Christmas recipes of Croats from Hungary

Christmas represents - peace, love, family gathering, and there are also traditional gastronomic specialties. Christmas customs, including the food we prepare for the holidays, are different from region to region, from country to country. Today we are in the home of Marina Skenderović from Hungary.

Holidays wouldn't be holidays if there wasn't family and food that brings us together around the table. Unlike some ancient times, today's holiday table is much richer, so we don't know what to try first from the offer that is on the table.

The Christmas customs of Croats in Hungary are increasingly resembling those of the world today. Nevertheless, there are still small differences by regions whose roots we find in tradition.

Preparations for Christmas start weeks earlier. Marina Skenderović together with her husband Marin are one of those who preserved the Christmas customs of the Croats in Hungary. They brought them from Subotica to Budapest and maintain them to this day, and as she told us, they will continue to maintain them. They have been living in the Hungarian capital for 30 years.

For the Advent concert in Budapest, which was held in the Basilica of St. Stephan in the organization of the Croatian Embassy, she made Angel Wings, leaves (as they are called in Bačka, Subotica), but as she says, "we certainly brought the recipe with us from the old region, from the source of the Buna river".

And as for our traditional cuisine for the Christmas holidays, which she brought to Budapest, she points out: “In our family in the north of our dear Bačka in our Subotica, for Christmas Eve we prepared bean soup with carrots, parsley, onion and garlic, with a roux of fried butter and sweet ground red pepper, wild Carp is also baked, on potatoes sprinkled with a dry mixture of flour, salt and ground red pepper, finished with melted butter, pasta with hard cheese and cream, topped with butter, then a milky braided cake is baked, which is a little sweeter with more eggs and butter.”

And for dessert, she prepares "mákos gubu": - “These are milk rolls, which are cut to a thickness of 2 cm and left to dry for a couple of days, and then on the day of preparation, they are poured over with hot milk, mixed and sprinkled with a mixture of ground poppy seeds and crystal sugar, which we adopted from our fellow Hungarians.”

And then there is a gastronomic fantasy for the first day of Christmas: - “Soup is cooked from an older hen or guineafowl or pheasant, depending on what people managed to get, or maybe they had their own at home, then veal or beef stew is cooked with homemade wide noodles, topped with cream, this dish is served with pickles or pickled peppers that can be stuffed with cabbage, then a roasted turkey with mince pies is served, and with it, a compote of cherries, pears, apricots and peaches, followed by a French salad, and of course, those who like can also eat a knitted milk cake. For dessert, small cake cookies are served, which a good hostess prepares a few days before. For New Year's Eve there is a slightly different menu, a pig is roasted, served with French salad, with potato salad, and at midnight, cabbage rolls with homemade cream are served. On January 1st, green lentil soup with hot dogs is cooked, this last menu is accepted by Hungarians, and it is interesting because of the belief that if you eat lentil soup on January 1st, you will have enough money for a nice life all year long.”

Marina's recipes were part of the "European cookbook", a book of recipes from all over the world: “It was truly an honor to be presented in such a cookbook with such eminent professional chefs, I am still just a housewife, an amateur in cooking, who loves to cook.”

The cookbook was published by their dear friends Gabriel and Violet in the 2017 edition, the year where Mrs. Skenderović found herself with other professional chefs who work for embassies accredited here in Hungary: “Since I was once the chef at the Croatian residence during the time when Dr. Zdenko Škrabalo was the plenipotentiary ambassador of the Republic of Croatia, the choice to show our autochthonous Croatian dishes fell on me.”

The recipes she presented in the book were: clear fish soup, Istrian fusi with truffles.

And since some people don't eat fish, she decided on a Dalmatian chicken dish and prepared chicken in the Primošten style: “To make the atmosphere right, I also prepared a very old dessert - a cake that is over 560 years old. The Imotski cake is very interesting because it is made entirely of almonds, eggs, butter and our very fine Maraschino liqueur, which is made from a very old type of cherry, which gives this cake a special taste,” says Marina.

Source: HRT