Wild game in the history of Hungarian cuisine

Wild beef – as we most often know it, served with bun dumplings or napkin dumplings. The dish went through a difficult period in the canteens and during the years of socialism, as it suffered a similar indignity to the Hortobágy pancake: everything that was left was blended into it. However, wild beef, if given the right amount of attention and, most importantly, made with quality ingredients – can be an elegant, masterful dish.

As a partly hunting, mostly semi-nomadic people, game meats were once an important part of Hungarian cuisine. Originally prepared in the 'hunter's way', dishes consisted of marinated meat, with a sauce made from the vegetables and spices used for the marinade. It is made from game, various parts of beef, and sometimes rabbit.

In the Szeged cookbook published in 1876 by Aunt Rézi, or Terézia Dolecskó, we can read the following recipe, which uses kidney steak and prepares it 'hunting style'.

Kidney steak in a hunter's style. The kidney steak, once cleaned of its skin and bones, should be scalded with sour marinade and left to stand covered for two days. Then it should be stuffed with garlic, pinned with bacon, put the fat and the roots in the marinade in a pot, add the meat and the sour juice and simmer covered until soft. Then make a little brown sauce with sugar, add the meat juice; add the flavor so that it is sweet and sour, like game sauce. Then cut the meat into slices and serve with this brown sauce. You can serve buttermilk slices or pieces of pâté as a side dish.

It's definitely worth paying attention to not using lean meat to make game, because it will dry out completely – choose beef brisket, steak, or beef cheek.

Sauces in Hungarian cuisine The spread of French sauces in Hungary was the result of a long process, which was primarily due to the tastes of the aristocracy and the development of gastronomy. In the 17th-18th centuries, under the Habsburg rule, the Hungarian noble kitchens increasingly adopted Western European, especially French, culinary traditions. At the Viennese court, French cooking was already dominant at that time, and this influence gradually spread to the kitchens of the Hungarian nobility. The employment of French chefs in Hungarian castles and manors was not uncommon, so modern sauce-making techniques also became known.

At the turn of the 19th century, with the revival of French cuisine, spearheaded by masters such as Marie-Antoine Carême and Auguste Escoffier, there was an increasing conscious systematization of the world of sauces. This was when the classic five basic sauces (béchamel, velouté, espagnole, hollandaise and tomato sauce) were developed, on which modern French cuisine is built. From the list compiled by chef Auguste Escoffier.

we wrote about it here before.

At the same time, these techniques also appeared in Hungary, especially in noble kitchens and bourgeois catering. In the second half of the century, the famous confectioner and gastronome, József C. Dobos, described French culinary technologies in detail in his Hungarian-French Cookbook, including the principles of sauce preparation. This book had a great influence on Hungarian catering, as it made French culinary knowledge available to a wider range of Hungarian chefs for the first time.

What goes into game sauce? As mentioned earlier, the sauce itself is originally made from the marinade, which is further flavored.

In the cookbook of C. József Dobos from 1881, brown sauce is the basis for quail prepared in the hunter's style:

. (Cailles au chasseur.) Once the quails have been plucked, gutted, dressed, salted, with butter, shallots, and mushrooms, which we chop into small pieces, put them in a casserole. A quarter of an hour before serving, shake them on the fire, pour over a little brown sauce and red wine, put a piece of dark-colored glace on them, boil them, skim off the fat, pour the sauce under them, serve them in a pyramid shape, and serve.

In the cookbook The Gourmet Master, often mentioned in our previous articles, we can read the following:

Game sauce. Strain the juice from the roast, pass it through with some of the vegetables from the marinade, mix 3 deciliters of sour cream with 1 spoon of flour, pour it over the roast, twist a lemon leaf, add cracked pepper, 10 chopped capers, 1 spoon of mustard, a few cubes of brown sugar and — if necessary — a little salt. Bring it all to a boil and pour it over the roast. Serve some of it in a separate cup.

Today we can find a wide variety of venison recipes, and as many houses as there are customs. It is worth keeping in mind that the sauce is a particularly important part of the dish, so we should choose the best ingredients for it. Today, the marinade is not always used for venison, but if we have the opportunity, we should do so. A good venison sauce is a little salty, a little sweet, a little sour, and the complex taste is given by good quality vegetables. I have come across sour cream, cream, and butter versions, and the most exciting ones still add the capers and mustard mentioned above.

Game on the menu at Spago Budapest

Executive chef István Szántó told us about the game at Spago Budapest earlier:

“The history of Spago Budapest’s vadasas goes back to the Oscars two years ago. That’s when I got the opportunity from Wolfgang Puck to participate in the preparation of the famous Governors Ball dinner, and we thought a lot about how and in what form we could present Hungarian cuisine and Hungarian flavors. Comfort food plays a prominent role at the dinner, we wanted to present a dish that guests would enjoy and would easily become popular. It was important that the dish was sufficiently spectacular and exciting, and also suited the local public taste.

Game is my childhood favorite. It’s a comfort food, but because it’s tricky to make and requires some technique, it’s not something you often make at home. It’s easy to mess up because there are so many pitfalls. It’s a very complex dish, creamy, flavorful, sour, sweet, and salty all at once. Beef is very popular in the United States, and our game ended up being a big hit at the gala dinner. Then we had to put it on the Spago Budapest menu, and it became one of our most popular dishes.

At the gala dinner, of course, we served the venison in a different form, since different considerations apply at a standing reception than in a restaurant, we prepared smaller portions so that guests could taste a variety of dishes. The Spago Budapest venison is a complete á la carte dish.

The key to our game is to give a new look to a dish that is familiar to everyone, bringing back the original taste experience, but still giving more and more detail. For the game, we use beef cheek, which is the most tender part of the beef that can be prepared. The marinated beef cheek is first grilled, then slowly baked at a low temperature. The game sauce in Spago can be put between a sauce and a puree consistency – we make a beef stock, add root vegetables, bay leaf, lemon, lemon zest, mustard, and then blend it until it is completely smooth and silky.

It is served with whole roasted baby carrots and napkin dumplings, which also evokes Austrian cuisine. It is accompanied by a rich jus made from beef bones and Tokaji wine, and enriched with mustard seeds.

It’s topped with a spur leaf, which has a nice horseradish flavor. The presence of spur leaves is due to the Oscars. When we started preparing outside, one day we went on a trip with Tetsu Yahagi, the executive chef of Spago Beverly Hills. He knew the sites in and around Los Angeles quite well, and during the trip we came across an incredible amount of spur leaves, which we collected and added to the dishes. To this day, it can be found on every plate, and when you put it on, it takes me back a little to those experiences there, suddenly I feel like I’m on the ocean shore again.”

Károly Ember/Sándor Bauer.