Did you think you’d be getting a Hungarian lesson right out of the gate? Hold on to your coffee cup, because I’m going to hand you all four of the only Hungarian words I know - three of which are perfect if the only time you need to communicate is in a Hungarian bakery.
Please - kérem
Thank you - köszönöm
Strudel - rétes
The fourth word is “helyes,” which means “correct,” which is absolutely hilarious. When you use a credit card and it asks if the total is correct, you mash that green button to say “HELYES!” it is.
While I have clearly mastered the art of ordering strudel, I’ve not had a chance to try out my Hungarian pronunciation on many other foods.
Because I am a gal on a budget, working and traveling alone in a country where everyone speaks a language I don’t understand, at a time of year where it gets dark by exactly 4:01 PM - I haven’t been as willing to venture out for dinner. (I know, I know. How will I find a Hungarian husband if I’m only willing to go to the ruin bars on a Saturday between the daylight hours of 2-3 PM?)
Instead, I’ve been doing something very out of character and cooking every meal. In fact, outside of my airbnb, my #1 most-visited spot in Budapest is the Prima supermarket 4 minutes from my front door.
If you asked me what I was most excited to do in Budapest before I left, I either lied to you and said “the Turkish baths” or I was honest about it being the grocery store.
The best tourist attraction is the grocery store.
I firmly believe foreign grocery stores are better cultural experiences than museums.
You can see and squeeze produce you’ve never heard of. You get hints at how regular people eat and live in the city today. You can explore international versions of your favorite snacks at home - or go all out on snacks that you’ve never heard of before.
Coming from a land where we must fight suburban moms in GMC Yukons just to get a parking space at Harris Teeter, it also feels downright exotic to walk to the corner market. (Big city friends, you may roll your eyes at me.)
Hungarians use forint, not Euros.
One US dollar is equivalent to 316.15 forint, which just means that I have almost no concept of what I’m spending on anything here. When I got cash out of the airport ATM, all of the instructions were in Hungarian and I forgot the exchange rate and accidentally ended up withdrawing $327.44USD.
I’ve been breaking my big bills (Is that Wilford Brimley on the 200000 note?) at the grocery store, trusting that people working the cash registers will give me the right change and hoping that I won’t check my bank statement later to discover that I accidentally spent $70 on a bottle of wine.
Here are some of my favorite Hungarian grocery store discoveries:
You have to weigh and label your own produce before you check out.
I have not yet figured out how to do this, so I am just slowly developing scurvy.
In order to cheat the system, I bought a bag of onions and a giant bag of potatoes, pre-packaged. I then had to call my mom to ask what I should do with that many potatoes, because I don’t even really like potatoes…
Lots of sour cream. Almost no butter.
Hungarians love sour cream, and it is served on or in most of their traditional dishes. Sour cream comes in single-serve containers, large buckets, and every possible quantity in between - and because of this, most grocery stores have two full refrigerator units of store space devoted just to sour cream.
Butter, on the other hand, is basically sold by the stick, and gets exactly one shelf of space. (I don’t know how many forint I spent on my slab of fancy French beurre de baratte, and I don’t WANT to know.)
The refrigerator cases in the back of the store are almost exclusively for szalámi.
The packages appear to be organized loosely by brand - with no other real system. Just a mismatched sea of cured meats - in slices, in casings, with paprika and without, smoked, etc. as far as the eye can see. My charcuterie game over here is on fire.
Everything is pork, or made with pork, or flavored with pork.
And here I am, craving seafood in a landlocked country.
DO NOT keep your receipt, you absolute buffoon.
(This is what I imagine the self-checkout girl was thinking as she slapped my hand and reached into my bag to grab the receipt I’d scrunched up and thrown on top of my groceries - the way I’ve done it 700 times in American grocery stores.)
Condiments come in tubes.
This makes sense, when you consider that urban Europeans have to carry everything home to their smaller refrigerators - but for some reason, this delights me in a way that I can’t fully explain. Let’s make everything more like toothpaste! There’s mustard and mayonnaise and horseradish - and variations of each of those that are spicy. There’s onion paste, goulash paste, paprika paste.
By far, the most captivating thing I discovered was a tube of “spagettikrém.”
A tube of … what, exactly? I’ve found nothing conclusive on the internet about it. Nary a recipe in sight. (Or at least, not in English.)
Well, dear readers - it’s your lucky day, because I tried the spagettikrém for all of us.
And it is … *drumroll* … spaghetti sauce.
Specifically, and almost impressively, the worst spaghetti sauce I have ever tasted.
(Later confirmed by a woman at the grocery store who patiently listened to me explain the difference between spaghetti sauce and tomato paste in English. Hungarians really just squeeze this onto their pasta and go about their lives.)
It tastes like someone blended up the grittiest, most sour tomatoes they could find into thick goo and called it “sauce.” I’m reporting them to Italy as we speak.
5 Things I Consumed This Week (other than spagettikrém):
3 cherry rétes, purchased from a very nice woman at the Great Market Hall who is soon going to become worried about my health if I keep this pattern going.
Various strategies to improve my daily Wordle score and one-up my coworkers.
What I thought was pistachio-flavored cottage cheese (arguably a gross concept to begin with, but I’m up for the adventure); then, upon opening it, thought “oh! It’s yogurt!”
It was actually… rice pudding with pistachio jelly. 🤢A LOT of content about Machine Gun Kelly and Megan Fox’s proposal.
4 bone-dry potato latkes smothered in sour cream
(I have to use up all of these damn potatoes somehow…)
I have a latke recipe for you! https://www.northmiznon.com/latkes-recipe/