tossing in whatever treasures of land and sea they manage to come across, hence why the recipe calls for [[CRAB??]], shrimp, chicken, beef, and smoked turkey. (Of course if you don’t have them all on hand, just use what you’ve got!) Given that these palms are native to this part of the continent, it’s little wonder that this is considered a very important dish, one that a woman is traditionally expected to be able to make before she’s considered marriageable.

I messed up in one big way. As the name implies, this dish is supposed to be cooked down until it’s thick and rich. But I started with a bunch of water to boil the meats, and then added more to thin the palm sauce, and even after an hour and a half of boiling it was too thin. Alas, it was time to eat, so we ended up with more of a soup. It was definitely tasty (though I found the shrimp to be quite overcooked — my preference would have been to add them at the very end!), but if you’re going to make this, make sure to err on the side of less water as you can always add more. Alas, doesn’t look like I’m quite cut out to be a Liberian housewife yet.

Sweet potato greens | Recipe

Add these to the list of foods I’m surprised we don’t see more often in American markets. They’re tasty, nutritious, easy to cook, and we’re already producing them everywhere we grow sweet potatoes. (My guess is they’re being fed to pigs.) Fortunately, Mama Pauline’s had them frozen in a big lump imported from Cameroon, and they cooked up quite like frozen spinach would. As with the palm butter, it’s a stew with a jumble of meats, though with a fresher and less heavy flavor. This was the clear crowd favorite!

Check rice | Recipe

I couldn’t figure out where the name comes from, does anyone know? The special ingredient is jute, which is known as molokhiya in the Arab world, an astonishingly mucilaginous green that until now I’d only encountered as a really goopy soup. Fortunately I find it goes a lot better when mixed in judicious quantities with rice.

Speaking of rice, it’s the main grain of this corner of Africa, and is typically made these days from the parboiled (aka converted) variety. Despite the bad rap that Uncle Ben gets for his converted rice, it turns out to actually be healthier than plain white rice, because the parboiling process forces vitamins from the germ into the heart of the grain.

Hot fried pepper | Recipe

If the intense spice of the peppers doesn't get you, then the pungency of the smoked fish will! Be sure to open the windows and turn on the vent when preparing and frying up this intense condiment, which brings an unmistakably West African flavor to the table. I scaled down the recipe by 2/3 and still had way too much left over!

Pineapple beer | Recipe

“Beer” is a misnomer, as there’s no yeast or brewing or alcohol involved. But it wouldn’t be right to call it “juice” either, since instead this is more of an extract made by boiling pineapple and leaving it to sit overnight, then straining the solids from the flavored water. I’m not quite sure why this is considered a better technique than simply juicing a pineapple and adding a weak simple syrup, it’s certainly more labor-intensive! But I guess you can do it with nothing more specialized than a knife and a strainer (or a substitute like an old, clean t-shirt), rather than something to press juice with.

Ricebread | Recipe

While much of Liberian food is quite similar to that of the surrounding countries, one distinctive aspect is a tradition of baking that returned feed slaves brought back from the US. This recipe’s understated name leaves out an important part, it’s full of plantains along with broken rice. It’s rich and hearty, though not too sweet, a nice gluten-free breakfast option that we happened to eat for dessert.

Meal 84: Jamaica

I was surprised to read in my research for this meal that a lot of Jamaicans wish they'd never gone independent from the United Kingdom, missing the economic stability and lower crime of that bygone era. It turns out that this tropical island, which on the surface is about as different as possible from that European one, has a fair amount more in common with it than you would think, at least through the lens of food. The patty, for instance, is probably directly derived from the Cornish pasty. The saltfish in the national dish was introduced through English trading ships, as was the quirky and beloved starch-on-a-tree, breadfruit. Even sorrel, that cheery drink, came on slave ships from West Africa. That said, it's held on good authority that jerk meat is a homegrown creation, and in fact allspice, found throughout the cuisine as mostly a spice for savory dishes, is native to the island.

Our guest of honor was Lois, from Jamaica! We also dined with Heather, Sarah, Brian, Chris, Betsy, and Christen. Despite the fact that it looks like I was pasted in the front there, I swear I was actually there, it's the lighting.

Planter's Punch

There's plenty of disagreement over whether this drink comes from South Carolina or Jamaica, but either way, this drink is a sweet, tropical refresher. Tropical juices and grenadine (which I made from scratch by boiling down pomegranate juice and adding sugar) hook up with dark rum and a dash of bitters, and voilà. There are as many recipes as bartenders!

Sorrel

The word in Spanish for the flower, and the rich red drink it makes, is jamaica. So I’m not at all surprised that the island with the same name loves to drink what we call hibiscus and they call sorrel. It’s got all the color and staining power of beets, with a fruity sourness reminiscent of pomegranate without the sweetness. Accordingly, when making a drink from the dried sepals, you sweeten it after a boil and long soak, and sometimes even add other flavors like ginger and clove. I made this one fairly tart, and Lois said she liked it that way, so hooray. Just be sure to not spill any on yourself or the stain will likely not come out! Goes very well with rum, by the way.

Saltfish and ackees | Recipe

While jerk is by far the best-known Jamaican food up here, the undisputed national dish is a breakfast food that looks like scrambled eggs but is made from an oily fruit and a salty dried fish. It’s curious that, even though they’re surrounded by abundant seas, the national dish is made from long-preserved fish from Canada, but colonial legacies will do strange things. At least the fruit is quite native: ackees look a bit like oversized lychees, but aren’t very sweet. So long as you remember to soak the fish overnight, the dish is a cinch to whip together, and tastes quite a bit better than it looks or sounds. I’d definitely eat this salty, moderately greasy, and tasty plate as a hangover cure.

Patties | Recipe

A Jamaican patty is flaky, tinged yellow with curry, and traditionally stuffed with an allspice-heavy, moderately spicy ground-beef filling. I did that, as well as a vegetarian version with chorizo. As I continue to struggle with pastry, I gave up rolling out big sheets of the patty dough, and instead rolled out individual rounds, which was tedious but worked ok. The patties baked up nicely and were really quite yummy.

Jerk chicken | Recipe

Once you’ve whipped up the off-white marinade, heavy with onions and the classic thyme and allspice, you’ll wonder how it’ll turn into that super-dark coating that you think of when you think of jerked meat. Well, it takes patience: first for the long marinade, and then the slow grill, but darken it will. It turned out so damn well: I’m sure part of it is due to having used tender local well-raised chicken, but that long marinade just took it to beautiful, spicy, flavorful places.

Breadfruit

Ever heard of the Mutiny on the Bounty? The ship was on a mission from the Caribbean to the South Pacific to bring back samples of the tree that grows this big, fleshy, surprisingly bread-like fruit that was rumored to be super nutritious, as cheap food for slaves. It turns out the scaly fruit is kind of a health dud, and the slaves originally refused to eat it, but it eventually became a beloved part of the cuisine of the islands. It’s easy enough to cook: just roast it whole over fire (like I did) or in an oven (if that's more convenient), and cut it open. So what’s it like? Well, it looks like one of those smooth-skinned avocados blown up to several times its size, and tastes something between a banana and an artichoke. They’re kinda hard to come by — this was the fourth Nosh for which I looked in West Indian markets for breadfruit and the first time I got them — so if you happen to see it, do yourself a favor and give it a try. I doubt you’ll develop a craving, but you probably won’t hate it either.

Ice creams: Grape-nuts | Mango

Turns out Jamaica has a pretty big ice-cream culture, so for my final act before selling my machine, I whipped up a few frozen treats.

I was surprised as you probably are to learn that Grape-nuts ice cream is one of the most beloved flavors in Jamaica. (Weirdly, it also is in Maine.) I can see why: there’s something about how the malt plays off the sweet and cream, and the crunch in contrast with the soft, that’s just really delightful. The mango ice cream, with a squeeze of lime, was pretty alright too, though I think the chunks of fruit were too big and got kinda icy.

Meal 81: Italy

In the estimation of many, Italy is the true heart of Western gastronomy. France gets so much of the glory, but it wasn't until Catherine de' Medici of Florence married French King Henry II and brought her chefs with her that their cuisine set on the road to such lofty achievements. A major flaw of going one-meal-per-country is that even the most culinarily interesting and diverse countries only show up once. Well, except for Italian food — thanks to the Holy See (aka Vatican City, a permanent observing state) and San Marino (a tiny but full-fledged member), we essentially get three shots at it! (Oh, I guess thanks to Monaco we'll get French food again. Score!) But even then, there's so much variety across Italy owing to a wide diversity of climates and geographies; to name just one important distinction, the North tends to use butter and the South olive oil as the cooking fat of choice.

One great thing about this project is that there's always a theme for a birthday party. Italy marks Laura's third birthday nosh, after Canada and France. In a shocking break with tradition, I'm the one who took the group photo, so Laura's included! Surrounding her are Erin, Lisa, Anna, Alicia, Jessica, Kirsty, Sarah-Doe, and Elsa. Note the utterly empty bowl that once held pesto pasta.

Antipasti | Appetizers

Our pre-dinner entertainment was tarot card readings (tarot was invented in Italy, who knew?), so we needed an appetizer that didn't require formal service. Fortunately, Italian food has perfected the art of pre-dinner nibbling with the antipasto, literally, "before the pasta." The spread gave me the opportunity to represent preserved foods from around the country.

For meats, we had San Daniele prosciutto from Friuli in the northeast, richly spiced cacciatorini salame from throughout the north and central regions, and a spreadable, fiery 'Nduja from Calabria. I can't even remember all the cheeses, but they included a fresh sheep's-milk ricotta from Lazio near Rome, a delicious, medium-flavored snacking cheese called bra from Piedmont, and a truly distinctive cheese called formaggio di fossa, so named because it's buried in a pit and allowed to anaerobically ferment for a few months, making for a really pungent, sharp, and crumbly cheese. I also roasted some eggplant, chopped it up, and doused it with olive oil, garlic, oregano and salt to make a Southern Italian salad-dip-like thing.

Pane tipo Altamura | Semolina sourdough bread | Recipe

(Sorry there's no photo. Imagine a round loaf of bread.)

I was going to make a ciabatta, until I discovered that it was invented in...1982! So I went searching for an older one, and given my love of sourdough and alternative flours, I ended up with this bread from Apulia, which is known in Italy as Puglia. (Why does English mangle it? Some Anglicizations make sense, like Florence for Firenze and Naples for Napoli. But Apulia, as well as Genoa for Genova, don't seem to add anything.)

Since Roman times, the semolina-based loaf from this particular town has received wide acclaim, and I gotta say it turned out great when I made my best imitation. Moderately spongy with medium holes, a substantial but not overwhelming tang, a bit of nuttiness from the semolina and a crispy but not overly-thick crust made this one of the favorites I've ever made. The only downside is how long it takes to make it: 40 minutes, then 2.5 hours, then 2 hours, then a relatively long bake — something that can only be made on a leisurely weekend day. This bread went great with the antipasti, and the second loaf I made held up admirably for several more days.

Aperol spritz

We're not big fans of Negronis and those other classic Italian cocktails, Laura and I find them too bitter. But this, the famous apertivo of Venice, won our vote: three parts prosecco, two parts Aperol, one part soda, with ice and a slice of orange. Aperol is indeed made of some bitter things, but it's milder and sweeter, and when paired with the dry bubbly, it's just lovely and refreshing.

Pasta fresca all'uovo con pesto alla genovese | Fresh pasta with basil pesto | Recipe

In a proper Italian meal, the primo piatto, the first plate, is generally pasta or soup. Uh, duh, pasta please.

I can't believe I'd never made pasta until now, and it was just as fun and satisfying as folks had told me it would be. With something so simple — it's just flour and eggs — the ingredients are extremely important. I used Italian Tipo 00 flour, which is milled super-fine, which helps it cook faster and also not require as much hydration (hence no added water beyond the moisture from the eggs), leading to a softer texture. The eggs came from the farmer's market. Making up the dough (pasta means paste, as in dough) was easy enough, the laborious part was cranking the sheets of dough through ever-narrower settings on the (borrowed) machine, carefully dusting each layer with flour to avoid them sticking.

Pesto means "pestle," as in the thing you use with a mortar to mash something. Fortunately, the Cuisinart has eliminated the tedium of mashing basil, garlic, grated hard cheese, pine nuts and olive oil with pieces of stone, so this classic Ligurian sauce came together in just a few minutes. Sharp from raw garlic, rich from abundant oil, and fresh and aromatic from basil, the pesto played so well against the soft, mildly eggy canvas of the fresh pasta. There was nary a noodle left after just a few minutes.

Involtini di manzo in salsa di tomate | Beef pinwheels | Recipe

In Northern Italy, meat is traditionally more abundant, and meat dishes are often straightforward hunks of flesh. In the poorer South, meat is treated as more of a luxury good, whose flavor is to be stretched by blending with complementary ingredients. Perhaps an illustration of this distinction is the two meanings of the word braciole: to northerners it'd be medium-thick slices of meat, to southerners it's meat slices pounded thin and stuffed. The latter, which is also universally known in Italy as involtini or "roll-ups," is what we had for a main course. I made it Sicilian-style with breadcrumbs, grated cheese, raisins and pine nuts (ironically, the pine nuts were far more expensive per pound than even the grass-fed beef), held together with a toothpick and browned all sides until cooked through. With the pan juices, I built up a tomato sauce, then put the involtini back in. The great thing about this dish is you can cook ahead of time, and reheat in just a few minutes. (It's also pretty yummy cold!)

Cassata ricetta mia | Sicilian layer cake, my way

A birthday party needs a cake, right? The cassata, probably Italy's most famous cake, is made with sponge cake soaked in rum, and layered with the same sort of creamy spread you find in cannoli. The recipe I found looked cool because it uses a layer of marzipan lined with chocolate to give the thing body; I half-managed to layer the pan with the rolled-out almond paste, but spreading with molten chocolate was a disaster and it all clumped up. I changed course by mushing it all into a layer of chocolatey marzipan, and used that as a layer of the filling. Another layer was sweetened ricotta cheese studded with chocolate curls. Candied fruit is a traditional part of the cake, but Laura doesn't like it, so I kept a corner clear for her. The cassata was rich and delicious, but be warned that whatever recipe you follow is going to be a whole lot of work.

Gelato di cioccolato | Chocolate gelato | Recipe

Drop the mic, put a cork in it, closing time, etc. I shall no longer search for a chocolate ice cream recipe, because there's no way anything could be better than this gem, which comes to us by way of the beloved goddess of Italian cuisine, Marcella Hazan.

What's all the more astonishing is that it's so rich and sumptuous, yet as a gelato contains no cream. So why's it so rich and tasty, and smoother than any frozen dessert I've ever made? Surely the blend of rich cocoa powder and melted semisweet chocolate rounds out the flavor, but the trick is in a dash of caramel that you whip up in a pan on the side and pour into the custard right as it firms up.

We went through roughly a bottle of Italian wine apiece, plus the Aperol Spritz. The recycling collectors must think we're lushes with very particular regional taste in wine.

Meal 78: Indonesia

Indonesia's all about the islands. It's got over 17,000 of them, including large parts second- (New Guinea) and third-largest (Borneo) islands in the world. It also has the most populous island — at 141 million people, Java's population is about the same as Russia's, in 133 times less area! While it's generally not much on our radar from a geopolitical or cultural standpoint, it's played an important role in world, and culinary, history. For millennia traders from the West have sought its spices, and who knows how long it would have taken a European to make it to the New World had there not been the urge to find an easier route to the pepper, nutmeg, and cloves of Molucca, the Spice Islands? Curiously, spices don't have a particularly bold role in Indonesian cuisine today, which instead leans more on roots like ginger and galangal, and chili peppers, which ironically were first brought out of the New World by Columbus as a next-best-thing for not having found black pepper and found their way to Indonesia via the Portuguese. (They brought peanuts, too.)

Joining us for the meal were Erika, Claire, Iris, Ben, and Michelle.

Arrack punch | Recipe

Indonesia's best-known liquor was actually a lot better known a century ago. In that pre-Prohibition age of punches, this sugarcane-and-rice firewater clocking in at 50% alcohol was a mainstay, a touch of the colonial and exotic. As a predominantly Muslim country, Indonesia has little drinking culture (Bali is a notable exclusion!), but this recipe, with limes and freshly grated nutmeg (which is native to Indonesia), seemed appropriate. Laura made them cold and strong — there's nothing but ice, simple syrup, and lime juice to cut the alcohol!

Tumpeng nasi kuning | Yellow rice mountain | Recipe

The tumpeng is more than a cone of rice representing the country's mountainous terrain. It's the sign of a celebration, as important to many Indonesian families as a cake is to a Western birthday. It's also more than just the rice itself, because it always comes with an assortment of foods that make up a feast, at the whim of the host. It's this intersection of tradition, symbolism and flexibility that's led it to recently be named the primary national dish by a government agency.

This recipe looked great, but turned out not so good. Soaking with fresh turmeric overnight didn't make it as richly yellow as a quick douse of the powdered version would have, and the instructions to boil, covered, on high for 20 minutes led to burnt rice sticking to the sides so hard it took a week of soaking to get off. Fortunately, though, most of the rice turned out well, and as you can see, made for a pretty cone — which I formed with a chinois, a pointy strainer.

Krupuk | Fried crackers

These things start out as these little wafers of sun-dried tapioca starch with flavoring, but as soon as they hit oil, they puff up, with a texture somewhere between a Cheeto and meringue. You can buy them pre-fried in a bag just like chips, but it's so fun and easy to make them. You can even make them completely from scratch, but alas, without much sunshine to speak of, I resorted for store-bought. I made two versions: garlic, and fish, the latter being not a wafer but more like a nest of noodles.  The savory-fatty-crispy contrasted the strong, sweet punch quite nicely.

Satay ayam madura | Chicken skewers with peanut sauce | Recipe

I couldn't have been happier to fire up the grill for the first time this year for this tasty treat, popular throughout Indonesia and Southeast Asia. You start by making a peanut sauce, a complex thing of beauty, with peanuts fresh roasted on the stove, blended with intense flavors like shrimp paste and cayenne peppers. Then skewered chicken goes through two marinades: first a bath in sweet soy sauce and chicken fat rendered with garlic and ginger (YUM), then halfway through cooking a basting with peanut sauce, more sweet soy sauce, and lime — all that fat and sugar make for some flare-ups, and it was dark and cold out so it was hard to test for doneness, so I just cooked it low and slow until crispy. My only regret through the whole thing is that I didn't buy more chicken; the tasty, mildly sweet, caramelized morsels disappeared in seconds.

Urap sayur | Blanched vegetables with coconut dressing | Recipe

For whatever reason (sanitation?), Indonesian cuisine has many cooked salads. Vegetables I'd be happy to eat raw, like bean sprouts, are blanched or steamed before being dressed. While gado-gado, with a peanut dressing, is probably the most famous, we have plenty of peanuts going on in other dishes. An urap, with a sweet-sour-spicy flavored coconut dressing, is more common on a tumpeng platter.While I enjoyed the flavors dressing, the blanched veggies weren't quite my thing, though some others at the table said they liked the whole thing quite a bit.

By the way, this was by far my easiest coconut-extracting experience. I did my usual thing of whacking on the equator a few times with the back of a cleaver, and not only did it crack nicely and easily to open, but the flesh also separated almost effortlessly from the shell. Usually it takes a good ten to twenty minutes to pry it off. Did I do something right? Did I get lucky with this coconut? I'd love to understand what happened so I can repeat the success.

Rendang daging minang | Caramelized beef coconut curry |Recipe

Rendang is a strange and clever technique for making meat last at room temperature for weeks. You start with enough coconut milk that it looks like you're making a soup, but you keep it on a low boil for hours until all the liquid evaporates, and you end up with a sort of fried meat. (This isn't the first time I've seen this technique — the oil down from Grenada, in particular, also cooks a stew down in coconut milk until it's nice and thick.)

 The Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, who have a centuries-long tradition of travel and trade, invented the dish for their journeys, and then spread the love wherever they landed, so now it's a popular dish throughout the region. Today, with decent refrigeration, packaging, and supply chains, there's no need to spend long hours making this complex dish, except that it happens to be extremely tasty — kaffir lime leaves, star anise, lemongrass, and a host of chilies and aromatic roots combine for a really luscious dish. The beef, which starts out as an extremely tough cut like shank, melts into nothing until it's the texture of tuna fish. And all that coconut milk — the fat makes the dish rich, and the residual sugars caramelize! Yum.

Tempe orek | Stir-fried tempeh |Recipe

Tempeh is Indonesia's homegrown soy product, based on fermentation with a particular fungal spore whose white vegetation forms a white mass that holds the beans together. (If that sounds gross to you, I recommend you not research how cheese is made.) While in the West we tend to use it as a vegan substitute for ground beef, Indonesians tend to treat it as the Chinese often do tofu, cut into cubes and stir-fried until crispy. This recipe uses a straightforward sambal of quick-cooked garlic, shallots, chilies and galangal, made into a thick sauce with palm sugar and kecap manis, a sweet soy sauce. (Kecap is pronounced pretty much like "ketchup," and that's no coincidence — it's a long history, but our tangy, thick tomato condiment can trace its history back to Southeast Asia.) The result is quite tasty, with moderate spice, and very healthy for vegetarians and vegans as it's loaded with B vitamins.

Sambal teri kacang | Fried dried anchovies with peanuts | Recipe

This dish is about as intense as it sounds: super-fishy, crunchy, and with that sweet-sour-spicy base we've seen repeated a lot throughout the meal. It was a bit of work to soak and then dry the anchovies, but I'm glad I did because otherwise they'd have been way too salty. Fun to munch on, but you don't need to make much per person unless you need something to snack on with beer.

Setokeng | Warm ginger broth with floating treats |Recipe

Whether warm or icy, most Indonesian desserts are a sort of half-drink, half-soup full of assorted nuggets. This one is a wintertime comfort, a sweet ginger broth playing host to a grab bag of delights both floating (bread, peanuts) and sinking (tapioca pearls, palm fruit), topped off with a drizzle of condensed milk because why not. It's a bizarre texture combo, ranging from fall-apart mushy to chewy to crunchy, but I found it surprisingly nice and comforting on a cold evening.

Meal 74: Hungary

Though it's common to think of Europe as being a jigsaw puzzle of peoples who've been there since before recorded history, the people who now populate the land known as Hungary didn't show up until a mere millennium ago. Known as the Magyars, they brought a herding tradition — and a non-Indo-European language most closely related to Finnish — from Siberia. Over the centuries, they settled into an intensely agricultural society that blended new foods such as paprika from the Turks and pastry from the Austrians into their meaty, brothy, bready core cuisine. (And oh, do they like their paprika: I used a quarter-pound in making this meal! If you're cooking Hungarian food, do yourself a favor and get some fresh stuff.) Related to jigsaws, one thing I've been mulling about after cooking this meal is that the old phrase, "The whole is greater than the sum of the parts," isn't always true. In fact, often you can get more utility out of breaking up an ingredient, and using each bit to its advantage. With the chicken, I was able to get several tablespoons of fat by trimming off the skin and slowly rendering it. (I used this in place of lard. No objection to lard, I'd just forgotten to buy some, and it was cold out!) And with the eggs in the torte, by separating the yolks from the whites, the recipe avails itself of the richness and emulsifying properties of the former, and the magical leavening properties of beating the former.

We were lucky to have two people of Hungarian descent, Michele and Danielle, with us. (I'm one-eighth Hungarian, for what it's worth!) Also on hand were Brandon, Diana, Irene, and Soo-Young who's in Budapest as I write this!

Gulyás | Beef and vegetable soup with paprika | Recipe

This dish, called "goulash" in English, was originally made by herdsmen, who'd slaughter one animal, make a huge stew in a hanging pot over a fire, and eat for several days. Accordingly, it's an unfussy dish, and while you'll see a whole lot of recipes out there, it's little more than cubes of meat slowly cooked in a broth scented with paprika and onions with some root vegetables thrown in toward the end. (The farmer's market happened to have parsley root; if you can't find that then parsnips are a good substitute.) I do particularly like this recipe for its caraway seeds, which add an almost minty aroma and play nicely off the brightness of the paprika.

Csirke paprikás | Chicken in paprika-sour cream sauce | Recipe

I loved this dish growing up. The vibrant color and flavor of the paprika, with the scrumptious creaminess of the sour cream, made for an unctuous sauce to smother over every bit of chicken and sop up with noodles. In my preparation, I took it two steps forward and one step back. The mistake was accidentally buying a hen instead of a chicken, which even after an hour and a half of braising was still pretty tough. The two things I did right: using super-thick, homemade sour cream, known as tejföl in Hungarian and known throughout Slavic countries as kajmak; and making spätzle-esque dumplings to sop up all that tasty sauce.

Nokedli | Little egg dumplings | Recipe

These dumplings are not at all complicated to make, it's just tedious them. Mixing up the dough takes all of two minutes, but scraping the dough back and forth across a spätzle plane over boiling water, and then scooping the little boiled dough bits, takes patience. They did go absolutely perfectly with the cream sauce, so I don't at all regret making them, and I'm happy I happened to have the proper device on hand. (If you don't have one, you can pinch off little bits of dough, but the texture wouldn't be the same and it'd be even more annoying to make!)

Kenyér | Crusty bread | Recipe

Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, sometimes what I figure out to cook makes no sense once I start getting down to it. I'd identified a Hungarian bread recipe, but as I set out to start making it I realized it was of the sweet variety, nothing like the hearty, crusty bread that the above dishes require. So with several hours remaining until meal-time, I researched more deeply, only to discover that the best recipes require overnight fermentation. Drat! Well, I happened to find a website in Hungarian that through Google Translate seemed to approve of this no-knead recipe, with hints of rye and whole wheat, so I went for it.

I'd kind of looked down on no-knead breads — how would you develop the gluten? why are you afraid of touching the dough? — but you know what, for a fraction of the work and no additional time, this was one extremely decent loaf. The crust was decently thick and crunchy, the interior spongy and dense but not gummy. Really, an excellent bread for sopping up soup and sauce without falling apart. I think I'll make it again.

Uborka saláta | Cucumber salad | Recipe

As one description says, "Hungarian vegetables tend to be of the nongreen variety." Cucumbers make a notable exception, perhaps because of the crisp and cool contrast they make to the rich, soft stewed meats. This salad wasn't all that exciting, and I think I put too much water in the dressing so it was all just not very flavorful, and yet it took a lot of work to shave the cucumbers — since I don't have a mandoline, and I wanted thin uniform slices, I used a peeler instead.

Lecso | Stew of peppers, tomatoes and onions | Recipe

I probably didn't need to make this since there was so much other food going on, but it wasn't too hard. As another simmered dish, the texture matched that of the stews. The recipe mentions that it makes a good breakfast with some eggs on top, which sounds pretty similar to shakshuka, the North African dish.

Dobos torta | Chocolate-frosted layer cake | Recipe

I'm not huge on pâtisserie. The precise chemistry of baked goods is too much science and not enough art, while I'm a bit too haphazard to carefully handle and prepare fragile goods in precise preparations. But I had to game up for Hungary, which thanks to its split empire with Austria gained a strong expertise in making really tasty and impressively composed desserts. And all signs pointed to making this multi-layered cake, slathered with a thick coating of bar chocolate and butter to allow for long storage and transportation. (And flavor!)

The classic dobos torte is round, with a toffee crust. The cake part is little more than an really sweet omelet, with ten egg yolks, a pound of sugar, seven beaten egg whites, and less than a cup of sugar. Despite appearances, you don't cook one cake and then slice it like cheese, rather you bake the layers on their own. It's really tedious to bake each layer individually as would be required for a round cake, so I followed the Smitten Kitchen advice and simply made two jelly roll pans of cake and sliced them up. No good excuse on not having the toffee crust; I just messed that one up by being too cautious and removing the caramel from the stove before it was done, so I ruined one layer of cake and just junked it. But other than that, this cake was pretty easy, the frosting is especially forgiving and after refrigeration sets very nicely.

This was our last sit-down Nosh of the year. We've got a combined Honduras/Holy See holiday party coming up, and then in the new year we're onto the I countries!