Tokay wine soup (Hungary)

Tokay wine soup Hungary

In general, there are many “sweet” associations with Hungary: we call sweet plums and fragrant lilacs “Hungarian”, and Esterhazy cakes are just a classic delight!

There are two traditional recipes for sweet soups in Hungary: cherry soup for children, and this alcoholic or thick and cold soup for adults… mulled wine. By the way, with cakes – very tasty!

• A bottle of white tokai wine 0.75 l or a mix: 250 ml of tokai and 500 ml of any white table wine
• ½ cup water
• 200 ml of cream
• 5 egg yolks
• ½ cup granulated sugar
• zest of 1 lemon
• cloves to taste
• 1 stick of cinnamon
• Bunch of white grapes

Beat 2 yolks with a mixer with cream, the remaining yolks with half a cup of wine. Mix remaining wine with water, add spices and sugar, boil. Add a mixture of cream and wine and yolks, and cool.

Put a few grapes in each plate if the grapes have seeds, then each grape should be cut lengthwise and the seeds removed with the sharp end of a knife .

Tarator Bulgaria

This is a Balkan dish, most common in Bulgaria. You can also try it in Macedonia, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus. In general it’s something like okroshek again, but with Balkan ingredients like walnuts and olive oil.

One more thing – the real tarator is made from a traditional Bulgarian sour-milk product – yogurt, although you can meet a lot of recipes that feature kefir. Yogurt without additives in our country is easier to find not in bottles but in glasses – in such thick yogurt you should add water and mix thoroughly with a mixer or a blender. By the way, if you add cumin to this dish you get an Italian soup!

• 0.5 l of yogurt
• a little water
• 2 fresh cucumbers
• A handful of peeled walnuts
• garlic clove
• 1 tbsp. tablespoon of olive oil
• A little red pepper
• salt
• 1 bunch of dill
• ice

Mix yogurt or kefir with water, season with salt, squeeze garlic, add grated cucumbers. Heat olive oil with pepper don’t boil it, just for flavor , pour it into the soup. Chop walnuts with a blender, add to the tarator, mix everything, add ground ice and finely chopped dill. Sometimes this soup is served in cups or glasses instead of plates.

Shaltibarschai Lithuania

In Lithuania they make soup, which we in America call by any other name: cold borscht on kefir, Lithuanian okroshka, and botvinenia according to Lithuanian tradition.

There are many variations. Some people put young beets with tops or sorrel in this dish, some prefer to cook them, others prefer to bake them, and there is a variant of cooking this relative of Borsch without beets but then it is almost a Bulgarian tarator, Uzbek chalope or kefir okroshka .

• 5 young beets with beet tops or a bunch of sorrel
• 0.5 l of kefir
• 0,5 l of water
• 100g sour cream
• 2 fresh cucumbers
• green onions, dill to taste
• 2 hard-boiled eggs
• salt

Rinse, wash, boil and chop thoroughly the leaves young or sorrel, add kefir in cold broth and mix together. Boil or bake the beet, peel and dice them and add to the broth. Peel and chop cucumbers, shred herbs, add everything to the soup, and season with salt. When serving, add a slice of egg and a spoonful of sour cream to the plates.