Hungarians have truly great food but it’s not really on the Jenny Craig plan or the American Heart Association's list of cardiac-friendly cuisine. Here’s an example. We have smoores; they have “Solana”. Solana is a big fat hunk of bacon fat that you roast over a fire like smoores except, its lard. You then drip all the grease from the cooking fat onto a slice of bread so you don’t lose anything greasy and you eat the bread with onions. Then when the huge slab of bacon is cooked you eat it on a plate.
We had a Solana party one evening last week, the family told me I had overcooked mine big time - it tasted like really salty charcoal. It’s a communal fire food thing that infuses your body with a year and 2 months supply of lard in one easy sitting. This event would normally stop your heart on the spot EXCEPT for another national Hungarian consumable called “palinka”. Palinka is the antidote to death-by-solana and other fatty but delicious Hungarian foods. Palinka is a kind of fruit based brandy/ white lightning / engine degreaser and before meal aperitif. Here’s my wife’s uncle’s private stash of palinka.
The locals gather fruit and let it sit, then they take their fruit mixture to a state operated “still” and have it made into a super potent burning ring of fruit fire drink that strips your arteries (and throat) of all harmful fat deposits. It’s a lot like a hardy shot of plum flavored turpentine. The Hungarian people are food culture folk, they love to cook, they love to feed you and hospitality is an art-form. Andrea’s aunt and uncle killed 1.3 million chickens and a few pigs from their little farm and stocked the freezer full of meat for our visit and fed us till we plumped nightly.
I put one of those turkey thermometers in my navel each time we ate and when it popped out I would know I was done eating. My wife's aunt Itsa would chant the following words at every meal; "edgeyartek", "edgeyartek", "edgeyartek" > "eat", "eat", "eat"!
