As the cold weather approaches, our kitchen shifts into winter gear. The spotlight turns to richer, heartier dishes that take longer to prepare, to pickled vegetables from the pantry and to the techniques that allowed peasant kitchens to cook in colourful ways even throughout the winter.
Hungarian peasant cooking followed the rhythm of nature during the colder months as well. Alongside the last of the fresh vegetables and poultry, the arrival of winter meant that smoked and salted meats, dishes preserved in fat, root vegetables stored in the pantry, pickled vegetables, porridges, pasta dishes and offal increasingly appeared on the table. These humble, yet distinctive dishes sustained families through the cold season.
With this in mind, we have built our autumn-winter menu around what nature offers in the cold months, how the peasant kitchen approached sustainability and how we can continue this tradition while also cooking in a way that is both authentic and contemporary. Our dishes, as always, are guided by our core principles: closeness to nature and sustainability. Let us share a few of them with you.
Based on our principles
Closeness to nature weaves through every part of our menu, and our bouquet of herbs embodies this aspiration. Sourced from Halásztelek, our bouquet of tagetes, purslane, lemon balm, chamomile, and hyssop served with yeast cream reflects how simple, readily available ingredients can become extraordinary when treated with care.
The pantry is an important space for sustainability. For one of our favourite winter dishes, rucáskása, we preserved savoury gooseberry, redcurrant and beetroot while they were in season, so that we can enjoy them now. This is precisely how the peasant kitchen operated: thinking long term and wasting nothing.
Seasonality not only means using ingredients at their peak, but creating dishes that reflect the time of year. In our cigánypecsenye, the pork cutlets, the mustard seed and paprika-flavoured jus and the pickled plums evoke a classic, heartier and slightly acidic winter profile. Made with one of the beloved ingredients of the season—poppyseeds—our csiripankó also carries a distinctively wintery atmosphere. In this Transylvanian dessert, poppyseeds are paired with a potato-based dough and a miso-flavoured warm egg foam.
A lot out of a little
Winter’s natural scarcity can be a blessing in disguise, urging us to incorporate creativity in every item on our menu. In our walnut pasta, we evoked the flavours of the winter forest with buckwheat, trumpet mushrooms, mushroom garum and a koji-based sauce. A handful of ingredients reveal a deep (and not sweet!) flavour. Our chestnut-based dish also honours a humble classic: chestnut, one of the simplest desserts of the peasant kitchen, is cooked in milk, quickly fried in a pan, and served with a spiced walnut cream.
Our zero-waste approach continues through to the end of the menu. The meringue in our petit four is made from leftover egg whites and is spiced with honey locust, an ingredient overlooked by contemporary kitchens. Even our rosehip jam follows the principle that shaped the winter peasant kitchen for centuries: nothing goes to waste.
The autumn-winter menu is not simply a list of seasonal ingredients but a testament to the principles we work by throughout the year. Closeness to nature, sustainability, the traditions of the peasant kitchen and the cuisine of the Szatmár region and the old and new methods of preservation all remind us that winter is a season of truly memorable flavours.
