Fresh produce from the local market

This afternoon I saw a Tweet about food from Remco Timmermans, with a link to a presentation by Jamie Oliver, earlier this week. I watched Jamie talk about healthy and fresh food as a cure for the top diseases in Western society, just after visiting the local indoor produce market here in Pécs, where I had purchased fresh peppers, carrots and cucumbers for lunch.

What a joy to watch all these products together. Mountains of fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs, meat and fish. And when you bring your own bottles you can get milk straight from the cow, scooped from a large container. Nothing is pre-packaged, pre-cut, pre-cooked or pre-anything. You have to work with the products yourself.

When we talk about culture we mostly think about theatre, museums, music or literature, but obviously the definition is much wider. I consider local cuisine and the appreciation of food as one of the most important expressions of culture.

Where we in the Netherlands hardly think about and spend little time on what we eat, here in Hungary it is a much more important and normal task. Jøzs Koch, a provincial governance official, had invited me and a few other friends to his home for dinner. We were given a very warm welcome and before dinner we were proudly shown his large collection of Zsolnay-china, antique furniture and beautiful paintings. Hungarian cuisine is largely based on simple, yet harty farmers ingredients. So on our plates we were presented Hungarian sausage, fat, potatoes, salted onion salad, eggs and a soft cheese-pepper salad. Of course this was preceeded with a variety of alcoholic drinks, and also during dinner the local wine flooded freely. Somewhere halfway I had to be careful not to drink too much, as I still had to do my weekly phone interview for Dutch radio later that evening. Only at that point I figured out that in order not to get an immediate refill, I had to stop completely emptying my glass every time. For dessert we had sugar-coated chestnuts with whipped cream. To be honest I had my doubts about chestnuts for dessert, but it was truly delicious! Of course dessert was accompanied by a special after dinner wine, called Tokije, a kind of local sherry.

The evening started off a little shy, but after a few drinks languages mattered less and less, until the point where everybody spoke all languages fluently (fluidly…?), including Hungarian: Egészségedre!