Hortobágyi palacsinta

The story

Hortobágy is a region of the Great Hungarian Plain, but hortobágyi palacsinta has nothing to do with it. As the Budapest news site Telex put it, the hortobágyi has as much to do with Hortobágy as párizsi sausage has with Paris. For decades the standard account held that the dish was invented for the 1958 Brussels World Expo and given a rustic name there. The dish itself is older. A palacsinta filled with paprika chicken appears in a 1909 cookbook, a 1939 cookbook gives one with veal stew, and Telex found an 1896 recipe in the periodical Székesfehérvár és Vidéke: chicken braised with onion and Szeged paprika, finished with sour cream, chopped, rolled into thin pancakes and baked under salted sour cream until the top crisped. The likeliest story is that the expo gave an existing dish its catchy name. Today cooks fill the pancakes with veal or chicken pörkölt or with ground meat stewed the same way, and turn the strained juices into a paprika and sour cream sauce. Serve two per person as a hot starter, with a crisp cucumber salad, and keep the main course light.