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Yes, Redsugar, porkolt comes closest to a good, simple texas chili - without beans or tomato. I like to bring some dried mexican chilis and cumin with me when I visit friends in Transylvania and make "Navaho" chili for them (mutton is cheap there) which they have taken to calling "Texasi porkolt." A few years ago the Museum of Folklore in Budapest had an exhibition on the creation of "national symbols" in Hungary, which was quite enlightening and amusing as well - one of the symbols treated was gulyas soup and the idea of paprika as a Hungarian symbol. The word itself comes from Turkish, and paprika was not widely used until well into the 19th century. Karoly Gundel had a big hand in popularizing paprika as well when he was chosen to cook at international exhibitions in Paris and Brussells in the 1890s - paprika was considered "spicy" and his signiture dishes, such as chicken paprikas became the ethnic food fads of the 1890s. Old style Hungarian cooking is still the norm in Transylvania - herb flavored white sauces and souring agents such as csibere - fermented wheat bran. The acceptance of soups and stews - such as gulyas - began more in urban Pest around 1800 than in countryside cooking. Gulyas means a cowherder - especially the guys with big hats around the Hortobagy plains near Debrecen, and of course their soup was called "gulyas. Most peasants, however, couldn't afford much meat, and continued eating starchy paps and mushes until the 1950s - the real Hortobagy cowboy food was slamboc (pron.: shlambotz) which is bacon and onions browned in paprika, and then cooked into a mush with big, lasagna-like dried laska noodles. It is quite good, but you will never see it in a restaurant. My mother and aunt remember a slew of dishes - puliszka (polenta/mamaliga), hajdina kasa, dodolle, rantott leves (roux soup) that nobody eats anymore, since they are all associated with poverty and the low staus of being a peasant. Meat was eaten rarely, even in our family where my Grandfather was a butcher. Fresh meat (as opposed to smoked meat or bacon) was simply too valuable for everyday eating. After the second world war meat became more common in the national diet of Hungarians, until today it absolutely dominates.

Hmmm... Viennese goulasch is a bit different than the gulyas we eat once you cross the border at Nickelsdorf. Viennese is more of a stew served alongside spaetzl, and I think that the "goulash" known in the US and Germany probably comes from the Viennese version. Hungarians never add flour or use garlic and caraway. Czech goulash is similar - served with steamed bread dumplings. However, if you want to rile a Magyar, argue about goulash. They will tell you (and tell you, and tell you again) that gulays is a soup, and not the (delete one of any of seventy five Hungarian expletives) stuff they eat in Vienna. I have never seen bell peppers in any gulyas served in Hungary. I like 'em, but it would be like serving bell peppers in pumpkin pie for thanksgiving: the intended audience would not get the joke. Porkolt, however, is not gulyas, it is stew, made with little (west Hungarian) or no(Great Plains) added liquid. Bogracs gulyas is simply gulyas cooked in a bogracs (hanging kettle) for outdoor picnics, or served in cute little kettles in restaurants. Szekely porkolt is pork stew (onions, paprika, pork, I add water) to which chopped sauerkraut is added for the last half hour of cooking. "Csango" porkolt is some food writer's idea of doing the same using lamb, but Csangos (one of the Hungarian minority groups in Romania) never eat it, and I have never seen it on a menu. Actually, the Transylvanian Hungarian minority known as Csangos don't cook much with paprika but use strong garden herbs like tarragon a lot. "Szekely Porkolt" gets its name from a librarian named Szekely who used to request it at one particular Pest restaurant in the 1920s, and the name stuck. If there is any gulyas aesthetic, it is probably that "simpler is better."

I would agree with John Tseng. Downtown Budapest is filling up with expensive, yet howlingly mediocre resturants that depend on business lunches and tourists, which have actually edged out the rather good (but never michelin star level) older restaurants that had been there since the communist era. Food was actually better during the communist era - not as broad a choice, no tuna tatare to speak of - but meats and vegtables were notably better. Gundel is cute, but it is 90% attitude, history, and appearance and 10% chocolate crepes. Of course, it is very good, but none of my local friends consider it worth culinary hosannas. I live ten minutes walk from Gundels. There are three small, cheap family style eateries in my neighborhood I would immediately suggest for better Hungaruian food. One of my old employers put it well - he said the restauranty experience in Budapest followed the Russian model: it was where new money went to show off money. It is not about food, it is about expensive surroundings, mini skirted waitresses, and high tabs that will impress whoever you have taken out that night.

Quite simple, really. Saute onions in lard or oil. Add cubed beef to brown, and then add lots of paprika - lots of it. A bit of marjoram is also traditional. Now add beef stock and boil until beef is almost done. Add chopped potatoes and maybe (this is kind of new-agey) a carrot. Cook until done, eat with bread. I like to add egg and flour dropped dumplings (galushka) at the end, as well. Notice that there aren't any quantities mentioned. You can probably find quantities on the net. What you want is essentially a simple, rich red broth with meat and potatoes. Soup, not stew. I used to cook at a pub in Budapest and my recipe was the result of asking all the old guys and aunties that were hanging around in the afternoon how they liked their gulyas. Then I cooked up a batch according to the argument of the day. I used an entire cow spine for stock, though. It is getting hard to find an honest gulyas in restaurants in Budapest these days and the idea at our pub was to shame all the other restaurants into gulyas submission.

I remember having very good falafel sandwiches in Safed in 1993 - some family style place on the main drag. There were these silky slices of preserved lemon that were amazing. I have tried slicing Moroocoan style salted lemons to get the same effect at home, but no luck. Any idea abnout those lemons? Otherwise, as a dispalced New Yorker in Europe I still dream about Mamoun's on Bleeker street....

Chopped Liver hint: my Romanian Grandmother made it with olive oil instead of chicken fat (shmaltz). My family has a history of living to old age. This may be why. Also, add lots of black pepper. Incidentally, a lot of what American Ashkenazic Jews consider to be everyday food was pretty rare in East Europe. You didn't just walk into a kosher butcher shop and see a tray of chicken livers, as you might in Brooklyn. You bought a live chicken and the shochet slaughtered it for you, producing exactly one chicken liver. Add a heap of onions and hard boiled eggs and you had enough "gehakte leber" for a family to enjoy on bread as a treat. I gave a 95 year old Romanian Yiddish writer a gift of smoked salmon some years ago and he replied "Lox? I have heard about this!" This man and his wife generally dined on tea, cookies and buttered bread, with a meat soup for Friday night. There used to be a tradition of going to "Romanian" restuarants like Moskowitz and Lupowitz after attending Yiddish theater on Second Ave in the Lower East side. The food was what a Romanian immigrant Jew would dream of eating, not anything one ever ate in Romania. Check out Moskowitz and Lupowitz' menu Steak a la Kretchma???

I had some pigs ears yesterday for lunch at a chinese lunch counter here in Budapest. Boiled in soy, sliced, stir fried with greens, on top of a heap of rice. Delicious. In Hungary the meat from the pig's head - along with bits of boiled snout and ears - is available at the lunch counters at butchers' shops, but the ears usually go into head cheese.

Other suggestions: the Kehli in Obuda, and the Tabani Kakas at Attila ut 27 in Buda - great matzo ball soup, goose specialties, everything cooked in goose fat. For super sized portions the Szent Jupat at Moszkva ter (Dekan utca) - just don't get "garlic pork" - it uses nasty garlic powder.

Gundel is overrated, yes, but it is good if you are trying to impress diplomats or future in-laws. The Gundel is all about history, not really gastronomy. For Hungarian dishes you can get the same food - minus the anachronistically stiff waiters and the dinner jacket requirement - at almost any restaurant in town for 1/10 of the price. For "continental" you are better off at any of the French or Italian restaurants. They have a good wine list at Gundel's, though. For the price of a bottle of a good wine there you could book a tour of the wine regions around Villany or Tokaj, though. Bagolyvar is OK - just that. It is at least cheaper than the Gundel. The trick to good food in Budapest is to find places that are out of the center of town and are not dependant on microwaving everything to death. Other suggestions are the Fatal (means "wooden plate) downtown, the Castro Bistro on Raday Utca (serb specialties, but the best gulyas in town) and the Kadar Etkezde on Klauzal ter (open only for lunch, closed mondays and weekends). My favorite fish soup place (with honest hearty main courses and occaisuionally drunk waiters) is the Arany Hal Etterem (take the black 7 bus towards Bosnyak ter, get off at the corner of Thokoly and Amerikai utca after the railroad bridge. ) in my neighborhood, Zuglo.

I was in Vienna a week ago, and Prague a week before that. Unless you want to eat sushi or fine French cuisine in a bistro filled with nouveau super-riche Russian mafia, remember that these local cuisines are not all that complicated (read: STODGE) and if you are willing to seek simple surroundings, not all that pricey. In Prague, simply get out of the center of town and the prices drop 60%. Hop on a metro and sit on the train for ten minutes and take your chances. The same goes for Vienna. I used to think Vienna was a poisonously expensive place to eat, but then I discovered the outer istricts. And then, after realizing that meat and potatoes at 7 Euros was a bit boring, I eat mostly turkish kebabs there when I am in town. Last week, I went with my girlfriend to a Turkish place near the Westbanhof, the waiter had trouble speaking German, just like me, so I ordered using my abominable "annual trip to Turkey" Turkish.... well, three of us ate a fine turkish meal - not a take out sandwich - at a table (soup, adanas kebab special plate, and beer) for 11 Euro. Total. They didn't charge us for beer and laughed when I pointed this out on the bill. Moral: learn bad Turkish and speak it in emmigrant Turkish communities. It works. For Budapest: simply don't eat downtown. The food is not better, simply more expensive, and if you don't know what good Magyar food is, it ain't found downtown. Look for "etkezde" (lunch places that close after lunch) for home cooking. Kadar Etkezde at Klauzal ter - go there day after day and eat lunch. Eat the stews sold for the workers at outdoor markets - best bean soups you can get. Szena ter is not bad, the Lehel ter market has a great cheap traditional old style self-service near the metro exit. The food stands at the Teleki ter vegetable market are the last place on earth where you can get roast piglet or goose with red cabbage and taters for under two Euros. Personally, I hit the chinese food at the huge outdoor "chinese markets" in the 8th district or on Beke utca - amazing real Vietnamese or northern Chinese (including Hui muslim chinese) lunch places for the Chinese who work the markets, usually 500 Forints a plate (2 Euro) and you simply tell them to pile whatever you want on the plate, it's all you can eat for 2 Euro. Hygene is Market style, though... doesn't bother me...

Shouldn't have to apologize to foodies. If you don't travel you don't taste the local food. Music and food hit me on the same level - they leave an impression on my mind of a place and it's flavors. I play a lot of differnt styles of music - Taraf style, Transylvanian village style, Klezmer - and each of these is imprinted with a gustatory sensation as well. Eating hot big-holed Moldavian bagels with an old Jewish fiddler. Discussing what my illiterate and obese Transylvanian Gypsy band friends could possibly find to eat while on tour in Japan (nikuchaga and katsu.) Chowing on lamb with Muslim gypsy bagpipers in Yambol. Best meal this last summer was in Ayder Yayla, eastern Black sea coast in Turkey. A whole village of itinerant Hemshin (Muslim Armenian) pastry bakers. I was pursuing bagpipers and one invited me to join the family meal: boiled garlicky goat followed by fried trout, followed by baklava with Kackar mountain "crazy" honey, and then do the whole meal over and over again. that said: Mamaliga (or coarse polenta) poured into a baking pan and covered with plum jam, castor sugar, and crushed walnuts... cool and slice. Bye bye Atkins diet...

Boris, I should mention that last summer I discovered a fantastic restaurant in the old city/downtown part of Varna - the name escapes me but my girlfriend wrote it down (in Japanese, as she is wont to do, so I can't read it until she gets back from Tokyo.) Just ask for the "folkoric" restaurant near the main square of the old city. One of Europe's best eateries, you can stuff yourself on well prepared regional food in a beautifully restored old style Bulgarian "Han" for ten bucks with good Thracian wine and raki included. We actually stayed three extra days in Varna just so we could keep eating there. Now, to be honest, one doesn't travel to Bulgaria for gourmandizing. Restaurant food tends to be much the same everywhere - roast meat, bad rice, cucumber and tomato sald, and truly horrible bread rolls. Kebabche meat (ground pork flavored with cumin) is formed into every concievable patty - sausage shaped, cutlet shaped, ball shaped - and gets a bit tiring after a week or two. It also often goes bad - a bout of food poisoning sent me to the emergency ward of Sofia Hospital a couple of years ago... not a pretty sight. I usually travel to Bulgaria each summer, after a couple of weeks in Maramures and Bukovina in northern Romania, where I go to learn Romanian style fiddle music - I'm a working musician. Once I get sick of hanging around playing with the amazing village fiddlers and eating only corn meal mamaliga and potatoes and getting fleas for weeks I catch the 6 am train from Suceava, change at Bucharest, switch trains again at Ruse, and I am in Varna at 8 pm (all those trains end up costing about $20). We get a private room for six Euros, and have a nice 3 Euro fish dinner at one of the many restaurants on the Black Sea beaches ten minutes from downtown. Afterwards it's baklava, turkish style coffee and raki at the cafes. Varna - of all the Black Sea towns and resorts - is the greatest undiscovered and amazingly inexpensive beach vacation in Europe. I'll be back there in August.

Actually, Hungarian szilva gomboc (plum dumplings) sound like the plum confections you are mentioning. Very easy to make. Sounds like a lot of work but if you have old mashed potatos and plums lying around you can have it on the table in half an hour. Take cold mashed potatos. Add some flour and an egg or two to make a stiff dough. Chill. Now pit some small plums. Replace pit with a sugar cube and some cinnamon. Now Take some potato dough and cover the plum so you have a dumpling ball the size of an... i don't know... maybe the size of an apricot. Drop the potato dough/plum balls in salted boiling water, simmer for five to ten minutes. Remove from water. The longer you boil them the softer the plum gets. Have on hand fine breadcrumbs sauted to brown in a lot of butter. Roll the boiled dumplings in the hot buttery crumbs, the shake on sugar. Eat. And eat. And eat.

Zdravo Boris! Speaking of Bulgaria, anybody ever get a hankering for those good old communist-era style Balkan sweets? Spongecakes and cremes drenched in fake rum aroma sugar syrup as if they were baklava? I go to Romania and Bulgaria quite a lot and I do overindulge. The Central Teras in Cluj is a good example. About twenty cakes, all variations on the "soak it in rum syrup" theme. In Varna and Balchik last summer during the heat wave there were days I existed on nothing else but cakes, coffee and beer. And maybe a bit of raki. And banitsa for breakfast. Banitsa is the Bulgarian cheese pastry - like a Turkish borek, but more filling and dryer. Not sweet, it is great straight from the bakery. Once it cools it tastes like a brown paper bag, but fresh they are great!

Dobos torta with less than seven layers would be like alcohol free beer. But most people do not make their own cakes - there is a pastry shop on the corner and you buy them there. While consumer items in Hungary are no longer "cheap" cakes still are. Usually, if I am going to visit my aunt I will stop near her bus stop and buy about five different slices - usually a Black Forest cake, an Eszterthazy (nut and creme), a slice of dobos, and a couple of Krémes (this is what Homer Simpson would dream about if he were Magyar) My aunt managed a restaurant for fifteen years so she would complain that the dobos just isn't what it used to be... On a lighter note, palacsinta stands and tiny streetside strudel shops are making quite a comback, after having dissappeared during the mid 1990s.

Living in Budapest one tends to take great pastries for granted. My favorite is the Sutemény Bolt (Cookie Store) at Oktagon Square. Can't argue with chocolate kuglof the size of a football for 75 US cents. The best cakes are at Perity (pronounced Perich) next to the Kossuth Mozi (movie) near Nyugati Train station. This is the same Perity that used to have a stand up pastry shop on Andrassy ut near the famed Muvész Kavezó - they supplied the Muvész' pastries, and still do from their kitchen. If you are a tourist, don't miss the Muvész, but the real coffee house culture is across the street at the Eckerman Kavezó, in the German Cultural Institute - no pastries to speak of, but all the art, film, and music scene drifts in for coffee, newspapers, art journal reading and networking in the late afternoon, just the way coffee culture in Hungary is supposed to work. Being of the Hebrew persuasion, I love to hang out at Frohlichs bakey on Dob utca in the 7th district Jewish ghetto. It's the last kosher bakery in a town that once had dozens of them. They serve great coffee with local specialties such as "flodni" - an apple-nut-poppyseed crumb cake traditional to Hungarian Jews. As far as strudels go, I am really spoiled. We get them fresh at the metro or bus stations for about 60 cents. Cherry, apple, cheese, or sweet cabbage. You either cram them in your face on the bus or take them home. Nobody really makes a big deal about rétes (strudel). All these delicacies come with a price - I paid it and now I have had to go on Atkins. But no problem: check out the spanking new "Csoda Suti" bakery on Dob utca in the ghetto! Sugar free, diabetic friendly and low carb pasties, with one small table so you can chow down right there. Everything has carbs and calories posted for all to see. And they actually taste good!