After a "kitchen break" of a few months, we have again started adding entries to our treasury of Hungarian recipes. Among them are more than a dozen recipes from Hungary's Roma/Gypsy community. Some are "takes" on simple Hungarian dishes, and others more outlandish. (Pig's womb and ground squirrel are not so easy to find at the market.) But variety is the spice of life, and we feel it's important not to overlook this interesting corner of Hungary's kitchen, especially given that there has apparently not been a Roma restaurant in Budapest since 2004.

From the book Cigányok Főztje (Cooking of the Gypsies) by Géza Csemer - from which many of the recipes below were sourced - we learned a few basics about Roma cuisine and culinary history. First, Gypsies don't really have any traditional holiday or religious dishes, and they usually make the same dishes as their gádzsó (non-Roma) neighbors. "Surprisingly we haven't brought any cooking traditions with us from India," wrote Csemer, "only a thousand-year hunger." A few traditions that Csemer does mention are eating túró and drinking pálinka during funeral vigils and handing out kalács and pogácsa to bystanders at baptisms. Eating stuffed cabbage flavored with dill and having pig killings are also baptism traditions.

The Roma "are still a nation in motion," wrote Csemer. "They are guests everywhere." According to him, they arrived in Hungary in the 15th century with the Turks, who brought them as musicians and artisans. They adopted the local religion and language in the new country, and they also copied the new culinary culture wherever they went. Most of the Gypsies living in Hungary today arrived in the late 19th century from Transylvania. Csemer wrote that most of the urban Gypsies are úri cigányok (noble gypsies), who were forced to become musicians in the 18th century. Musical skills were passed from generation to generation, and became family tradition.

These Gypsies became the Roma elite, and the Hungarian-Roma cuisine described in the book comes from this group (which Csemer identifies himself as being part of). It turned out that their jobs as musicians helped shape the cuisine that today's Hungarian Gypsies eat. Many of the dishes were the results of Gypsy musicians tasting dishes and flavors at the restaurants, receptions and banquets where they were playing, and then going home and reproducing them (or asking their wives to). It seemed that from those places, they also adopted the style of eating well and largely. "Many Gypsy families cooked away whole fortunes using a cheap wooden spoon," wrote Csemer. "They were not concerned with saving money for bad times, but they refused to eat cheaply made dishes."