Authentic Hungngarian sausage recipe

[grisell]

Oh, I didn't work in Hungary, he did. I worked with him here in Sweden. I've only been in Hungary on vacations.
I also like the Transylvanian recipes best. They are more sturdy and appropriate for this time of year. Lots of cabbage, sausage, sour cream and bacon; no sissy Széged fish soup made of what is pulled up from the river. Yuck!

BTW, French goose liver is the best!

[the chorizo kid]

i have a slight disagreement. it was suggested that a chef that works in a budapest hotel is an expert in authentic hungarian sausage. perhaps. when i want to know about an authentic national middle european quisine, i look to see what the peasants have been doing for the last millenium or so. peasants raised and processed almost all of their daily food and drink. simplicity was key, because of storage problems and because the women had to cook as well as work the fields, etc. when my ancestors moved to hungary in the 1720's, they learned to make hungarian sausage from the local peasants. the method was handed down and retained. authentic hungarian sausage has only the paprika as a spice. some allspice is occasioanlly added for depth, because the quality of paprika is not always the same. i find ground cloves even better, but that is my own addition, which i tried to make clear. i tried to pass on the recipe of rustics, the "old way."
note that one of the internet recipes called for cumin, and that was implied to be authentic. the next day we were told that cumin is never used in hungarian cooking. does that say somthing about not automatically accepting internet recipes as authentic?
i am not saying that great hungarian sauasage has to contain only what i suggested. anything that tastes good can be used. i am saying that authentic ethnic sauasge recipes will be found among the underclass that relied on them for daily food, century after century, even after invaders [cf turks] came and went.
i guess our disagreement [if any] is about the meaning of "authentic." to me authentic is "the old way." if i want an authentic pizza recipe, my best source is to ask mama marenda how her great, great, great grandmother made it in sicily/naples. barring that, the net etc.
the gyulai looked good.

[grisell]

Ok, once again: cumin is a mistranslation. Forget about it! This is a very common mistake in recipes, even in cookbooks. It should be caraway and nothing else. Why the mistake is made so often is explained by this table:

English: Caraway Cumin
Latin Carum Carvi Cuminum Cuminum
Hungarian Kömény Római kömény/fehér kömény
French Carvi Cumin
German Kümmel Kreuzkümmel
Italian Kümmel(!) Cumino romano
Swedish Kummin Spiskummin

Obviously only English and French have realized that cumin and caraway are totally different species and not even related.
As an example, in Swedish cookboks, kummin could mean both caraway and cumin, whereas spiskummin is only cumin. A good guess is that this is valid for most other languages, too.
Fortunately, cumin and caraway are seldom used together. A simple rule of thumb is: cumin in Southern cooking (Southern and South-East Asia, Middle East, Africa, Latin America) and Caraway in Northern cooking. It gets complicated with Spanish recipes: then one has to know if the dish is of Northern or Moorish origin (which is often obvious from the other ingredients). Jewish recipes could also be amibiguous, if I remember correctly.

What does 'authentic' mean? How long back should we go? 10 years, 100 years, 1000 years? 18th century Hungary was far from 'authentic'! Their cuisine had had hundreds of years of influences from Romans, Mongols, Turks, Austrians, gypsies etc. If you want to make sausage exactly like it was made 250 years ago, the problem is that there are very few 18th century matrons to interview nowadays.
I have a very good cookbook which also has a section on Hungarian culinarian history, A száz leghíresebb magyar recept by Zoltán Halász. I trust it.

[the chorizo kid]

grisell
i think you have hit the nail onthe head. how far back do you go to get "authentic?" it seems to me that total years matter less than cultural continuity. going back to the 1720's, as my family does, there is direct cultural continuity. the romans left 1500 years ago; the mongols 1000; the turks over 300. that was the last significant occupying culture. gypsies don't count, obviously [i think they are of romanian origin-and hardly an occupying dominant culture]. as for finding 300 year old matrons, that is a no go. but you certainly can find the decendants of those matrons, and if those decendants have kept the cultural traditions, including food, as my family did, you do have actual contact with the "old ways." the old women of our church, all of whom were born peasants in middle europe, put together a cook book of the old ways before they died, in their 80's, many years ago. this is one obvious source of authentic recipes. i'm sure lot's of churches and cultural clubs have done the same thing. perhaps your own family has done some of this. i learned from my parents, so i make good peasant food: goulash; paprikash; sarma; sausage; salami. not very distinguished or fancy, but authentic. all of these dishes were served at large "old country weddings" up to the 1970's, when the old people started dying off, and the young people became americanized. that is what i mean by "authentic." incidentally, none of my three grown children has any interest in keeping up these old ways [they're vegetarians, and i'm an avid sausage maker. is that freudian?].

[Ianinfrance]

If we're talking authentic Magyár by virtue of long family history, then I think it's time to mention that my mum's family was first "mentioned in dispatches" back in 1689 in a document in my brother's possession, shortly after the good Laczkó Máté Szepsi made Tokaji Aszú My uncle Dőnci (the one who taught me hungarian cookng) left in '67 (1967 that is). But if that's when the first documents talk of the family, it's almost certain they had been there for ages beforehand.

I first started cooking Hungarian food, by the way, back in 1947 when I helped Nagymama season her főzelék and pull out the dough for rétes.

[grisell]

I think we lost Greyham, the original poster long ago. Greyham, are you there?
Why don't you ask your Hungarian customers more precisely what they are refering to? Maybe someone can bring you a sample from Hungary. Or at least a name and place of origin?

[Ianinfrance]

Update - - - update - - - - Update

Well, I made a batch of the hungarian sausage snails today.

Hungarian Sausage snail

2500 g pork shoulder
500 g smoked fat streaky
5 g black pepper
40 g noble sweet paprika
5 g csipos csemege paprika
1.5 g caraway
30 g nitrited salt (0.6%) )NB quite a lot too
30 g coarse sea salt } much salt
18 g garlic crushed into 50 mls water

Peel & crush garlic into cold water, leave to infuse while measuring remaining ingredients and preparing the meats. Weigh spices and grind all together. (Caraway - used 3/4 tsp which weighed the required amount).

Cut pork and bacon into smallish cubes, mix well, sprinkle the ground spices over and mix well again. Strain the garlic juice over, pressing well. Mix. Chill in freezer till VERY cold, nearly freezing.

Mince once through fine screen. Chill again and when very cold, work well together (K beater in Kenwood in two batches for about 30secs per batch). Finally pack into sausage stuffer, and stuff into lengths of about 500g apiece. Hang to bloom over night, shape into coils like cumberland sausages,

=================

Comments. Before stuffing, as usual we fried up a patty to taste. The sausage meat is significantly too salty for our taste. Very edible, and would be fine added as an ingredient to a dish like a lentil casserole or cassoulet type dish, but fried on its own, we found it too salt. I'm delighted with the recipe with the exception of the quantity of salt. It certainly tastes genuinely hungarian to me, but I can't honestly say that I have a clear memory of the exact flavour profile of sausages eaten in Hungary the last time we were there. The caraway did not dominate at all, which is just as it should be.

[jenny_haddow]

I like the sound of that recipe Ian, I shall certainly try it with less salt though.

Cheers

Jen

[Ianinfrance]

Merci Jenny,

I shall certainly try it with less salt though.

After letting the sausages bloom overnight, we coiled them up and kept one to cook tonight, which we did. When fried as a sausage (rather than as a patty) and after 18 + hours blooming in the wine cellar, the sausage tasted a lot less salty, interestingly enough. I think that instead of a total of 60 g salt, I'd be tempted to try again with 50g. As a sausage it was also a little bit dry, though that might be because the bacon wasn't fatty enough (I guess it was about 50% fat) so the total fat proportion would have been 250 g in 3000g total weight, or slightly under 10%. But it could also because we should have used a little more water to extract the flavour of the garlic.

Served with mixed bonduelle poêlé paysanne, we were well pleased on the whole. I won't reserve them just for use as an ingredient, as I half expected to have to do.