I’m not sure if my father was joking when he told me over the phone that my grandmother would be turning in her grave if she knew I was eating vegetarian goulash. I was in Budapest, the city that birthed him and nourished my imagination during my Australian upbringing. In only a short visit I wanted to imbibe as much of the place as I could; to swim in its waters, to drink in its essence, and most importantly to eat the cuisine the disruptions of the 20th century had denied me. But there was a hurdle – how to consume the food of your people when much of it conflicts with your values. While food can be one of the few windows into the heart of a new place or a vital connection to culture, for a Hungarian vegetarian like myself, having to walk a little further and Google a little harder to feel closer to a distant time and family was an obstacle I readily approached.
Goulash, or more correctly gulyás, is a thick, warming stew ladled up by Eastern Europeans for hundreds of years. Though also consumed in neighbouring countries, Hungary has claimed goulash as its national dish. Its origins and form may be up for debate, but it finds a well-established heartland of meat and paprika. With the word ‘gulya’ meaning ‘herd of cattle’ and a ‘gulyás’ being a ‘cowboy’, beef-less goulash is a bit like saying oxygen-less air. Beyond these key ingredients, the dish is in the eye of the beholder. The cast of supporting characters might involve stock, tomato, capsicum, potato, and caraway seeds. After slowly bubbling away on a hot stove it’s served with a dollop of sour cream.
My paternal grandparents, Miklós and Theresa, fled Hungary in 1948 with my infant father in tow. The details of their story have never been entirely clear to me. What I do know is that as Jews, they had miraculously survived the upheavals of the 1930s and ‘40s. Instead of the peace they would have craved, the rising threat of the communist regime had led to the difficult decision to exchange their multi-generational family home on the Danube for passports and seek a new life in Australia. I won’t dwell on what followed. In short, Miklós wasn’t able to continue to practice as a lawyer in Australia but, like many other migrants at the time, worked on the railway. Theresa had acted in a film in Hungary and listed her profession on her immigration paperwork as ‘actress’, but as far as I’m aware she didn’t work a day after arriving in Australia. I never met him; I met her only briefly when she came to our home at the end of her life. Under pressure to assimilate, the passage of their native tongue, cuisine and culture stopped with my father.
The wind whipped my face on a chill Autumn day as I walked across the Danube on the Széchenyi Chain Bridge, crossing over from Pest to Buda. It was this less commercial part of the city, which cascades down from Buda Castle, that once held the Vadasz family home. Since it’s now a municipal building with an ugly grey façade, any sentiment it aroused in me was entirely subjective. Exploring other parts of the city though, on foot and via rattling old trams, Budapest’s dark glamour and hearty food reached through the many layers of clothing needed to stave off the November cold to warm me just as effectively as a trip to the famous public baths. With its grand old buildings and wide boulevards, some of Budapest’s quarters weren’t dissimilar in look to Paris, if you ignored the bullet holes and slight air of shabbiness. The sites and the flavours resonated with familial connection. The sprawling Dohány Street Synagogue where my grandfather and his brothers had gone to worship. The romance of Gerbeaud Café, serving coffee and cakes at prices inflated by tourism, but which provided my grandfather with the krémes (a custard pastry) which family legend has it was the first thing he ate when he returned to Budapest from a concentration camp. Having spent nearly the same amount as a night’s accommodation on one myself, I can confirm that Miklós knew a thing or two about pastries. I took multiple trips to the Central Market Hall, under the vaulted roof of which I devoured crispy lángos slathered with sour cream, and fresh strudel densely packed with cherries.
Happily, much of this was incidentally vegetarian. It wasn’t all straightforward though, and a meat-free goulash proved more elusive than I would have hoped. Hungarian cuisine isn’t exactly built for people of my dietary persuasion. In 2019 only 1% of the country’s population confessed to being vegetarian. With an emphasis on pork knuckle, sausage, schnitzel, and meaty soups and stews, one has to go to some lengths to secure a meat-free traditional Hungarian meal.
Tradition is in many ways a nebulous concept. Though cultural customs may seem like fixed rites and rituals to be upheld and defended, this perceived stasis is an illusion. What may appear as sturdy, or tried and true, would likely have taken hundreds of years to develop into its present form, and will continue to develop in untold ways into the future. It is an ever-evolving organism, not objectively self-determinative as if decreed by a higher power, but actually an organic creation reflective of the people of whom it is comprised. This has been recognised by the previous UN Special Rapporteur on Cultural Rights, Farida Shaheed, who stated that ‘cultures are not static, homogenous entities. They are dynamic and heterogeneous. Cultures are as much about products as they are about processes. The question is, who are the initiators and who are the decision-makers in these processes?’
Theresa Vadasz was a beneficiary of a cultural legacy, which she sought to uphold as best she could within the pressures of a policy of assimilation and the irrefutable disruption her new circumstances had rent upon her ability to carry it forward. From the moment she and her family left Budapest, they initiated an offshoot of the way of living they had been socialised to accept as the norm. Try as they might to hold onto an idea of their cultural norms, their Hungarian traditions would inevitably develop as they encountered the new Australian reality. It would be understandable to cherish the version of that culture you typify as the ‘original’, and defend it against all perceived threats.
Non-meat-eaters travelling in certain parts of the world will be familiar with the need to employ a certain amount of ingenuity. Looking for a meal in countries with flesh-heavy cuisines, especially in which you don’t speak the language, can require hours of trawling Google Maps, blogs, and happycow.com if particularly desperate. I’ve come to enjoy the chase, and using this as a frame for a unique experience in a new place. Even more so, I’ve now begun to experience high levels of joy upon finding those daggy, drab restaurants that seem to exist the world over, with a tome-like menu displaying an implausible array of local dishes adapted to be plant-based.
I nearly cried when I found a menu of Hungarian classics rendered meatless. As I told my dad during our call, my first vegetarian goulash in Budapest was well worth offending our ancestors. I’d traipsed through the cold night, out of the bustling Jewish Quarter where I was staying and into an unfamiliar quiet suburb, searching for a particular restaurant. In that crumbling old European way, many of Budapest’s establishments are tucked away in unexpected nooks, underground, or through anonymous darkened passages. They are often cavernous and dim, with heavy medieval-feeling furniture and a violin whining in a corner. I knew I’d found the right place when I opened a door to reveal steps down to a basement restaurant and felt gentle warmth emanate from below like a lover’s breath in an intimate moment. When the steaming cauldron of red stew topped with sour cream was brought to my table I devoured it with thick slices of bread and felt a paprika-coloured hue rise in my cheeks and the warmth return to my bones.
My brother recently searched for our family name in an Australian historical news and media database. It came back with a small clipping from the 1950s, barely legible, headlined ‘GOULASH FOR ALL’. It showed Theresa holding a large pot and ladle while beaming up at the camera and told of her serving up goulash to schoolboys at a local school fair. Despite my grandmother’s posthumous disapproval, it was unthinkable that I could come to Budapest and not be nourished by the ubiquitous dish that had brought sustenance to her, my grandfather, my father, great grandparents, and long-gone great aunts and uncles. The story of their Hungarian traditions had been irreversibly interrupted when the family opened an Australian branch, blending with Anglo-Australian influences and the modernisations of the intervening decades. Tradition and custom, which give meaning to our lives, are ideas as mutt as we all are; a balance braided from our history and the future we set in motion.
