About 40 minutes by bus from Budapest, Hungary is a colorful town named Szentendre. Situated right on the Danube River, this village is laid out over cobblestone streets where brightly painted storefronts and houses offer tourists charm and entertainment.
While we were visiting Szentendre, our tour took us to the Szabadtéri Néprajzi Muzeum (The Hungary Open Air Museum), established in 1967, to illustrate the typical country life of Hungarian folk.
When our group of about 30 people arrived, the museum’s guide gathered us around long wooden tables, arranged under a wooden pavilion outside. A tiny fire was burning in a pit near the front of the pavillion, and, on the flame, rested an old dented black cast iron pot.
A guide, dressed in old jeans and a button-down shirt with holes in the elbows, sauntered up in front of the group with his hands deep in his pockets. “My name is Taksony. I’m going to supervise you in cooking a pot of the national Hungarian dish known as goulash.” He took his hands out of his pockets, grabbed a thick gray potholder, lifted the cast iron pot off the fire, and set it on the dirt in front of him.
I hadn’t washed my hands when I got off the bus. No one had, and we were going to cook something? I wrinkled my nose.
“The word goulash,” he said, “comes from the ancient Hungarian word gulyás, which means herdsmen or cowboys. People out in the country made goulash from whatever beef, vegetables, and spices they had on hand. Since paprika is widely grown in Hungary, it became the favored spice for the dish.”
Each person had a knife on the table in front of them. Mine was a small paring knife with a worn wooden handle and dull blade. I thought about the sharp knives I had at home to slice, chop, mince, and quarter my vegetables. This frail little blade didn’t look too promising. I looked over at the knife in front of my husband. His was longer than mine, but so skinny that it didn’t seem to be useful either.
Girls in gathered skirts wandered around the long wooden tables and gave each of us a vegetable to chop. I was given a tomato and my husband was given a pepper, the likes of which I’d never seen at home. Our vegetables sat right on top of the wooden table tops, which contained knife marks from hundreds of lessons in making goulash. Was this sanitary?
By the time we all got our vegetables—onions, tomatoes, potatoes, or peppers—the guide was cutting off a piece of lard into the cast iron pot.
“I’m going to brown the beef first.” He put the pot back on top of the fire and the lard sizzled as it heated up.
“Who wants to be an assistant?” Taksony asked, and he pointed to a man from our group who was over six-feet tall and wore a grin that lit up his face. “What’s your name, sir?” Taksony asked him.
“Richard,” said the man with the bright grin.
“I need you to dump these cubes of beef in the lard and stir them until they get brown. Don’t let them burn!”
Taksony gave Richard a long-handled wooden spoon and the bowl of beef. We watched Richard dump the beef into the pot and jump back as the lard hissed and sputtered. He began to stir.
“What’s your name, miss?” Taksony asked a sixty-year-old woman in a yellow sun dress. He waved her up to the front next to Richard.
“Carol,” she said, biting her lip. Her hands were tightly clenched in front of her.
“Carol, here’s the garlic and paprika. Please count out six cloves of garlic and put them in the pot. Take the paprika and spoon in 4 heaping tablespoons.”
Carol bent over the bowl of garlic that Taksony was holding and counted. She tossed six heads into the pot. He handed her the canister of paprika and a measuring spoon. She pried off the lid, gave it to Taksony, then heaped the dark red powder onto the spoon four times and tipped it into the mixture.
“The meat is burning, Richard! Here, take it off the fire with this.” Taksony gave Richard the pot holder. Richard lifted the pot by its handle and placed it on the ground.
Taksony bent over the pot and whistled. “Saved it. Now keep stirring,” he said to Richard. “Carol, you can go back to your table.”
The guide looked out at all of us. “O.K. Cut your vegetables into slices.
I took my old paring knife into my right hand, the tomato in my left hand, and attempted to slice it. The blade barely made a mark in the tomato’s skin, it was so dull, but I persevered. Finally, after using the point of the knife to poke holes into the skin, I managed to create slices, the juice of the tomato oozing into the wood of the table top.
My right-handed husband was holding his knife in his left hand and staring at his four-inch yellow pepper as if it were a venomous snake. His giant basket-ball-sized hands floated in the air in front of his chest.
“Cut it,” I said.
“I don’t know how,” he said. “A deep furrow appeared between his eyebrows. “This is a knife. I only know how to use a microwave.”
“You can do it,” I replied as sweetly as I could manage while thinking what a complete idiot he was.
His hands kept floating in front of his chest like he was swimming the dog-paddle.
“No. You do it for me, honey. You’re so good at cooking.” He gave me his knife and rolled the pepper towards my tomato slices.
“Fine,” I said, looking quickly around to see what all the other men in our group were doing. I didn’t see anyone else handing his knife over to his wife. They were all bent over their tomatoes, onions, potatoes, and peppers and diligently stabbing their food with worn-out knives. Geez.
I admired the four-inch little pepper before attempting to cut it, and then used my husband’s skinny little knife to slice the pepper into several rounds. I didn’t remove the seeds since no one had mentioned anything about that. When I was done, I used the knife to push the pepper slices back over in front of my husband. Nobody seemed to notice that we cheated.
The girls in long, gathered skirts came to each of us and scraped our vegetables off the top of the wooden tables into large bowls. They took them over to Taksony who ladled them into the cast iron pot and placed it over the fire again.
“Richard, keep stirring.” Richard bent his tall frame over the smoking fire and stirred the vegetables into the meat mixture. I could smell the toasty aroma of the paprika as he stirred while I thought about all the germs swirling around the spoon.
“This is going to take awhile to cook,” said Taksony, so you guys can go wander around the open-air museum to see what a country village in Hungary once looked like. Come back in forty-five minutes to eat lunch.” He waved his hands to shoo us out of the pavilion.
Wiping our hands with the little sanitary wipes we were given, we wandered out into the dirt roads to view the church, the mill, the knitting house, the store, the bakery, and the cottages where villagers lived. Since we were all hungry, however, in forty-five minutes, we were back in the pavilion ready to eat.
Taksony showed us into a room filled with newer wooden tables with benches. We sat down side by side and poured lemonade into our glasses from pitchers on the table. The girls in the swishing skirts brought baskets of coarse bread and placed them in the center of the long tables, one basket at about every two feet. Then they carried steaming bowls of goulash in flat bowls and placed them in front of each person. My mouth watered as I hoped that all the germs in the pot had evaporated in the heat. I squeezed my eyes shut.
Heat did kill germs, didn’t they? I hoped so. Nevertheless, I thought I’d ask a question.
Taksony was standing at the front of the room watching the girls bring out the bowls of goulash. I raised my hand. He nodded at me to indicate I had his attention.
“Are we eating the goulash that we made out in the pavilion?” I asked, trying not to wrinkle my nose. I glanced down at my bowl, trying to reassure myself that the cooking process had surely eliminated any dangerous microorganisms.
“Oh, no!” said Taksony, chuckling. “We gave that pot to the pigs.”
“Thank goodness,” I said, dipping my spoon into the delicious-smelling concoction in front of me. I immediately imagined the pigs eagerly scarfing up the national dish of Hungary. I bet they liked it.
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