My mom was visiting me last weekend and brought homemade ‘kolbász’ and ‘pálinka’, so we decided to invite Krista over and give her a taste of Hungary.
First of all, we explained what ‘pálinka’ is, from what and how is it made. It is a traditional alcoholic drink made from different kinds of fruits, such as plums, apricots, apples and cherries, which are collected, fermented and then destilled.
Since I got four bottles of pálinka and they were all different, we could taste and then rank them. The absolute winner was the ‘szilvapálinka’ (plum pálinka) made in 2010 and the ‘sárgabarack pálinka’ (apricot pálinka) from 2016 got the last place.
There is an old tradition in Hungary called ‘disznóvágás’, which is the slaughtering of a pig in order to get pork and processing as many parts of it as posible to produce some food from it. This is also the way of making ‘kolbász’, which is a kind of sausage made from minced and seasoned pork, that is put into intestines. So we shortly described this tradition, which by the way includes drinking ‘pálinka’ early in the morning, and tasted the Hungarian sausage with some bread.
We also taught Krista how to say cheers in Hungarian, which is ‘Egészségedre!’ and is a really difficult word to pronounce for foreigners.
I am glad that we had the chance to share some interesting things about our home country and to bring some real homemade flavours to our meeting and not just talking about them without actually trying. I really hope that we could bring a little Hungary to Finland this time.
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