under the frog

I've started a new book: Under the Frog by Tibor Fischer. It's the story of two young basketball players and the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Perhaps I'll write more about it when I finish, but one of the early chapters contained a wonderful description of the hospitality you encounter in the Hungarian countryside. It is 1949 and our hero, Gyuri, has just arrived in the tiny village of Halas where he is treated as an honored guest. When I read this I'm transported back to my first visits to Hungary with Calvin College, and the families who treated us so well.

"The scale and ferocity of peasant cuisine could be overpowering if you were out of training. Gyuri knew how the breakfasts alone could put feeble urban dwellers in hospital. At Erdovaros, the summer he was thirteen, when Gyuri had been entrusted to one of the local families, they poured him a generous palinka [brandy] for breakfast along with a brick of fat [lard] garnished with a dash of paprika. Thinking well of their liberality, he drank the palinka before walking out the door into the ground. It had taken his legs hours to remember how to walk but his stomach only a few moments to evict the solid elements of his meal. That sort of morning fuelling was tolerable only if you had grown up on it and if you had a day in a field ahead of you. Even as an atheletic thirteen year-old, harvesting for an hour had given him so much pain in so many places that all he could do was lie in the field and pray for an ambulance, while the heavily pregnant woman who had been working alongside him kindly offered to go and get him a drink.

The hospitality was unleashed straight away. Gyuri hadn't seen so much food, so much good food since the point when the war had got noticebly war-like, and it was quite possible that he had never seen that much food in an enclosed space ever before. The depressing thing was that he wouldn't be able to make up for five years' going hungry in one evening, however hard he tried. Even the expansive Neumann was looking awed by the food, since people had unmistakable designs of inflicting several sevings on them. If Gyuri tried to slow down his consumption, the villagers who had appointed themselves his personal troop of waiters would hover around and if he ate up, the consumed items would be swiftly replaced. Within half an hour of mastication commencing, Gyuri was seriously worried about parting company with consciousness: surrounding his enourmous plate, which had grown a stalagmite of sausage, cured pork, pig cheese and boxing-glove-sized chunks of bread, were two glasses of wine, one red, one white, two glasses of palinka, apricot and pear, and two glasses of beer in case he got thirsty. Behind him he could hear enraged villagers fighting to get to his side so they could pour out more of their pressings and distillations."