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What Hungarians eat for Christmas – Recipe VIDEOS
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The most wonderful time of the year is just around the corner, so it is time to talk about our favourite Christmas dishes. Here is a list of the most common traditional meals consumed by Hungarian families on 24, 25, and 26 December.
For the recipes, I included Kitchen Paprikash’s recipe videos. Kitchen Paprikash is a YouTube channel dedicated to Hungarian cuisine and showing people how to make delicious Hungarian meals (in English).
The perfect starter, Fisherman’s soup
Fish is the inevitable element of every Hungarian Christmas table. According to Hungarian folklore, fish-scale symbolises wealth, and if you are eating fish, your family will move forward in the next year as quickly as fish swim in the water. It is probable that you’ll find fisherman’s soup on the Christmas menu in almost all Hungarian households. Fisherman’s soup is a paprika-based fish soup, usually prepared by using carp, catfish, or pike with a variety of vegetables. Gourmets might know that certain regions make fisherman’s soup quite differently in Hungary, and they all believe that their version is the original one.
Stuffed cabbage
Hungarians have been eating stuffed cabbage for Christmas for centuries. The ancestor of the stuffed cabbage was cabbage-meat in Hungarian cuisine. The dish spread in the Balkans and Hungary in the 17h-18th century. The Szakácsmesterségek cookbook from 1695 featured two versions. One of them was the cabbage from Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) which called for goose or hen meat, while the other stuffed cabbage recipe called for “cow meat” and ginger.
No Christmas would be the same for me without my moms hókifli’s! With the usual fillings of corse!
Mákos guba, rántott hal, rántott hús, hús leves