Budapest and paprika

Vegetables in Budapest can be pretty revolting.
If you don't believe me, pop into Tesco or the vile Spar and admire the piles of stinking potatoes, sprouting and greeny black, the soft, rotting onions, mildewed broccoli and cauliflower and wizened fehér répa (white carrot, not the same as parsnip at all.
In fact it's the oh-so-fashionable parsley root, although don't tell the nénik at Bosnyák tere market or they'll whoomp up the price).
Don’t even get me started on the sheer horror of fôzelék.
What other nation takes a delicious vegetable such as a pea, carrot, spinach leaf or even lentil and turns it into a thing of unspeakable horror?
Hungarian chefs have little respect or enthusiasm for vegetables.
A perfect example of this attitude is the fôzelék, a horrendous transformation of a healthy thing such as a plate of spinach into something inedible, a pappy mush for toothless invalids.
To make a fôzelék, you take fresh vegetables, such as spinach, French beans, peas and carrots, pumpkin, lentils, sóska (mouth-puckering sorrel); all delicious and packed with flavour and vitamins, not to forget the inherent fartable roughage.
Then boil it up to within an inch of its life for days and days so that every trace of goodness, texture or taste evaporates.
Mix up a good chunk of zsír (lard) and white refined flour and add a large dash of salt to create a nightmarish roux or rántás, which you add to the pulp.
Serve luke-warm with a greasy kolbász floating listlessly on top.

Where the Magyar redeems himself is in the garden market.
While pears and apples are best suited to damp countries like England and Belgium, the soft fruits of summer such as apricots, peaches, plums and cherries are divine and plentiful in the heat of the stifling, airless Karpát medence.
(The strawberries and raspberries are always rotting, oversized and tasteless but you can’t have everything).
The apples also are a nightmare; Jonatán should have been strangled at birth.
I’m not a fan of watermelon although Mr Drone comes from a family of magyar watermelon peasants stretching back as far as the Honfoglalás, so I have to get a football-sized slice down occasionally.
Perfect for inducing a dose of the runs, in my not-so-humble opinion.
The other great fruit is the Magyar tomato or paradiscom, which in Hungarian also significantly means ‘paradise’ (cf. the film 1492: the Conquest of Tomato) which in summer are so full of flavour they burst through their skins with sheer exuberance.
The paprika (bell pepper or capsicum, not the powder here) is the other great item of Hungarian food. TV paprika are so-called, not because they are snacks for couch potatoes, although they are that too, because they are tölteni való or ‘for stuffing’.
Fresh paprikas, bursting with vitality and Mittel Europa exuberance (an oxymoron if ever there was one) such as the squat, deep red pritamin paprika, knock the tasteless California peppers that shamelessly flood Europe, right out of the window and into the turds on the pavement.
Hungarians are still a little scared of eating their fruit and veg raw and often boil up tomatoes and peppers into lecsó, a stew that in a vague way resembles ratatouille, but without the courgettes, and the aubergines, and the garlic, and the culinary verve.
The photo shows some approximation of a Magyar TV paprika that I found in a Turkish corner shop in Bruxelles, in the beautiful main square of Forest/Vorst.
This is FourBees half-hearted homage to the Magyar paprika.
(It probably trundled all this way on a lorry direct from Bulgaria....)
A FourBees photo.