For My Family, Hungarian Summers Are As Sweet As Stone Fruit

When I think of Hungary, my husband ’s homeland, I think of the stone fruits that bookend our late-summer trips to the village of his childhood. Here, on the plains of central Hungary at the foot of the Bakony Mountains, fruit is the song of our summers. Platters of dinnye (melon) and clusters of szőlő (wine grapes) are the melody that carries through a decade-long renovation of our 300-year-old house, next door to my in-laws.

Last summer, we came to finish the guesthouse and to tame the wild plum trees, whose branches are so heavy they scrape the soil. We harvested inky blackberries and tended land nourished by millennia of livestock. We ate stone fruit raw by the fistful: meggyes, luscious Balaton cherries; őszibarack, fist-sized peaches; szilva, sour plums in every shape and size (small and yellow, firm and blushed, deep purple and tender — a prune in the making); and ribizli, red currants, the scarlet orbs dangling from tiny stems. My children love to pull them off one by one with their lips.

Every year, fruit is also the muse of our summer kitchen. We cook apricots low and slow into a tender pulp called lekvár, a fruit butter to spread on rolled pancakes. We sprinkle plums into thick, earthy tortes laced with poppy seeds. To me, these tortes offer the taste of perseverance; the story of shifting borders, world wars, communist rule, and the 1956 revolution — all baked in a humble cake. It’s the food of the village folk, of our family, that I crave on the long stretches between trips. Like the people themselves, it is modest but remarkable. 

When I first met my husband, András, 16 years ago, his native tongue was beyond my recognition. Magyar (Hungarian) is renowned for its complexity, influenced by centuries of nomadic history. (The Magyars are thought to have settled in the region around 900 A.D.) On visits, I would get by on small bits of German, the second language of our village, but it was fruit that gave me an inroad: walking the orchard with András’ father, learning to tame the gnarled limbs; perching atop pots full of stone fruit with his mother, mimicking the movements of her small but discerning knife, trimming away only the largest offenses. Here, perfect fruit is suspect; most villagers, like my in-laws, still use sustainable growing practices. The result: boastful flavor, and sometimes-spotted fruit that expresses its exceptional terroir.

Three weeks into our months-long stay every summer, András’ mother rolls palacsinta — thin pancakes — spread with apricot lekvár. Stacks of them wait in a warm oven, covered to stay moist, ours for the taking between hauling branches and taking hikes up the Bakony’s gentle slope. My mother-in-law lavishes jewel-toned gyümölcsleves, a tart fruit soup, into shallow bowls and humors me if I whisk a ladleful away to our wedding porcelain, from nearby Herend, for a photo. The rest goes into jelly jars, to be chilled in the fridge for the next day’s trip to the beach at Lake Balaton, Central Europe’s playground, an hour south. There, we eat lángos, fried dough slathered with garlic and sour cream. Black and pink currants float in the iced lemonade we drink in the warmth. We feast on fagyi, or ice cream, in every flavor, from bodzavirág (elderflower) to fekete szeder (blackberry).  

Our last days of the summer every year are spent moving soil and plotting our small orchard. It’s taxing work, but work that lends an intimacy to the land. We’re shaping next year’s crop, growing a legacy that will feed our children for decades to come.

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