During our nation's colourful history Hungarian cuisine got influences from many ethnic gastronomies. In the first couple of centuries AD our ancestors lived in the Euro-Asian steppe. They were a semi-nomadic group that lived as hunters and fishermen.
Around 500 AD the Magyar tribes migrated and settled down near the River Don. They got into contact with Turks and Bulgarians and learned much about cooking from them.
Soup was a very important meal in Hungarian cuisine at that time, as it is today. A perfect Hungarian lunch always starts with some kind of soup. It was a complete meal and more like a stew in those nomadic years. They usually served soups with small round-shaped pasta, tarhonya. As of today we still have tarhonya as a garnish in our menus.
Other ancient Hungarian dishes are stuffed cabbage, beef soup, fish soup, and the famous goulash. They are still very popular. Ancient Hungarian cooking used several types of grains, like millet, oat and later wheat.
The most delicious dishes were always made in a single pot. This pot was usually the bogrács, a cast iron kettle, hung on an iron stick over the fire. Bogrács is a very popular cooking utensil today, we use it for outdoor cooking.
After settling down in the Carpathian Basin our ancestors incorporated pork in their cuisine. We often cook pork dishes today especially in the villages where almost every family raises its own pork and butcher it during winter time within a great feast called “disznótor”.
In the early middle ages after the consolidation of the Hungarian State, Hungarian cuisine had influences from both western and eastern nations. Especially the great invasions left their marks on our cooking.