Have you ever felt nostalgic for a funny, soggy dish? Hungarians have. I tell you the story of the meat with egg barley and I cook it for you. (On the picture: herders are cooking in their cauldron on the Hungarian Lowlands in 1942. Photograph: fortepan.hu)

We ate it in the communism and we eat it nowadays. It is very simple, cheap and filling. We cook it at home, but you can finde it on the menu of the not sophisticated restaurants, too. Meat with egg barley or, as we call it from the communist times, the ’pioneer’s dumpling’.

 What is the Egg Barley?

 If you wold like to enumerate the ’noodle nations’, I think, you will not mention the Hungarian. But it is good to know, that the dried noodles and pastas are very important elements of the Hungarian cuisine. In the past, in the Lowlands the herders always stored this kind of foods in their hovels. Either of them is the egg barley.

 According to the literature, it originated in Persia and the Hungarians learnt to produce it from the Ottomans. (Maybe you know that the Hungarian Kingdom had been occupated by the Ottoman Empire from 1541 to 1686.) The process is simple: they passed the soft dough through a sieve and then they dried it on a piece of canvas.

 Another Type of Communism

 We used different nicknames for the Hugarian communism like ’the happiest barrack’ or ’goulasch communism’. Why? Becouse we were as poor country as every other one in the Comecon ,but we always had enough food. It is very important for the Hungarians to have enough food. From 1948 to 1956  we had lived in a hardliner, soviet type communism but after the revolution in 1956 the regime had to make a new deal with the people: hey guys, you bide where you be, and in exchange there always will be enough to eat. We are going to build appartments for you, we give a job for everybody etc., etc.

A tipical canteen in a Hungarian factory (1961, photograph: fortepan.hu)

 The Hungarian cuisine was very bare in these times and either of the most common dishes was the meat with egg barley. As I wrote it above, we cooked it at home and in the same time we were able to get it in the canteens of the schools, the universities, the factories and in the cafeterias all over the country.

Pioneers in a camp in Budapest (1949, photograph: fortepan.hu) 

 It is little more than the ’pörkölt’ (a stew made of chopped meat with onion, paprika, tomato, black pepper and salt – this is the basic of the Hungarian goulasch and it is similar to the dish called goulasch in the other countries of the formal Austro-Hungarian Monarchy) mixed with fried and boiled egg barley.

 It’s great, isn’t it?

 Okeydoke but what about the Pioneers?

 The manufactured (not the home-made!) egg barley consists of small and round pieces. As if they were small dumplings. And in the school canteens the egg barley was overcooked every times, we always got big soggy dumplings on the plate.

 By the way pioneers! The meat with egg barley was common in the pioneer camps, as well but I think, the real reason is that with the term ’pioneer’s dumpling’ we would had liked to tell, this spoiled, soggy thingy is so unimaginable, so terrible, so communist.

I've cooked meat with egg barley. These are the ingredients (Photographs: K.S.E.)

And this is it. OK it is not as soggy as in the school but we liked it 

My lady made a portion of cucumber salad with sour cream for it. Belive me, these are the perfect couple