It is not only about eating roasted blood with onions or rooster testicle stew: the sugared

cottage cheese and bread and dripping are all thought to be strange by foreigners, reports.

Even if you ever heard about Hungarians having some strange eating habits, it can be hard to
recognize: since bread and dripping with purple onion, pasta with poppy seeds, the tripe or
the kidney and brains are so delicious – what can be so strange about them…? Yet foreigners
getting to know the Hungarian cuisine and culinary culture surely have a hard time accepting
the typical Hungarian dishes, ingredients, eating styles and habits.

Here are some examples.

1. No matter what you cook, the starting-point is always fats and onion Hungarians living
with foreigners quite often hear the shocked question “you fry the onion on oil (or fats)
again?” It may not strike us, but most of our dishes really start like that, and these are not
only stews and ragouts but also soups and vegetable dishes.

2. Can’t live without paprika Fresh paprika is the essential ingredient of many Hungarian
dishes: just think about the lecsó, but neither the goulash, the stew, nor the paprika potatoes
would exist without the ground (Erős Pista, Édes Anna and their numerous clones) and hot
paprika. Just to mention the most important dishes. So it could seem that paprika
predominates the Hungarian cuisine. There is a substratum of truth in that the Hungarian
cuisine relies on the Holy-Trinity of fats-onion-paprika – but at least they form the basic
backbone of it.

3. Putting sour cream in everything A foreigner can immediately spot the sour-cream-love of
the average Hungarian. Firstly, there are several dishes which must contain sour cream, but
apart from them we usually put sour cream on every dish “without reason”. It can be chicken
paprika, lángos or runner beans soup – but who has not eaten a good bread with sour cream
and onion for dinner yet? It is also essential on the top of the quark cheese noodles and the
quark cheese pancakes – the latter ones lead to our next point.

4. Quark cheese, what is more: sweetened quark cheese? Just like sour cream, the typical
bumpy, thin quark cheese is also a national peculiarity, something like this hardly appears
outside the Carpathian basin. So the autoletic, premeditated and constant usage of this kind
of cheese is suspicious already in itself, but it is nothing compared to the fact that we also
put sugar in it… and chocolate at the top… thus creating the Túró Rudi.

5. Giblets without control: tripe, kidney and brains, and rooster testicle stew! The edible parts
of animals usually stop at the height of the legs or wings for a distinguished Western-
European. They are gradually shocked by the chicken leg or gizzard put into the soup by
granny – but this is nothing compared to a good kidney and brains, or rooster testicle stew!
Of course, the list can go on with the stew of trotters, the pig pudding with pettitoes, and the
gizzard stew.

6. Eating the solid fats – it does not matter if you put it on bread, or you call it bacon and put
into your mouth piece by piece Bacon is also known westwards of Hungary, but many
foreigners cannot cope with how Hungarians can eat the meatless, 100 per cent fats bacon.
The bread and dripping or the greaves do not better the situation.

7. The delicacies of disznótor: roasted blood with onions, blood sausage, chitterlings Dishes
of the pig feasts and disznótor deserve an own paragraph. Slaughtering a pig is scary itself
and it can seem to be a barbaric tradition for some of the ingenuous foreigners, but if it turns
out what dishes are made during this event, the shock is guaranteed. Some people even
question the existence of roasted blood with onions…

8. Eating everything with bread – even bread with bread Although most of the courses have
“normal” trimmings, Hungarians tend to pick a great slice of bread instead. (There are some
radicals who frequently eat pasta or noodles with bread – but this is an extreme example.)
Still, it is quite strange for a foreigner that Hungarians normally eat bread with any soup or
even dishes that are trimmings in the eyes of foreigners (e.g. steamed or roasted vegetables).

9. Pasta with poppy seeds, the drug taboo Westwards of Hungary, poppy seeds are almost a
taboo in cuisine, because the name of the plant got totally interwoven with the opium it
contains and the heroin made of that. Thus, at most, they pour a little of poppy seeds at the
top of some pastries as decoration, but that’s all. Poor foreigners do not know that poppy
seeds themselves do not involve any danger, so they are usually shocked when hearing about
Hungarian dishes of poppy seeds…

10. Various soups: especially the cold, sweet, pink ones It can be said that Hungarians love
soups: compared to many other countries Hungarians eat much more of this kind of dish.
That’s okay, but, when instead of serving the usual hot salty soup for the first course the
waiter serves some cold pink liquid, which is even sweet, foreigners get set back on their
heels. They can cope with it better at the end of the courses, as a dessert… The term
“foreigners” is, of course, very generally here, stands mostly for the tourists and students
coming from the western countries. Besides, there are many open-minded and flexible
people among them, who enjoy discovering the Hungarian cuisine. Just like there are many
Hungarians who would never ever taste the kidney and brains, or the rooster testicle stew.