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.