A Visit to the Village Distillery

In rural Hungary it's common to make a strong brandy called pálinka out of the season's fruit, usually from the bounty of plums, apricots, pears, cherries and apples that the countryside produces every year. You can make it out of any fruit, really, except maybe a tomato, but those are the most common ones. There is also a grappa made from leftover crushed wine grapes, which is sort of a separate sub-category. Pálinka is similar to schnapps (which is usually a bit milder) and (more so) to the rakia and slivovice they make across the Balkans. Fruit here in a good season has a distinctive succulence, which gets passed on in the distillation. Quality ranges from untaxed and undrinkable (unless you want a monster headache) moonshine made in home stills to artisanal commercial varieties that can be as complex and expensive as high-end whiskies or brandies.

a hardworking apple tree

Péter's (Móni's sister's long-time boyfriend) father Tamás has a weekend dacha in Diósjenő, in a valley about an hour north of Budapest, with a few fruit trees (2 apples, 1 plum, 1 pear - apricots don't grow so well this far north) in the yard. Since none of the ladies in the family make jam, the considerable excess gets washed, cored, de-seeded and, its blemished bits discarded, tossed into one of several air-tight plastic barrels to ferment until it's ready to take to the village distillery to make a quite powerful but somehow smooth elixir that will chase away the winter colds and other agues of those who are fortunate enough to receive a glass or bottle.

And this is what we are doing this December morning. This will foreseeably be Tamás's last batch ever, since the aging trees are on their last legs and he's ready to retire as a pálinka hobbyist anyway. It's quite a bit of work, especially for someone who doesn't drink much of it himself. I had helped with processing the fruit on a couple occasions over the last two years - and gone on a couple plum raids around the neighborhood, since fallen fruit (or nearly-fallen) fruit by the roadside outside fenced areas (there's a lot of it all over in season) is considered fair game. Once we wandered onto some unmarked private property and got into a standoff with a troop of local peasants, until we convinced them that it wasn't their pumpkins we were after. They didn't care about the plums. In fairness, crop theft is a major problem in rural areas and, among other unfortunate effects, greatly contributes to tensions between gypsies and non-gypsies in such places. But fallen plums don't count.

Anyway, Tamás had long ago promised that when the final batch was ready go, he would take me to the distillery to watch. Most larger villages have such a facility, usually close to the railroad tracks, like this one, since the trains don't complain about the smell. You pay the professional distiller to cook up your mash to a specified strength of alcohol. Of course, he has a meter on his machine and you have to pay the excise taxes (the revenuers are very strict about this and check for undocumented booze regularly) in addition to the distillery fee, so it's not the cheapest way to get juiced, but he knows what he's doing and you get what you pay for in terms of quality. This is in contrast to home distilling, which, seemingly the most pressing issue facing the government for several months last year, has been recently legalized in small quantities (they were doing it anyway, in small quantities or otherwise, and selling much of it illicitly to the hard up), where, as István the distiller put it, "they don't know where it starts and ends and can't reach anything like our level of quality" - referring to the heads and tails, the beginning and end of the distillation process that you have to throw out because they are full of nasty headache chemicals, among other flaws. I don't think the moonshiners are too selective about the quality of the fruit they throw in the barrel either. Don't drink it!

mash

István is very busy this time of year, with the summer's fruit fully fermented and cold winter nights ahead. So he calls the shots. He tells you when he's got time to cook your mash, which is why I had to get up at 4:30 on a Monday morning to drive up to Diósjenő. He tells you when to go outside and split firewood (I ordinarily enjoy splitting firewood, but only after a good night's sleep. But I did my best without hacking my foot off.). The four barrels had already been brought over a few days earlier -- 400 kg of fermented fruit, with a bit of sugar added at the end to bring up the alcohol content a bit more (you're not supposed to do this with commercial pálinka, which by regulation is supposed to be only fruit). We patiently await the previous customer's grappa to finish trickling out, which István pours into jerry cans, After rinsing out the pot (surprisingly little residue, which seems to end up, presumably legally, in the brook outside) he and Tamás hoist in the first barrel. (I helped too after taking my photo).

And then this pot still

sends the vapors from the mash through the pipes overhead over to one of these electric blue things which I think in English are called a column still, which is much more clever than the pot still and much less picturesque.

Then you can leave the column still to do its job and go for a coffee and a wander around the wonders of  Nográd county, which I will cover in some later post. And when you come back, out is pouring the Pálinka. 39 litres of it!

István's little alcohol-content-measuring device said it was 47%, which is just right. It can come out much stronger, in which case you add distilled water to get it to the correct strength.

The pálinka goes into giant demijohns. It has to sit for a few months before the flavors marry. Right now it would just taste like something out of a chem lab. To some of it Tamás will add dried plums and apricots, and let it sit even longer, which gives a sweeter, richer taste.

Now I need to get my own tree!

Budapest Noir

Following a vaguely literary youth, I no longer get through novels at anything like the rate I used to. Maybe 10 a year. Part of the reason for this is because the Internet gives me plenty of shorter material to read. Another is that most recent literary fiction seems like a load of self-conscious bollocks, and I find myself really only drawn to genre stuff - historical fiction, crime, espionage, sci-fi - where the inherent bollocks keep the extraneous bollocks more in check. A third is because I don't have access to a really wide range of English-language novels. Periodically I gird myself to conquer the great classics of late 19th and early 20th century Hungarian literature, but usually get bogged down in a morass of archaic terminology about horses and farm implements and suchlike that I simply don't have room for in the dwindling storage space in my skull. Only occasionally do I see anything in contemporary Hungarian writing that excites me, and Budapest Noir is one such work.

The first in our very own Hungarian noir crime series, to be released in English, by Harper Collins no less, early next year. Probably the first Hungarian novel in all of history to bear the exact same title in translation. Except for Molnar's Liliom. But that was a play, and they turned it into Carousel.

Anyway. The author, Vilmos Kondor, as a fan of Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade has invented for us Zsigmond Gordon who in 1936, recently returned to Budapest from a stint in Philadelphia, is working as a crime reporter for one of the major daily newspapers when a prostitute is found murdered in a down-at-heels street in central Pest, with a Jewish prayer book in her possession. Driven by an inner doggedness that won't be dissuaded by powers who show him they don't want the matter investigated, he pursues the matter to the top, uncovering a nest of corruption at the highest levels of society.

All of this against a backdrop of a meticulously drawn Budapest where, despite the cosmopolitan nightclubs and elegant cafes, evidence that all hell is about to break loose is everywhere - for the reader, that is. The main characters themselves seem vaguely liberal but outwardly largely apolitical in terms of the great events that are starting to engulf them. Spain and Abyssinia are still far away in 1936. I doubt this trend continues though as later books in the series deal with the war years themselves. In any case, there's clearly a parallel being drawn to the political state of today's Hungary.

The better part of the action takes place with 15 blocks of where I live. I can't think of very many books I've read that, like Budapest Noir, take place on streets and sidewalks that I walk through every day. Maybe Gore Vidal's Lincoln. Characters in other Washington novels are generally shuttled at high speeds between frantic meetings with other potentates. Zsigmond, however, is a dedicated walker and, when he can't spare the time, user of public transportation on some of the same tram lines I use today. Inner Budapest hasn't changed that drastically physically since then, aside from being bombed out and then mostly repaired. Street names are a different story of course. Here's a quiz for Budapesters: which squares were Berlini Square and Mussolini Square in 1936?

Zsigmond Gordon is a bit of a cipher, in a compelling way. In some respects he seems to have been Americanized - at least from the viewpoint of someone whose idea of America is colored by Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade - and his equally cosmopolitan and more outspoken Transylvanian lady friend more or less tells him that he's got a lot to re/un-learn if he wants to succeed in Byzantine 1930s Budapest. While there are in fact Hungarians named Gordon, both as a surname and a given name (for example, our last prime minister), I suspect that the anglophone connection has some deeper significant that will emerge in later volumes, especially since while Gordon's eccentric but level-headed grandfather is a major supporting character, we never learn what's up with his parents or much else about his earlier life, except for a few snippets from working for the Hungarian language press in Philly in the 1920s (yes, there were Hungarian-language newspapers in lots of US cities back then).

The grandfather, a retired doctor who now dedicates his days to crafting the perfect fruit preserve adds a bit of comedy and part of another Hungarian twist: a healthy fixation with food that was rare in most countries in the 1930s. Zsigmond and Krisztina's (the Transylvanian's) dinner of fresh game in a mountain hunting station are described in more loving detail than one usually finds in noir fiction.

I'll be interested in taking a look at the English translation when it comes out. Stylistically it will be a bit of a challenge for several reasons. First because while the text seems fresh enough in Hungarian, quintessentially American noir fiction, in English and in 2011, unless you are James Ellroy at the height of his power, tends to sound like what Snoopy bangs out of an old typewriter on top of his doghouse. It's like translating a haiku into Japanese. It will be interesting to see what solution the translator comes up with to deal with this. Another is that the characters, even Zsigmond and Krisztina talking with each other, use a style of speech ("could it be that yourself believes that...") that is only used today in highly formal circumstances or mock formal circumstances or when addressing unfamiliar elders. (Grandpa addresses Zsigmond in the familiar, but then Zsigmond "yourselves" him back.) Do you try to to capture this or do you just say heck with it? 

Kondor himself is not part of the Budapest literary scene. He studied here at one point, but apparently lives a quiet life as a science teacher in a town near the Austrian border. This works to his advantage, since his 1930s Budapest manages to be a living city in a way that today's Budapest writers might not be able to manage. And hopefully out there he'll find the time and quiet to write more of these. Two thumbs up. It won't be a runaway international hit, but if you like these kinds of noir novels, or have an interest in Central Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, you will probably find it an enjoyable read. I am going to pick up the second one, Bűnös Budapest, (which they seem to have translated into the inaccurate and awkward Budapest Sin, but they've painted themselves into a linguistic corner with the Budapest "X" title template) on my way to Don Giovanni tonight and start it during the intermission. 

Vienna Braces for Advent

I like Vienna a lot. Who doesn’t like Vienna? We try to visit at least once a year, sometimes just for a day trip, which is entirely practical since the train only takes 3 hours now. I particularly enjoy visiting this time of year. The weather is a bit gloomy but nothing that a mug of steaming glühwein or punch in one of the many Christmas markets won’t disperse. I’m pretty sure that the Viennese didn’t always open their advent markets this early, but in a couple weeks they will be inundated by day-tripping shoppers and tourists from elsewhere in Austria and the surrounding countries, so this is the time when Vienna seems more Viennese.

In September Móni bought tickets for Tannhäuser at the Wiener Staatsoper (reviewed separately) as a birthday present, so we decided to make a long weekend of it – probably our last trip abroad for the year, or for forever if somebody doesn’t do something about the forint exchange rate – giving us three and a half days to wander around town.

 

History has twinned Budapest and Vienna to each other. In many ways the two cities are similar, even complementary cities, but where they diverge, in most but not all respects, Vienna comes off looking the better of two: transportation, public order, cleanliness, even the alpine tap water tastes better. This is nothing to get too upset about, since it’s in part owing to the vagaries of recent history (Austria got very, very lucky in the post WWII shakeout) and also in part because the Viennese have been so successful in building a livable a city over the centuries that, if the city where you live were repositioned 3 hours away from Vienna, chances are pretty good it would seem a bit shabby by comparison too. So we should take it as inspiration.

These will be pretty well-worn tourist routes we take this weekend, but they never get old. Friday we start with a walk around the old downtown, where Christmas decorations are going up on the pedestrianized Kartnerstrasse.

And then to the coffee shops for einspänners. Someone once told me that these are named after some kind of carriage because the coachman, the taxi driver of his day, would order one to warm up his hands with the glass, but if a fare arrived suddenly, he could stir in the thick whipped cream, cooling it down enough so he could drink it down quickly and be on his way.

Ending at the main Christmas market in front of the City Hall. Here you can get every kind of overpriced sweets, fruitcakes, Christmas knickknack, sausage, potato pancake, mulled wine or hot punch.

The smaller Christmas markets further away from the tourist areas, like this one close to the Schottentor are less touristy and less crowded, a bit cheaper, and have more specialized quality products – like this fine frau who serves up various cheering concoctions laced with apple schnapps (from day 4, that’s why it’s light again). You put a 2 euro deposit on the mug, and either give it back or forego the deposit and provide the mug with a loving home.  

Day 2 takes us on a walk through the Prater, which is roughly analogous to Budapest’s Városliget: bigger and more wooded, but also with amenities for the entertainment of the masses. There’s something poignant about an amusement park largely in winter lock-down. It’s the pay-per-ride type of amusement park that seems to have fallen out of fashion everywhere else where you pay through the nose just to get in through the front gate. I like the Prater model better, since it brings the park into the urban fabric, so casual visitors can enjoy it on a summer evening’s stroll.

Then we skirted the center along the Donaukanall. A very pleasant channel of the Danube, but sunken into a giant graffiti-covered (mostly the more thoughtful kind of creative and brightly colored graffiti) culvert, where you don’t really experience it as part of the urban landscape. The main channel of the Danube might as well be in Czechoslovakia. This is a common criticism from supercilious Budapesters, Parisians and inhabitants of other elegantly riparian settlements when searching for something nasty to say about Vienna: Here you have this magnificent city and this fantastic waterway suitable for framing flowing through the area along numerous riverbeds. Do they hate each other? or How do you know when you’re crossing a bridge?

And then on to the world’s most delightful garbage incinerator. This is an environmentally friendly garbage incinerator, powering a generator and district heating and emitting (I think) only steam. If it was the polluting kind of garbage incinerator, Hundertwasser in his earth-father wisdom wouldn’t have decorated it for them and they would build it right upwind from the Hungarian border, not in the middle of the capital.

Another plus point for Vienna is its modern architecture at every level and its integration into the existing urban fabric. I (sort of) studied architectural history as an undergraduate, and find the vast majority of all architecture from 1960 or so to be objectionable on the grounds of its egotism, dullness, or failure to take its surroundings into account. For me, Vienna is an exception to this rule on a city-wide scale. And it’s not just the Hundertwassers and Gasometers: simple modern glass office buildings and public housing looks like they were built with great attention to the integrity of the whole, at least so it seems to an outsider. I’m sure I would join the fray and grow more critical of individual aspects if I actually lived there. Hmm, and I neglected my old friends the Gasometers on this trip.

Day 3 it’s up to twee little Grinzing, bucolic stamping grounds of Beethoven and Schubert. Vienna prides itself on being the only big city in the whole world where wine is grown commercially inside the city limits, for which Grinzing, where the vineyards meet the Vienna Woods, is the best known spot to sample them. First we hiked up through the woods to the Kahlenberg Heights, which is where Jan Sobieski started his charge in 1683 to lift the Turkish siege of the city, one of the major turning points in modern history. The Austrians thanked him by dismembering Poland 90 years later.

Then out into the vineyards close to Nussburg, still inside the city limits of Vienna. 

And back down to Grinzing for some well-earned liver dumpling soup and an enormous shared kaiserschmarrn, the emperor’s crumbs, which was Franz Josef’s favorite dessert but I don’t believe is well known outside the old Empire. This house-specialty version is bolstered with meringue filling along with the traditional raisins and plum jam, so it’s a good thing we didn’t order an entrée. As usual after a long hike,  I ordered a beer.

But now we have to hurry back for Tannhäuser!

Tannhäuser at the Wiener Staatsoper

 

I have really only started attending the opera regularly since I moved to Budapest. I had been to the Washington Opera a few times way back when, and the Met once, the Deutsche Oper Berlin on a guest performance in DC, and maybe to a couple student / summer tourist performances here and there, but for the last 12 (12!) years it’s only been Budapest.

So, I know that in the grand scheme of things Budapest is considered a perfectly respectable opera company, with performances ranging from competent to brilliant on a given night, but as an ensemble company in a cash-strapped small country, it simply can’t afford the kind of talent that would place it consistently in the very top tier. It’s probably a bit better than the Washington Opera ever was, but how do I compare it to the likes of a hazily remembered performance of the Met or Deutsche Oper?

For some time I’ve been meaning to branch out and watch a performance in Vienna, among other cities. Actually they have (at least) two operas there. The Staatsoper does serious productions, while the Volksoper generally produces lighter fare.  And, so for my birthday Móni got us tickets to see Wagner’s Tannhäuser. Móni let me choose the performance, and I chose this one because a) I like it a lot and b) I have seen it three times in Budapest, which should serve as a good basis of comparison.

So how does Vienna stack up against Budapest? First, it’s 10 times as expensive. The price of our seats in the rafters would have gotten us pretty close to the front rows in the stalls in Budapest. Of course, low prices mean that you sometimes have to suffer sitting near chatty tourists, and high prices presumably mean you are paying for quality, but on the whole, let’s call Budapest the winner.

Second, our opera house is much nicer than theirs. It just is. In part this is because the Americans bombed the Vienna opera house in the war and much of it had to be rebuilt in the 1950s. So the lower foyer has a rebuilt grand staircase, but the theater itself looks like a giant Tastee Diner dressed up as a napoleon pastry. 

There are advantages to forced rebuilding, though. In Budapest we get a bit ashamed when our fellow patrons who use wheelchairs cannot be given the proper treatment that they deserve. Sadly, the same is true for our Metro system. Vienna trumps us with elevators in both.

Apart from the wheelchair issue, so far Budapest 2-0. Now the overture starts. The overture to Tannhaüser, clocking in at just under 20 minutes, is one of the greatest pieces of orchestral music ever written. In Budapest, sometimes you don’t get to hear the first couple minutes properly, but here the whispers cut off as soon as the first, or maybe second, note of the horn sounds, which is one of the things I’m listening for, since sometimes I think Budapest has a slightly dodgy brass section. But this might be because I listen to a lot of Wagner and Richard Strauss, who both wrote very difficult horn parts. And indeed the Viennese horns do their job without the slightest falter or blemish.  But the strings, by contrast, are played a bit too tightly by the more expressive standards of Budapest, which is fine when the singing starts but sounds too robotic for the overture. So we’ll call this one a tie.

No orgy ballet! In Budapest we always get to see the writhing debauchery of Venusberg as the curtain rises (the result of a little contretemps between Wagner and the French), a good reason to bring your opera glasses. But the prudish Austrians stuck to the Master’s original intentions. Budapest 3-0-1. Out comes Tannhaüser, dressed up in cca 1900 clothing. (with Venus in evening wear, sultrily sucking down – is that 2 cigarettes? – with Tannhäuser nattily dressed for travel with a boxy suitcase – coz he’s hitting the road, you know.) The opera itself takes place in the 14^th century. I don’t know if I like this. All the more surprisingly because I thought Vienna was conservative about stuff like this. Later we get young pilgrims dressed in tails and old pilgrims shambling around in hospital gowns, one in a straightjacket. OK, it’s just the costumes. We’ll let it slide. 3-0-2.

But then the singing starts and it’s clear that we are on a different level. Tannhaüser is played by American Stephen Gould who flies around the world as a heldentenor-for-hire. Vienna uses guest principals for a given performance, but I think he sings in Vienna quite often because I listened to an interview on Radio Stephensdom a few years ago where he said so (I listen to Radio Stephensdom, Vienna’s fantastic classical radio station on the Internet when I work because I can tune out the German when they start to blabber but I can’t tune out the Hungarian when Hungary’s equally fabulous Bártok Rádio starts to blabber, except Gould’s German was sufficiently rudimentary that I couldn’t tune it out either and I had to stop and listen). Anyways, he’s really good at singing in German. Simply this huge and amazingly controlled voice.

What really struck me about the performance was not only the technical quality of the singing and the timbres of the voices, but the level of nuance not just of Gould, but of all the other principals, especially Matthias Goerne as Wolfram, which added an extra dimension to the story that I had never experienced before. For example, the minstrels with their singing contest debating the nature of love in the 2^nd act is a bit of a dull litany in the Budapest production, but here becomes a taut psychodrama.

So final score is 5-3-2 Vienna. It isn’t streets ahead of Budapest on a good night but it is in a different category. For all I know this was a stellar night for the Staatsoper, but if this the average level of quality, then I’ll be visiting more frequently. It could be the comparison isn’t quite fair because the Budapest Tannhäuser is an old warhorse, and the best singers tend to go toward the higher profile nearly revamped productions. So I propose that the Hungarian government follow the lead of our western neighbors and disburse an extra 50 million euros to the Hungarian State Opera so that we can also find ourselves on a solid financial footing for enjoying world-class opera. It will be money better spent than whatever else it is they are spending our money on. And Stephen, if you come to Budapest, send me an email and I'll buy you a beer.

Finally, as for the audience, there was great consideration, even in the attic. Of course, the fact that half of Vienna has the ague reverberates up there in the rafters better than anyone else, but egregious cases were swiftly dealt with by the guardians of the audience, without the need for the operpolizei. We happened to have Herr Postnasaldrippen sitting behind us, but after a couple dirty looks he managed to restrain his snorts until the moments after the orchestra took up at the end of the aria. Gesundheit!

La Cenerentola

This week's opera was Rossini's La Cenerentola, which is a lot of fun. Strong ensemble performance, with  Lucia Schwartz Megyesi as Cinderella. It's not an opera that showcases a lot of individual virtuousity, but there are some devilishly intricate quintets and sextets. My guess is it's a lot of fun for the cast, too.

Rossini is probably one of the composers one would like to have supper with. He didn't like supernatural elements though. So instead of a fairy godmother, a pumpkin, and rodent coachmen in livery, we get a wise philosopher/tudor/benefactor and a cohor of clowns pushing around a pimped-up Studebaker and even cooking up a giant spaghetti dinner for the ball. (I wonder if the cast got to eat it after curtain.)

No videos up from this production, so I have to Youtube other productions to point out my favorite bits.

 Here in this rodent endowed performance from, I think, Barcelona, starting around 17:00 we get a good debate, alternating between lyrical longing (reminds me of the fabulous accordian music from Amélie) and rapid-fire Italian, as to whether or not Cinderella is going to go to the ball.

And then of course, we have Questo è un nodo avviluppato "this is a tangled knot". How can you not love this? Also, I'm going to start saying Questo è un nodo avviluppato more often when I want to irritate people who are concentrating on a difficult matter.