nglish jokes about Eastern European cuisines are pretty rich coming from the people whose national dish is vinegar-drenched deep-fried potatoes eaten out of a newspaper cone. But then again the English never seem weary of taking the piss out of French cuisine so it is really a local issue.Kürtőskalács (pronounced more or less like 'kewrtersh-kalartch') is said to be Hungary's oldest pastry. It hails from Transylvania, which, despite being populated mostly by ethnic Hungarians, was awarded to Romania after WWI. So, although it is de jure Romanian, de facto it is Hungarian (I'm talking about pastry, not territory here).
Essentially, it is a ribbon of sweet leavened dough wound around a cylinder, heavily sprinkled with sugar and baked over fire. In the olden days it was turned by hand but these days it is all automatic. When ready it can be sprinkled with caster sugar, cinnamon or chopped nuts. Thanks to it peculiar shape it is also known as chimney cake in English. That is what kürtőskalács actually means in Hungarian too.
In London, I found it in the New Covent Garden market where a very friendly Hungarian lady (on the picture above) plies them for one quid fifty pense a pop. A veritable yum-orama with a cup of freshly brewed coffee.
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de facto? check those facts? before Transylvania was taken by the Austro-Hungarian Empire and long before any WWII or WWI it was one of the three Romanian Principalities and even before that Transylvania was once the nucleus of the Kingdom of Dacia (82 BC–106 AD)which are the ancestors of today's Romanian people. The Hungarians (Magyars) conquered the area at the end of the 9th century. Regardless, the kurtos is out of this world!!!!
ReplyDeleteRelax and read it again! The author is talking about pastry and not territory. Kurtoskalacs is de facto Hungarian.
ReplyDeleteYou right!
Delete(A Hungarian man)
Word! :-)
ReplyDelete