In our latest post on Hungaricums we shortly mentioned the famous sausages from Csaba and Gyula. Both of these places are located in Békés county in the south eastern part of Hungary. The history of the two types of tasty sausage shows some parallels with the history of Szeged paprika. Thick sausage or salami from…
Although the concept of Hungaricums by now has been fully incorporated into our common language, it is always good to clarify the exact meaning of the word. According to a law adopted in 2012, ‘Hungaricum’ is a term that stands for a unique collection of exceptional and distinctive features that together deliver top performance in…
In these mid Summer days, towards the end of July, you can already detect some red paprika in the fields. As the fruit is still growing, you can already see the changes in paprika’s skin color. The maturation time cannot be linked to a specific time or date, because of the way of cultivation, the…
Similar to our recent posts, we chose an old newspaper article as the subject of this post. The publication on August 6th 60 years ago features the life in the Szeged suburb Alsóváros titled: “Among the Red Millers”. While in our days we strive to preserve the authentic nature of city suburbs, the article writes…
Our regular readers will certainly remember last week’s post referring to an article published over a 100 years ago featuring measurements made by the Szeged City Council to protect the origin of its own paprika. Some 65 years ago – during the communist Rákosi era – a newspaper article was published that very precisely described…
Our readers surely can remember that a few weeks ago we wrote about the quality of Szeged paprika in Hungarian language on the Day of Food security. It is very interesting to see how a local producer of Szeged paprika can identify and protect its products against imports (Spanish paprika). This theme is not only…
How to decorate with paprika? Szeged people 100 years ago were probably unaware what a beautiful sight they were producing when they strung the paprika fruits into long garlands and hung them up for drying. It was work for them, and for that matter, it was really hard work. For an outsider, a dreamer, a…
Here’s a step-by-step process description of Hungarian paprika production. What about the process from paprika to paprikash? We looked at the process, broke it down into steps, asked Vera to draw the images for us and added our insights. We collected about 100 things to know and short-listed 20+ for you. Learn and enjoy!
Paprika is in the air is the title of a collection of essays, short stories and articles written by Zsigmond Móricz, early-20th century writer and columnist. Móricz was non-native to Szeged, only a visitor, but the city captured him physically and mentally as he kept returning and writing about the city and its people. As…
In the Hungarian calendar we call the 12th, 13th and 14th of May as the name or feast-days of St. Pancras, St. Servatius and St. Boniface of Tarsus respectively. These three saints are referred to as the Ice Saints in many European countries and this name comes from the traditional belief that frost is likely…
The third week of May has been pretty busy for PaprikaMolnar: after several starts and stops and restarts we eventually transplanted our paprika seedlings to their final place in our farm. It’s a small plot of land this year, but planting has never been so hard with rain coming down every day, between which we…
300 years ago today, on 21 May 1719, Hungarian King Charles III.granted city status to the municipality of Szeged and the crest that symbolizes this status has been used by Szeged municipality to this day. The memory of this formal recognition of Szeged as a royal free city has grown to be the most important…