Hungary: Paprika and Protest
Hungary: Paprika and Protest
Hungary sits in the heart of Central Europe, a land of wide plains, river-crossed cities, and a history that reads less like a fever chart. For a thousand years it has been conquered, liberated, partitioned, rebuilt, and shaken again, yet somehow, it endures, carrying its memories in stone fortresses, folk songs, and bowls of paprika-red stew.
The medieval Kingdom of Hungary once stretched across the Carpathian Basin, powerful enough to challenge popes, emperors, and invading armies. But the peasantry, who tilled the land under heavy feudal burdens, lived a very different story. When the cracks finally split open in 1514, after years of taxes, serfdom, and noble privilege, a massive peasant army rose in a fiery, brutal revolt. It failed, but it marked the first great rupture between rulers and ruled, and it left a wound that never fully healed.
Over the next centuries Hungary became a borderland of empires: Ottoman, Habsburg, Soviet, each leaving behind new classes of winners and new generations of dissenters. But the Hungarian spirit stubbornly refused to quiet. In 1848, inspired by revolutionary flames spreading across Europe, Hungarians staged their own great uprising demanding liberty, equality, and national independence. In the 1890s, as industrialization seized Budapest and rural poverty deepened, agrarian socialist strikes rattled the kingdom. By 1919, in the chaos after World War I and the empire’s collapse, Hungary briefly declared itself a Soviet Republic, one of the shortest-lived but most radical experiments in all of Europe.
The interwar period brought its own turmoil: authoritarian rule, deepening nationalism, and fierce antisemitism that reshaped life for Hungary’s vibrant Jewish communities just as urban cuisine was flourishing in cafés and apartment kitchens. Then came World War II, occupation, deportations, mass killings, and with it a quieter, grittier resistance. Housewives, partisans, factory workers, and students fought back however they could, sometimes with weapons, sometimes with smuggled rations or the simple courage of getting food to the hungry. After WWII, Hungary formed part of the borderlands of Europe’s Iron Curtain, and in the modern era, is one of the epicenters of the populist right-wing nationalist current challenging the EU.
Through every upheaval, Hungarian cuisine held the country together. This post follows that story, dish by dish.
We begin with Nokedli, those humble, hand-scraped dumplings that fed peasants during the 1514 Dózsa-led Peasant Revolt, a moment when centuries of exploitation finally boiled over.
Then Goulash, the national stew of herdsmen and revolutionaries alike, simmering through the 1848 Revolution and War of Independence, when poets, workers, and soldiers fought to break free of Habsburg rule.
With Chicken Paprikash, we move into the Agrarian Socialist Strikes of the 1890s, a time when paprika-heavy home cooking sustained rural workers pushing back against landlords and poverty wages.
Next comes Pörkölt, rich and slow-cooked, tied to the brief, explosive moment of the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic, when the promise of equality flickered before being crushed.
We then turn to Hungarian Mushroom Soup, a dish deeply rooted in Jewish urban cuisine, framed by the shadows of interwar antisemitism in the 1920s–1930s, when Budapest’s cafés, kitchens, and markets became both cultural havens and sites of exclusion.
And finally, Lángos, the fried bread that became a lifeline during the Hungarian wartime resistance of 1944–1945, when resourcefulness meant survival and simple dough went far.
So ready your paprika, its time to explore Hungary’s history and cuisine.
Nokedli: Dumplings of Endurance
Nokedli, small, irregular dumplings made from flour, eggs, water, and salt, are among the most unassuming foods in Central Europe. They are not shaped, stuffed, or gilded. They are dropped by hand into boiling water, torn from batter with a spoon or fingers, cooked quickly, and eaten hot. In Hungary, nokedli became a staple not because it was celebrated, but because it was necessary. It stretched grain and eggs into something filling enough to endure long days of labor. Long before it was paired with chicken paprikash or browned in butter, nokedli belonged to the rural poor: to peasants who worked other men’s land, paid other men’s taxes, and lived at the mercy of forces they did not control. In 1514, those peasants rose up.
The Kingdom of Hungary emerged in the year 1000 with the coronation of Stephen I, a Christian monarch who bound the Magyar tribes into a feudal, European kingdom aligned with Rome. Over the next five centuries, Hungary became a large and strategically vital state, stretching across the Carpathian Basin. Its wealth rested on agriculture: grain, cattle, and wine flowed from peasant labor into noble coffers and foreign markets. In theory, Hungarian peasants were not slaves; they held plots of land and owed obligations rather than absolute bondage. In practice, those obligations grew heavier with each generation. By the late medieval period, the nobility had consolidated power through the Diet, controlled the courts, and exempted themselves from most taxes. Peasants, meanwhile, paid rents, tithes to the Church, labor dues to landlords, and extraordinary levies whenever war loomed. Their diet reflected this imbalance. Meat was rare. Wheat bread was precious. Dishes like nokedli, cheap, filling, adaptable, kept people alive when surplus vanished upward.
The 15th century brought mounting strain. Hungary stood as a frontier kingdom against the expanding Ottoman Empire. Continuous military pressure demanded soldiers, fortifications, and money. Kings increasingly relied on noble levies rather than standing armies, reinforcing aristocratic privilege while passing costs downward. After the death of the powerful King Matthias Corvinus in 1490, royal authority weakened. The nobility guarded its rights jealously, the peasantry bore the burden, and the state drifted toward paralysis. By the early 1500s, Hungary was a kingdom where many starved so that a few could remain powerful, and where resentment simmered just below the surface, like dumplings swelling in boiling water.
The spark came in 1514, not as a social revolution, but as a holy war. Pope Leo X called for a crusade against the Ottomans, and Cardinal Tamás Bakócz was authorized to organize it in Hungary. The task of recruiting fell largely on György Dózsa, a minor noble and soldier with a reputation for bravery. Tens of thousands of peasants answered the call. For many, it was the first time they had left their villages. They gathered with crude weapons, pikes, scythes, and clubs, sustained by whatever food they could carry or forage. It is easy to imagine pots of nokedli boiling over campfires: flour scraped together, eggs taken from village hens, batter mixed quickly and shared communally.
The crusade quickly unraveled. Landowners, alarmed at the loss of labor during planting season, demanded that peasants return home. Violence erupted as nobles tried to forcibly disband the peasant bands. What began as frustration turned into rage. The crusaders, already armed and organized, refused to submit. Under Dózsa’s leadership, the movement transformed into a full-scale peasant revolt. Manors were attacked. Tax records were burned. Nobles and clergy, symbols of exploitation, were captured and executed. The rebellion spread rapidly across the Great Hungarian Plain, fueled by decades of grievance and the sudden realization of collective power.
Dózsa became a messianic figure, whether he sought that role or not. He spoke of justice, of punishment for cruelty, of a moral reckoning long overdue. The peasants rallied behind him not as abstract revolutionaries, but as people who had been pushed past endurance. Their lives had been shaped by scarcity: by meals built from grain and water, by foods like nokedli that filled the stomach but never promised comfort. Now, that same frugality sustained them as they marched and fought. The revolt was not an ideological blueprint; it was hunger, humiliation, and anger given form.
The Hungarian nobility responded with overwhelming force. Led by János Zápolya, the voivode of Transylvania, noble armies crushed the poorly equipped peasant bands one by one. By July 1514, the rebellion was broken. Dózsa was captured and subjected to one of the most infamous executions in European history. He was seated on a heated iron throne, crowned with a red-hot iron diadem, and slowly burned alive, punished as a “false king” who dared to challenge the social order. His followers were forced to partake in his execution, a deliberate act of terror meant to scar the peasantry into submission.
The aftermath was swift and brutal. The Hungarian Diet codified peasant subjugation into law through the Tripartitum, which formally bound peasants to the land, increased labor obligations, and stripped them of mobility. Where the revolt had briefly cracked the feudal system, the response sealed it shut more tightly than before. The countryside fell silent, not because injustice ended, but because resistance had been made unbearable. Peasant life narrowed again to survival: to planting, harvesting, paying dues, and eating whatever could be made from little.
In the decades that followed, Hungary would pay dearly for this internal fracture. A weakened, divided kingdom could not withstand Ottoman expansion. In 1526, just twelve years after the revolt, Hungary suffered catastrophic defeat at the Battle of Mohács. The medieval kingdom collapsed, partitioned between Ottoman, Habsburg, and semi-independent rule. The nobility’s victory over the peasants proved hollow. The social order they defended so viciously could not save the state itself.
Nokedli is a simple dish. But, its the perfect pairing to many of the other dishes in this series.
Nokedli (Hungarian Dumplings)
Serves: 6
Prep Time: 15 min
Cook Time: 10 min
Ingredients:
375 g (3 cups) all-purpose flour
3 large eggs
180–240 ml (¾–1 cup) water (start with 180 ml / ¾ cup, add more as needed for thick, sticky batter)
1½ tsp salt
2–3 tbsp butter or oil (for tossing)
Instructions:
In a bowl, whisk eggs with salt.
Gradually add flour, mixing until incorporated.
Slowly pour in water until batter is thick and sticky (like thick pancake batter).
Bring a large pot of salted water to a boil.
Using a spätzle maker, large-holed colander, or spoon/scraper, drop small portions of batter into boiling water.
Cook 2–3 minutes until dumplings float to the surface.
Remove with slotted spoon, drain well, and toss immediately with butter or oil to prevent sticking.
Serve hot (traditionally with stews like paprikash or goulash).
Goulash: Stew of the Nation
Goulash, or gulyás, began not as a national dish but as a way of surviving the open plains. It was the food of gulyások, cattle herdsmen who drove vast gray Hungarian oxen across the Great Plain. These men lived outdoors for weeks at a time, carrying little more than dried meat, onions, salt, and whatever fat they could spare. Everything was cooked in a single iron cauldron over an open fire. Meat was cut small, onions softened in fat, water added, and the stew left to simmer slowly. Paprika, now inseparable from goulash, arrived later, spreading through Hungary in the 18th century after the Ottoman withdrawal, transforming the dish’s color and character. Goulash was practical, communal, and deeply tied to the land. It fed working people long before it fed symbols.
After the catastrophe of Mohács in 1526, the indirect consequence of the social fractures laid bare by the crushed peasant revolt of 1514, Hungary ceased to exist as a unified state. The kingdom was partitioned into three parts: central Hungary fell under Ottoman rule; the western and northern territories were absorbed by the Habsburgs as Royal Hungary; and Transylvania existed as a semi-independent principality. For more than 150 years, Hungary was a frontier zone, bled by war, depopulated by occupation, and ruled largely from elsewhere. When the Ottomans were finally pushed out at the end of the 17th century, Hungary did not regain sovereignty. Instead, it became firmly integrated into the Habsburg Empire, its lands intact, but its political agency sharply constrained.
The 18th century brought stability of a sort, but not equality. Hungarian nobles retained their privileges, tax exemption, control over local administration, dominance of the Diet, while peasants remained bound by labor obligations that echoed the post-1514 settlement. Serfdom persisted. The Habsburgs governed Hungary as a crown land, exploiting its agricultural output while limiting its political autonomy. German increasingly dominated administration and high culture, while Hungarian was sidelined as a provincial tongue. The countryside remained poor, conservative, and burdened; the cities grew slowly; and the memory of lost sovereignty lingered like an unresolved grievance.
It was during this period that goulash began to change meaning. Still a peasant dish, it nonetheless traveled, served at rural fairs, roadside inns, and military camps. Soldiers of the imperial army encountered it, carried it with them, and associated it with Hungary itself. Paprika, once dismissed as coarse and rustic, became fashionable among reform-minded nobles who deliberately embraced Hungarian customs as an act of cultural defiance. To eat goulash was increasingly to make a statement: this is ours.
By the early 19th century, Hungary stood at a crossroads. Across Europe, Enlightenment ideas, nationalism, and liberal reform challenged old empires. In Hungary, a new generation of nobles, intellectuals, and professionals began demanding change, not revolution at first, but reform. This period, known as the Reform Era (roughly 1825–1848), sought to modernize Hungary from within: abolish serfdom, establish legal equality, promote Hungarian language and culture, and loosen Habsburg control. Figures like István Széchenyi advocated gradual reform, believing Hungary must modernize economically and culturally before demanding political independence. Others, like Lajos Kossuth, pushed harder, arguing that without political sovereignty, reform would always be limited.
Food became part of this cultural revival. Hungarian language cookbooks appeared. Traditional dishes were codified, named, and celebrated. Goulash, once dismissed as rustic peasant fare, was elevated deliberately. It appeared at nationalist banquets and public gatherings. Its very simplicity, meat, onions, paprika, cooked together, mirrored the nationalist ideal of unity across class lines. Unlike court cuisine or aristocratic excess, goulash could belong to everyone.
Tensions escalated in the 1840s. The Habsburg Empire was financially strained, politically rigid, and increasingly out of step with its diverse populations. Hungary’s demands for autonomy clashed with Vienna’s insistence on centralized control. Meanwhile, industrialization lagged, crop failures worsened rural hardship, and censorship stifled dissent. When revolutions erupted across Europe in 1848, first in Paris, then Vienna, the spark reached Hungary almost immediately.
In March 1848, crowds gathered in Pest, inspired by news of revolution in Austria. Led by poets, students, and reformers, including Sándor Petőfi and Lajos Kossuth, they issued the Twelve Points, demanding freedom of the press, representative government, equality before the law, and an end to serfdom. Crucially, they demanded a Hungarian government responsible to a Hungarian parliament. The Habsburg court, reeling from unrest elsewhere, initially conceded. A Hungarian ministry was formed. Serfdom was abolished. For the first time in centuries, the descendants of the peasants crushed in 1514 were legally free.
But freedom on paper did not mean peace in practice. Hungary was a multiethnic land; Magyars, Croats, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, and many non-Magyar groups feared Magyar dominance as much as Habsburg rule. Vienna exploited these divisions. As Hungary moved toward autonomy, imperial authorities encouraged ethnic revolts against the new government. What began as a constitutional revolution slid toward war.
By late 1848, open conflict erupted between Hungarian forces and the Habsburg army. The revolution radicalized. Kossuth emerged as its dominant figure, calling not merely for reform, but for independence. A national army, the Honvéd, was raised, composed of peasants, artisans, former serfs, and students. Many had known hunger. Many had eaten goulash in villages and camps long before they wore uniforms. Now the same cauldrons followed them into war.
The War of Independence was brutal and surprisingly successful, at first. Hungarian forces scored victories against imperial troops. For a brief moment in 1849, Hungary declared full independence, dethroning the Habsburgs. It was the boldest assertion of Hungarian sovereignty since the Middle Ages. But the empire would not allow it to stand. Unable to defeat Hungary alone, Austria called on Tsar Nicholas I of Russia. In the summer of 1849, a massive Russian army crossed the Carpathians. The revolution was crushed under sheer weight.
The aftermath was severe. Executions, imprisonments, exile. Thirteen Hungarian generals were executed at Arad; Prime Minister Lajos Batthyány was shot in Pest. Hungary was placed under military rule. The promises of 1848 seemed buried alongside its leaders. Yet something irreversible had occurred. Serfdom was gone. National consciousness had been awakened. Hungary could be defeated, but not unimagined.
Hungary would not achieve independence in 1848. That would come, partially, in 1867, through compromise rather than victory. But the revolution left behind something deeper than borders or constitutions. It created a national culture that could survive defeat.
Goulash is hearty, delicious, and classic. Try it out!
Hungarian Goulash
Serves: 6
Prep Time: 20 min
Cook Time: 2½ hours
Ingredients:
900 g (2 lbs) beef chuck, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 tbsp vegetable oil
2 large onions, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 tbsp Hungarian sweet paprika
1 tsp caraway seeds (optional)
1 red bell pepper, diced
2 medium tomatoes, chopped (or 240 ml / 1 cup canned)
2 medium carrots, sliced
2 medium potatoes, cubed
1 liter (4 cups) beef broth
1 bay leaf
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh parsley, chopped (for garnish)
Instructions:
Heat oil in large pot over medium-high. Brown beef in batches; set aside.
Sauté onions in same pot until golden (8 min). Add garlic; cook 1 min.
Off heat, stir in paprika and caraway (if using).
Add bell pepper, tomatoes, carrots, potatoes, and browned beef.
Pour in broth, add bay leaf, salt, and pepper. Bring to boil, then simmer covered 2–2½ hours until beef is tender.
Remove bay leaf. Garnish with parsley.
Serve hot with crusty bread, noodles, or nokedli.
Chicken Paprikash: Simmering Hunger
Chicken paprikash itself was a relatively late arrival in Hungarian cuisine. Paprika had long been used in stews and soups, but the combination of chicken, onions, paprika, and sour cream reflects the 19th century, when paprika became industrialized and dairy production expanded. Earlier peasant cooking relied on lard, onions, and whatever meat was available, often pork scraps or offal. Chicken was valuable livestock: it laid eggs, reproduced quickly, and could be sold or traded. To slaughter one was a small luxury. Paprikash, then, was not an everyday meal for the rural poor. It was aspirational; a “proper” dish, signaling modest comfort and dignity rather than mere survival.
That distinction mattered in post-1848 Hungary. The revolution had abolished serfdom, but it did not abolish inequality. When the Habsburgs crushed the War of Independence in 1849, they ruled Hungary directly for nearly two decades. Political repression followed, but economic transformation did too. Peasants were legally free, yet land ownership remained deeply unequal. Former serfs often received little or no land; many became day laborers on the same estates they once worked under feudal obligation. Freedom meant wages now, but wages that barely sustained life.
The Compromise of 1867 changed Hungary’s political position but not its social foundations. Austria-Hungary was born, granting Hungary internal autonomy, its own parliament, and control over domestic affairs. The Magyar elite regained power, language, and prestige. Budapest modernized rapidly, railways expanded, banks flourished, and Hungary integrated more tightly into European markets. From the perspective of the ruling classes, this was national resurrection.
From the countryside, it looked different.
Hungary became increasingly agricultural within the Dual Monarchy, supplying grain, livestock, and specialty crops to the empire. The Great Plain, Alföld, was transformed into an export-oriented engine. Paprika cultivation expanded dramatically in the southern plains around Szeged and Kalocsa, shifting from household gardens to mass production. Mills processed it, merchants exported it, and paprika became a national symbol, marketed as distinctly Hungarian. Yet the people planting, harvesting, drying, and grinding it remained desperately poor.
By the 1870s and 1880s, Hungary’s rural class structure hardened. Large estates dominated the countryside, owned by nobles and bourgeois landowners who embraced capitalist agriculture. Beneath them were millions of landless laborers, agrárproletárok, who owned no land at all. They worked seasonally, migrating from estate to estate, paid in meager wages, often supplemented by food rations barely better than those of the old serf days. Bad harvests meant hunger. Good harvests meant profits for others.
This was the Hungary in which chicken paprikash took on symbolic weight. Paprika was everywhere, grown by the poor, processed by the poor, defining the national palate, yet chicken remained scarce on their tables. Sour cream, too, marked a boundary between mere subsistence and modest comfort. Paprikash represented what rural workers were told Hungary had become: prosperous, modern, national. But it also revealed the contradiction, those who made the nation’s wealth could rarely afford its representative dish.
By the late 19th century, pressure built toward explosion. Industrial workers in Budapest and other cities had begun organizing earlier, influenced by socialist movements spreading across Europe. Rural Hungary followed later, but when it did, it did so with ferocity. The agricultural laborers of the Great Plain lived under conditions that combined feudal remnants with capitalist exploitation. They had no job security, no land, no political power, and no protection against abuse. Seasonal unemployment meant starvation. Landowners controlled housing, wages, and sometimes even local authorities.
The epicenter of resistance became the Viharsarok, the “Stormy Corner”, a region in southeastern Hungary encompassing Békés, Csanád, and parts of Csongrád counties. This was fertile land, intensely cultivated, and intensely unequal. It was also where paprika production thrived. Here, socialist organizers found fertile ground not just for crops, but for ideas.
Agrarian socialism in Hungary was not theoretical. It was born from hunger. Rural workers demanded higher wages, shorter working days, guaranteed employment during the agricultural season, and, above all, human dignity. They organized strikes, marches, and mass meetings, often illegal under Hungarian law. Landowners responded with firings, evictions, blacklists, and violence. The state, dominated by landowning interests, sent gendarmes.
The strikes of the 1890s erupted in waves. In 1891, tens of thousands of agricultural workers went on strike across the Great Plain. They refused harvest work unless wages increased. Fields stood idle. Crops rotted. The state panicked, not because it sympathized with the workers, but because the entire export economy depended on their labor. Repression followed swiftly. Meetings were banned. Leaders were arrested. Troops were deployed.
Yet the movement did not vanish. It returned repeatedly throughout the decade, each time larger, better organized, more politically conscious. By the mid-1890s, agrarian socialism had become a permanent feature of Hungarian politics. Workers sang socialist songs, carried red flags, and articulated a radical truth: emancipation without material security was hollow.
Chicken paprikash hovered over these struggles as an unspoken demand. Not luxury, just adequacy. The workers did not ask for banquets. They asked for wages that could put meat in the pot occasionally, for the right to share in the abundance they produced. Paprikash symbolized that threshold: the moment when survival becomes life.
The state’s response hardened. After 1897, repression intensified. Strike leaders were jailed or forced into exile. Rural socialist newspapers were shut down. The ruling elite framed agrarian socialism as a threat to order, nation, and property. Hungary, they insisted, had been reborn in 1867; to question its social structure was unpatriotic. Paprika could be national; the people who grew it were not allowed to challenge the nation built atop their backs.
The immediate aftermath of the strikes was defeat, but not erasure. Wages rose slightly in some regions. Organization persisted underground. More importantly, a rural working-class identity had been forged. The myth that Hungary was a harmonious nation of peasants and nobles dissolved. The countryside was political now.
Of these dishes, chicken paprikash may be my favorite. The combination of flavors of paprika and sour cream hits so well here.
Chicken Paprikash
Serves: 4–6 (scaled from original 4)
Prep Time: 15 min
Cook Time: 45 min
Ingredients:
1.3–1.5 kg (3 lbs) chicken thighs (bone-in, skin-on)
3 tbsp vegetable oil
2 large onions, finely chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 tbsp Hungarian sweet paprika
240 ml (1 cup) chicken broth (plus more if needed)
240 ml (1 cup) sour cream
1–2 tbsp all-purpose flour
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh parsley, chopped (for garnish)
Egg noodles or nokedli (for serving)
Instructions:
Season chicken with salt and pepper. Heat oil in large skillet; brown chicken on both sides (6–8 min). Remove and set aside.
Sauté onions until soft (5 min). Add garlic; cook 1 min.
Off heat, stir in paprika. Add broth, scraping browned bits.
Return chicken to skillet. Cover and simmer 30–35 min until cooked through.
Mix sour cream with flour. Temper with hot sauce from pan, then stir into skillet.
Heat gently (do not boil). Adjust seasoning.
Serve over noodles or nokedli, garnished with parsley.
Pörkölt (Hungarian Stew): The Reduction of Revolution
Pörkölt 18th and early 19th centuries alongside goulash, part of the same family of paprika-forward stews that defined Hungarian cooking as paprika cultivation spread across the Great Plain. But while goulash retained a soup-like character suited to herdsmen and travelers, pörkölt thickened into something more static and domestic. It was cooked slowly at home, often from tougher cuts of beef or pork, sometimes chicken, sometimes whatever scraps could be spared. The defining feature was not abundance but concentration, making the most of little. It was food for peasants, laborers, and soldiers, eaten with bread or nokedli, filling the stomach and demanding nothing ornamental in return. By the turn of the 20th century, pörkölt had become deeply embedded in working-class life. Pörkölt is simple survival, and in 1919 Hungary, simple survival mattered.
The 1890s strikes had failed to overturn the rural order, but they left behind something more dangerous to the state than disruption: memory. Agricultural workers remembered that they could act collectively. They remembered the gendarmes, the arrests, the blacklists. They also remembered the slight concessions wrung from landowners who feared losing entire harvests. By 1900, Hungary was a country outwardly stable and inwardly brittle. The land question remained unresolved. Large estates still dominated. Millions remained landless. Seasonal hunger persisted. Industrialization pulled some workers into Budapest and other cities, but it did not absorb the countryside’s surplus labor. Hungary was modernizing, but unevenly, and that unevenness would define its collapse.
Politically, Hungary was trapped inside the Dual Monarchy. The Compromise of 1867 had restored Hungarian self-rule, but only within an imperial framework that constrained true sovereignty. The ruling Magyar elite dominated parliament through restricted suffrage and electoral manipulation. Nationalism was their language of legitimacy, but nationalism offered little to those who could not eat it. For rural laborers and urban workers alike, the state increasingly appeared as an enforcer of property rather than a protector of life.
Social democracy grew in the cities, agrarian socialism lingered in the countryside, and radical ideas moved between them. By the 1910s, Hungary had a politically conscious working class without political power, and a peasantry without land. This was an unstable equilibrium, but it took catastrophe to break it.
That catastrophe arrived in 1914.
World War I placed unbearable strain on Hungarian society. Millions of men were conscripted, leaving farms understaffed and families vulnerable. Food shortages worsened. Inflation devoured wages. Pörkölt, the food of the poor, was stretched with more onions, and smaller cuts of meat. The state requisitioned grain and livestock, often brutally. Paprika fields still produced, but bread grew scarce. By 1917 and 1918, hunger was widespread. Women queued for hours for rations. Soldiers deserted. Strikes returned, now in factories as well as fields. The war radicalized Hungary not through ideology, but through deprivation.
When the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in late 1918, Hungary was suddenly alone. The old order disintegrated almost overnight. Emperor Charles abdicated. A short-lived democratic republic was declared under Mihály Károlyi, who promised land reform, peace, and democracy. But the state was weak, the economy shattered, and foreign armies pressed in from all sides. Romania, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia laid claim to Hungarian territory. The Allies demanded further concessions. Károlyi’s government hesitated, negotiated, and delayed, while hunger deepened and hope evaporated.
For many workers and soldiers, the moderate republic felt like another broken promise. Land reform stalled. Factories closed. The army disintegrated. Into this vacuum stepped the communists.
In March 1919, faced with an impossible ultimatum from the Allies and mounting unrest at home, Károlyi resigned. Power passed to a coalition dominated by the Communist Party, led by Béla Kun, who had returned from Russian captivity infused with Bolshevik ideas. Almost overnight, Hungary declared itself a Soviet Republic, the first outside Russia.
The Hungarian Soviet Republic was born not from abundance, but from desperation. Its leaders promised bread, land, and dignity. They nationalized factories, banks, and large estates. They proclaimed workers’ councils. They spoke the language of class rather than nation, of international solidarity rather than Magyar exceptionalism. For urban workers and some landless peasants, this was intoxicating. Produce, which was taken by the state and rationed prior to the end of the war, now found itself simmering in pörkölt in communal kitchens. For others, it was terrifying.
The Soviet Republic lasted only 133 days, but they were dense with contradiction. The regime abolished aristocratic titles and proclaimed equality, yet relied heavily on coercion. The Red Terror targeted counterrevolutionaries, real and imagined. Revolutionary tribunals replaced courts. Political opponents were imprisoned or executed. In the countryside, many peasants resisted collectivization, preferring land ownership to abstract proletarian unity. The communists, largely urban and intellectual, often misunderstood rural realities shaped by decades of broken promises.
Meanwhile, the Republic fought wars it could not win. The Red Army initially achieved successes against Czechoslovak forces, briefly restoring Hungarian pride. But Romanian troops advanced relentlessly from the east. Hungary was isolated internationally and economically strangled. By August 1919, the Soviet Republic collapsed. Béla Kun fled. Romanian forces occupied Budapest.
The aftermath was brutal.
The fall of the Soviet Republic unleashed the White Terror, led by Admiral Miklós Horthy and counterrevolutionary forces. Communists, socialists, Jews, and anyone associated with the revolution were persecuted. Thousands were killed or imprisoned. The old elites returned, chastened but intact. Hungary would soon become a kingdom without a king, ruled by a regent who embodied order, hierarchy, and revenge.
For the working poor, little improved. Land reform remained limited. Inequality persisted. The revolution was denounced as foreign, un-Hungarian, and criminal, but its causes were never addressed. Hunger did not vanish with the red flags.
Pörkölt, like goulash, is hearty and delicious. In fact, outside of Hungary, it and goulash are often considered one in the same. Just remember goulash is the soup version, and this is the thicker version.
Pörkölt (Hungarian Meat Stew)
Serves: 4–6
Prep Time: 15 min
Cook Time: 1½ hours
Ingredients:
900 g (2 lbs) beef, pork, or chicken, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 medium onions, finely chopped
2 tbsp lard or vegetable oil
2–3 tbsp Hungarian sweet paprika
2 cloves garlic, minced
240 ml (1 cup) water or stock (plus more as needed)
1–2 green bell peppers, sliced (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
Sour cream (optional, for serving)
Instructions:
Heat lard/oil in heavy pot. Sauté onions until golden (8–10 min).
Off heat, stir in paprika. Add meat; coat evenly.
Return to heat, add garlic; cook 1–2 min.
Add water/stock to halfway cover meat. Simmer covered 1–1½ hours until tender, stirring occasionally (add liquid if needed).
15 min before end, add peppers (if using).
Season with salt and pepper.
Serve hot with nokedli, bread, or potatoes; optional dollop of sour cream.
Hungarian Mushroom Soup: Broth of Persistence
Hungarian mushroom soup did not emerge in the interwar period, but it found its defining role there. Mushrooms had long been part of Hungarian cooking, especially among rural foragers who knew the forests intimately. Soups thickened with onions, paprika, and sour cream appeared across regional cuisines, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. What distinguished the urban Jewish version was restraint and adaptability. Meat was optional or absent. Butter or oil replaced lard when kosher laws required it. Mushrooms, cheap, abundant in season, sometimes gathered rather than bought, became the center rather than an accent. This was not food of celebration; it was food of drawn shades, cramped urban apartments, and whispered voices. This was the food of trying to maintain some normalcy in a time of hostile peace, and for Hungary’s Jews, the peace between WWI and WWII was a very hostile peace.
After the fall of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in August 1919, Hungary did not return to stability so much as recoil into itself. The counterrevolution that followed was not merely a political shift but a moral reordering. Admiral Miklós Horthy’s rise to power signaled the restoration of hierarchy, nationalism, and a fierce rejection of anything associated with 1919. The revolution was reframed as a foreign infection imposed on the nation, Bolshevik, cosmopolitan, Jewish. This narrative mattered more than accuracy. While Jews were not a majority of the revolution’s supporters, several prominent communist leaders were Jewish, and this fact was seized upon to fuse antisemitism with anti-communism into a single explanatory myth.
The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 deepened this wound. Hungary lost two-thirds of its territory and population almost overnight. Millions of ethnic Hungarians found themselves outside the new borders. The loss was experienced not only as geopolitical humiliation but as civilizational trauma. A nation that had once imagined itself a partner in empire was reduced to grievance and nostalgia. In this atmosphere, scapegoats were not just useful, they were inevitable.
Hungary’s interwar antisemitism did not emerge suddenly; it crystallized. Jews had been legally emancipated in the 19th century and were deeply embedded in Hungary’s urban life. They were prominent in commerce, industry, journalism, medicine, and the arts. Budapest itself was, in many ways, a Jewish-built city. This visibility, combined with economic dislocation after the war, made Jewish communities vulnerable to resentment. The counterrevolutionary regime framed Jews as beneficiaries of liberalism, capitalism, and radicalism all at once, an impossible contradiction that nonetheless proved politically effective.
One of the earliest signs of this turn was the numerus clausus law of 1920, Europe’s first antisemitic law after World War I. Officially, it limited university enrollment based on “national proportions.” In practice, it targeted Jews, sharply restricting their access to higher education. It did not strip Jews of citizenship or property, but it marked a shift from social prejudice to state policy. Belonging was now conditional.
For Jewish families, especially in cities like Budapest, this new reality reshaped daily life. The interwar years were not yet the catastrophe of the 1940s, but they were a narrowing corridor. Professional paths closed quietly. Sons and daughters were told to look abroad, to accept trades below their qualifications, or to temper ambition. The state did not yet demand disappearance, but it demanded adjustment.
In small apartments in Józsefváros or Lipótváros, in neighborhoods dense with clerks, shopkeepers, teachers, and artisans, kitchens became spaces of continuity. Food could not stop laws, but it could stabilize meaning. Mushroom soup required little. Onions softened slowly in fat. Paprika bloomed gently, careful not to burn. Mushrooms deepened the broth. Sour cream, when affordable, rounded the edges. It was filling without being heavy, and it could stretch to feed more mouths than expected. It could also be reheated. It was a budget friendly provider of normalcy.
The interwar years also saw the rise of Hungarian urbanism in a cultural sense. Despite political repression, cities remained sites of modern life, as cafés, theaters, newspapers, and literary journals flourished. Jewish participation in this world did not disappear; it adapted. Jewish writers, composers, and intellectuals continued to shape Hungarian culture, even as their belonging was questioned. The city itself was a contradiction: exclusionary in law, plural in practice.
Mushroom soup crossed boundaries in this environment. Non-Jewish households cooked it too, often without thinking of it as Jewish food at all. Urban Hungarian cuisine was porous, shaped by proximity more than ideology. Recipes traveled down stairwells and across courtyards. A soup made for reasons of necessity became part of a cross-cultural culinary vocabulary.
Economic pressure intensified in the 1930s. The Great Depression hit Hungary hard, especially its urban middle class. Small businesses failed. Credit dried up. Antisemitic rhetoric sharpened, increasingly tied to economic blame. New laws restricted Jewish participation in certain professions and limited ownership in key industries. Each law, on its own, appeared manageable. Together, they formed a tightening net.
Yet Jewish life did not vanish. Schools continued. Synagogues filled. Cultural societies met. Kitchens remained active sites of care. Mushroom soup persisted not because it was symbolic, but because it worked. It aligned with dietary laws while remaining flexible. It acknowledged scarcity without surrendering dignity.
If pörkölt was about reduction through heat and force, mushroom soup was about survival through gentleness. It did not demand time or fuel beyond what families could spare. It assumed instability and planned accordingly. In this way, it mirrored the strategies of Jewish urban life itself: cautious, adaptive, rooted in continuity rather than confrontation.
The tragedy, of course, is that adaptation was not enough. By the late 1930s, Hungary’s antisemitic policies deepened further, aligning more closely with Nazi Germany. What had begun as exclusion hardened into systematic dispossession. The interwar period, once remembered as a time of endurance, would later be seen as the narrowing road to catastrophe.
Hungarian Mushroom Soup is both an easy soup to make, and one that is filling and delicious. I have made it for years, and found it to be a crowd pleaser.
Hungarian Mushroom Soup
Serves: 4–6 (scaled from original 4)
Prep Time: 15 min
Cook Time: 30 min
Ingredients:
4–6 tbsp unsalted butter
2 large onions, diced
700 g (1½ lbs) mushrooms (cremini, button, or mixed), sliced
3 cloves garlic, minced
3 tbsp all-purpose flour
1½–2 tbsp Hungarian sweet paprika
1 liter (4–6 cups) chicken or vegetable broth
240 ml (1 cup) sour cream
240 ml (1 cup) milk
2 tbsp soy sauce
2 tbsp fresh dill, chopped (or 2 tsp dried)
Salt and pepper to taste
Fresh parsley, chopped (for garnish)
Instructions:
Melt butter in large pot. Sauté onions until soft (5 min).
Add mushrooms and garlic; cook until mushrooms release liquid (8 min).
Stir in flour and paprika; cook 1 min.
Add broth and soy sauce. Simmer 10 min.
Mix sour cream and milk. Temper with hot soup, then stir into pot.
Add dill, salt, and pepper. Heat gently (do not boil).
Garnish with parsley and serve hot.
Lángos: Fried Defiance
Lángos traces its roots deep into Hungary's past, older even than the nation's codified cuisines. The word itself derives from "láng," meaning flame, evoking the ancient practice of baking dough scraps at the front of brick ovens, where the heat was fiercest. Emerging among rural Magyars in the Carpathian Basin centuries ago, it began as a humble extension of bread-making: leftover yeast-risen dough, stretched thin, baked or later fried in lard or oil. By the interwar years, it had evolved into urban street food, topped with garlic, sour cream, or cheese when possible, but its essence remained simple: flour, water, salt, and whatever fat could be spared. Cheap to make, easy to carry, it fed laborers, travelers, and families navigating economic hardship. In cities like Budapest, vendors hawked it from carts, its crisp exterior hiding a soft, steaming core. But as Hungary slid toward catastrophe, lángos would prove its worth not in markets, but in the shadows of resistance.
The interwar urbanism that had sustained a fragile pluralism in Budapest's cafés and courtyards began to fracture under mounting pressure. By the late 1930s, Admiral Miklós Horthy's regime, already steeped in nationalism and antisemitism, sought alliances abroad to reverse the humiliations of Trianon. The treaty's borders had left Hungary truncated, its economy strained, its people embittered. Urban centers buzzed with modernization, trams, factories, cultural salons, but beneath the surface, resentment festered. Jews, once integral to this urban fabric, faced escalating restrictions: laws barring them from professions, limiting business ownership, and enforcing "racial" quotas. Yet the cities remained vibrant contradictions, where shared spaces defied division. As global tensions rose, Horthy turned to Nazi Germany, seeing in Hitler's revisionism a chance for territorial reclamation.
Hungary's alignment with the Axis was pragmatic, not ideological, at first. In 1938, the First Vienna Award, brokered by Germany and Italy, returned southern Slovakia to Hungarian control. Emboldened, Hungary joined the Axis Pact in November 1940, eyeing further gains. The invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 yielded more land, and when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June, Hungary committed troops, declaring war days later. Horthy framed it as a crusade against Bolshevism, a nod to the counterrevolutionary myths of 1919. Hungarian forces, including the Second Army, pushed eastward, but the alliance exacted a brutal toll. By 1943, at the Battle of the Don, the Second Army was annihilated, over 100,000 dead or captured in the frozen Soviet wastes. Back home, rationing bit deep; flour grew scarce, oil a luxury. Lángos adapted: made thinner, fried in whatever fat was available, it became a staple for workers and soldiers' families, a quick bite amid air raids and blackouts.
As the war turned, Horthy sensed disaster. Allied bombings intensified; Soviet armies advanced westward. Secretly, he dispatched envoys to the Allies, seeking an armistice. Hitler, paranoid of defection, uncovered the overtures. In March 1944, German forces executed Operation Margarethe, occupying Hungary in a bloodless coup. Horthy remained as a figurehead, but real power shifted to pro-Nazi Prime Minister Döme Sztójay. The betrayal was swift and total: Hungary, once a junior partner, became a vassal. Deportations of Jews accelerated; within months, over 430,000 were sent to Auschwitz from the provinces. Budapest's urban Jews, spared initially, huddled in ghettos, sharing meager meals. Lángos, portable and unassuming, slipped into pockets, dough kneaded in hidden kitchens, fried over makeshift fires, sustaining those evading roundups.
The occupation ignited scattered resistance. Hungary's partisan movement, though smaller than Yugoslavia's or Poland's, emerged from diverse roots: communists, socialists, Zionists, disillusioned military officers, and anarchists. In rural areas, groups like the Bauxite Miners' partisans in the Mecsek Mountains sabotaged rail lines and ambushed German convoys. Urban networks in Budapest, such as the Zionist Halutz underground, forged documents, hid Jews, and smuggled arms. Women played pivotal roles; courier girls darting through alleys with messages tucked into lángos wrappers. The food itself became a tool of quiet subversion: easy to prepare in forest camps, it fed fighters on the move. Dough rose in the dark, fried over embers, topped with wild garlic foraged from hillsides. It was not gourmet; it was guerrilla sustenance.
By October 1944, Horthy's final gambit failed spectacularly. On October 15, he announced an armistice with the Soviets over radio, urging Hungarian troops to cease fire. The Germans, forewarned, kidnapped his son Miklós Jr., forcing Horthy's resignation. They installed Ferenc Szálasi, leader of the fascist Arrow Cross Party, as "Nation Leader." Szálasi's regime unleashed terror: death marches, ghetto liquidations, executions along the Danube. Over 15,000 Jews were murdered in Budapest alone. Yet resistance swelled. The Hungarian Front, a coalition of anti-fascist groups, coordinated strikes. Partisans in the Börzsöny and Pilis hills harassed supply lines, while in Budapest, student battalions like the "Liberty Fighters" clashed with Arrow Cross militias in street battles. Raoul Wallenberg and other diplomats issued protective passports, but ordinary Hungarians; priests, workers, housewives, hid fugitives in attics and cellars, sharing lángos as a gesture of solidarity.
The siege of Budapest, from October 1944 to February 1945, epitomized the chaos. Soviet forces encircled the city, pounding it with artillery. German and Arrow Cross defenders fought house-to-house, turning boulevards into rubble. Partisans inside aided the Red Army with intelligence and diversions, smuggling food across lines. Lángos, made from hoarded flour, became a lifeline, portable rations for those trapped in basements, its grease sustaining frozen bodies. Casualties mounted: 38,000 civilians dead, the city a skeleton of its former self. When Soviet troops liberated Budapest on February 13, 1945, they found a population starved, but resilient. Nationwide, the war claimed 300,000 Hungarian soldiers and over 600,000 civilians, including 550,000 Jews, a genocide facilitated by collaboration.
Lángos is basically elevated fried dough. How can you go wrong?
Lángos (Hungarian Fried Bread)
Serves: 4–6
Prep Time: 20 min
Rise Time: 1 hour
Cook Time: 15 min
Ingredients:
250 g (2 cups) all-purpose flour
1 tsp instant yeast
1 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
180 ml (¾ cup) warm water (plus more if needed)
120 g (½ cup) boiled and mashed potato (about 1 medium potato)
Vegetable oil (for deep frying)
Toppings: sour cream, grated cheese, garlic butter, or salt
Instructions:
Mix flour, yeast, salt, and sugar in bowl.
Add mashed potato and warm water; knead 5 min into soft dough (add water if dry).
Cover and rise in warm place 1 hour until doubled.
Divide into 4–6 balls. Flatten each into ½-inch thick rounds on floured surface.
Heat 1 inch oil in deep skillet to 175°C (350°F).
Fry rounds 2–3 min per side until golden. Drain on paper towels.
Serve hot with toppings (e.g., garlic butter, sour cream, cheese).
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