Plum Dumplings to Go the Distance
Text and photos by Pia Koh
I’d heard anecdotes from my aunt about my grandma’s kitchen being in complete disarray when szilvás gombóc were swimming in the pot.
I once roasted a chicken that was so crisp, so tender, so permeated with flavor, that it’s been mentioned, longingly, every year since. It was during a visit to my grandparents’ house in Providence, where my grandma and I would pass entire days in the kitchen together, and I still remember how her eyes smiled as I cleaned, buttered and massaged our unfeathered friend. When it emerged from the oven, glistening and tan, I had the self-assurance of someone who knows, instinctively, that their food’s come out right. And yet, I think the main reason we turn our memories back to that dinner, year after year, is not for the chicken itself, but because we’re nostalgic about that time, that place.
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A couple of years ago, my grandma moved from the three-story house where she’d raised her family to an assisted living home in the same neighborhood. Her husband had passed away a few years earlier, and she was growing too small for the space. Now, my grandma’s kitchen consists of only a microwave, a mini-fridge and a few serrated knives, so there’s little chance for me to cook for her.
Before the pandemic, she had eaten every meal in the dining room downstairs. At first, she complained about the food—bland meatloaf, dry salmon, small portions fit for old people who spend their days mostly sedentary. Then, a few months in, she stopped complaining unless she was coaxed; the enthusiasm once associated with mealtime had become a distant memory. These days, mid-pandemic, her food is pre-packaged and deposited in front of her room by a diligent masked nurse. How her meals have changed over these past two years, how sterile they’ve become. Worse yet, it’s possible my grandma will never enjoy a meal in the company of her family again.
At the height of covid outbreaks in late spring, visitors weren’t allowed to enter the lobby of the assisted living home. So, when I heard that my mom would be traveling to Providence to see my grandma through a window in the facility, I asked if she’d drop off a package for me. It was an opportunity to reach my grandma, if not in person, at least sensorily, the way I knew how.
I’d often send baked goods to Providence with my mom, who visited more frequently than I did, usually in the form of muffins or banana bread, but sometimes in pastries that incorporated the Eastern European flavors that my grandma had grown up with. She and my grandpa fled Hungary during the 1956 Revolution, and she’s hardly been back since. Her father-in-law had been sent to a concentration camp where he was employed as a cook. I’ve been told that he ate the kitchen scraps, which helped him stay alive until his eventual escape. That memory, of a misery unimaginable to me, has forced her to hold Hungary at arms-length.
Still, her taste for the flavors of her homeland have persisted, even despite decades of Americanization. When she still lived at home, her paprika, salami and sour cherry syrup were delivered from the motherland. Most meals she served, whether paprikás csirke or shrimp linguini, were accompanied by uborkasalata, thinly sliced cucumbers marinated in white vinegar and sugar. If we were lucky, she’d finish a dinner with whipped cream and gesztenyepüré–riced chestnuts and sugar processed together in a thick, nutty paste. Thus, I’ve developed a taste for the region that feels somewhat distant to us both.
Over time, I’d started sending vaguely Hungarian desserts, like linzer tortes or apple strudels. They were safe bets—the crust for linzer is like a nutty shortbread dough, the flavors of a strudel are as familiar as pie. But this past spring, I ventured further out. I was trying to hit my grandma with peak nostalgia. I wanted to not only comfort her with a familiar food, but remove her from the assisted living home, rewind time, somehow remind her that, although the world might be in peril, there’s comfort to be found. Perhaps I was sending this message for my own sake, too.
My attempts to emulate my grandma’s cuisine were bolstered only by her own cooking, since Hungarian food isn’t a regular part of my diet. Despite the decent number of Hungarian-Americans in New York (about 58,000 according to American FactFinder), only one restaurant, Budapest Cafe, still stands. It was part of a greater “Little Hungary” that once existed between East 75th and East 83rd Streets, a hub for the Austro-Hungarian populace that immigrated there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Along 2nd Avenue, one could have found a stretch of Eastern European restaurants, European butcher shops, stores selling imported Hungarian goods, and one of the few Magyar-speaking parishes in the Northeast.
Within the borders of Hungary, Salamon tells me that the plum dumpling varies considerably. While you can find szilvás gombóc in the northern regions, you won’t find them much in the city centers or in Budapest.
I found it curious that in a city as multicultural as New York, where one could locate an authentic version of nearly every cuisine, there exists such a dearth of Hungarian restaurants. To talk over this discrepancy and the legacy of Hungarian food in New York, I reached out to fellow Hungarian Jew, chef Jeremy Salamon.
Salamon began cooking at The Eddy, in the East Village, in 2014. As he rose in the ranks from line cook to executive chef, he began introducing his Hungarian background to the menu. Alongside New American mainstays like grass-fed ribeye and sunchoke purée, The Eddy offered lángos, a deep-fried Hungarian flatbread, and a chocolate sponge cake, Rigó Jancsi, named after a Romanian violinist. After a seven-year run, the restaurant closed in 2019. Now, Salamon is opening a more explicitly Eastern European cafe, Agi’s, where pastries will be predominant. When asked why he thinks Hungarian food has yet to be thoroughly embraced in New York, Salamon came up with a number of reasons.
“It’s a very old generation, and they’re just disappearing,” he says. “There’s not much of an interest from younger generations to carry the tradition forward, and I think it’s partly because Hungarian and Eastern European cuisines aren’t really pretty, they aren’t really Instagram-worthy.”
Eastern European food has long been stereotyped in America as heavy, sloppy and stewy. It’s unfortunate, he says, “but food is very much something that we see.”
But this isn’t the main reason why Hungarian restaurants are close to nil. A lot of the responsibility lies on those who immigrated here in the middle of the 20th century. Salamon says their lack of support is evident. When he launched a Kickstarter for his new cafe, Salamon had expected some Hungarians to back him. “But I had virtually none come out and support, not just monetarily, but not even voicing their support. And I think it really hearkens back to Hungary’s roots. It’s a tortured history for them.”
Older Hungarians, especially Jews, are reluctant to engage with their country’s past. As famously stated by Hungarian businessman Andrew Grove, those who left Hungary in the middle of the century had already lived through “a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ ‘Final Solution,’ the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint.” Put this way, it’s understandable that older immigrants have little desire to uphold a culture they were fleeing.
“My grandfather spoke about the Holocaust, but he never wanted to return to Hungary,” Salamon says. “They ultimately betrayed the Jews. My grandmother wanted to go back and she did after he died, but she’s always very hesitant to talk about the cuisine and the food, and to share recipes with me.”
Still, older generations remain protective of their cuisine. Salamon describes an encounter he had with a Hungarian guest at The Eddy, to whom he had served a huge plate of palacsinta—a rolled crepe-like dessert.
“She got up out of her seat, and I swore she was going to backhand me. She was livid, so red, all because I didn’t include chestnut puree.” In a way, Salamon says, the older generation is suppressing the movement forward for the entire cuisine. “It’s not easy, especially with Hungarians, who have a lot of pride. You can say that with other countries–but Italians, for example, have had that global exposure in so many forms. It’s been altered and toyed and played with, whereas Hungarian food really hasn’t.”
Despite the grief she associates with Hungary, my grandma never stopped appreciating the country’s cuisine. This is apparent in her collection of Hungarian cookbooks, which have been creased and stained from use over time. Trying to decide on a dish to send to Providence, I referred to a stack of books that I had adopted from her old kitchen. There’s a worn white one, with a cover decorated in the folklorish watercolors of Eastern Europe, containing archaic instructions like: “once boiling, move your pot to the corner of the fire.” There’s another one with a tattered cloth binding in which neither the quantity of ingredients nor the instructions are stated with precision.
I was drawn to a particular recipe in Susan Derecskey’s The Hungarian Cookbook for its clever technique, although I was skeptical about its flavors and whether I’d be able to execute it well, if at all. It’s a recipe for plum dumplings, or szilvás gombóc.
***
In Georg Lang’s Cuisine of Hungary, the restaurateur writes, “if someone were to ask me to name the Hungarian food preparation that is most different from that of other nations, I would name without hesitation hot noodle desserts.” Szilvás gombóc are woven into the fabric of Hungarian cuisine, which is contingent on doughy noodles, potatoes and stone fruit. But the sweet dumpling has been enjoyed across Eastern Europe since at least the 17th century. According to the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, one of the earliest of these recipes was found in an anonymous manuscript at Prague’s National Museum, dated in the 1600s.
Within the borders of Hungary, Salamon tells me that the plum dumpling varies considerably. While you can find szilvás gombóc in the northern regions, you won’t find them much in the city centers or in Budapest.
“It’s really more of a countryside grandma thing,” he says. Since it was spawned in Northern Hungary, Salamon thinks that it might have expanded into Austria, where you see a very similar dumpling using apricots instead of plums. Meanwhile, Hungarian cities have transformed this dessert into a ravioli rather than a dumpling. “They’re shaped like these elongated triangles. It’s made the same exact way as ravioli is, but it’s an eggier dough, and they fill it with this very thick plum puree.”
I was eager to pull off this seemingly simple, but technically challenging, dish. I’d heard anecdotes from my aunt about my grandma’s kitchen being in complete disarray when szilvás gombóc were swimming in the pot. There would be screaming, crying, sounds of defeat, then sudden enthusiasm, excitement and ultimate achievement once the plum dumplings were plated, stabbed, and the purple syrup came draining through the gooey potato dough.
To my surprise, my grandma thought the dumplings tasted close to authentic.
Despite the turbulence that awaited me, I began the recipe. I riced the potatoes, spread them on a sheet tray, and placed a stick of butter on the counter to temper overnight.
Nevertheless, the following morning, most of the expected obstacles came to pass. Although I liked the idea of shoving a sugar cube where a pit once was, I found it impossible to remove the stone and retain the fruit’s shape. Then the potato was gummy and wouldn’t properly bandage around the plums, which were wider than expected and already protruding in translucent spots from under the dough.
Once it was time to boil, the pot was too crowded and the dumplings, brushing up against one another, lost their dough in large swaths, revealing naked purple flesh, and allowing the sweet sugar syrup to bleed into the water. Meanwhile, the potato exterior was being dyed pink in the tainted salt water and, by the end of the endeavor, I counted nine casualties whose guts and skins had sunk to the bottom of the pot.
Coating the dumplings in breadcrumbs was another odyssey. I thought this step might be my one saving grace, since it would cover holes in the dough, and at least dry out the soggy plums. I also needed the breadcrumbs to impart some sweetness, which I could tell was lacking in the dessert. The boiling water had done what boiling water usually does–sap the flavor from the sugared plums and render the bland potato dough even more insipid.
So, very carefully, I somersaulted the dumplings around a plate of breadcrumbs, creating five presentable rolls before the topping was depleted. I left the four remaining naked dumplings on the counter, sprinkled with cinnamon sugar, for my mom and I to share that morning.
Soon after, my mom left with the package, and I sighed. It was disappointing that the one dessert I’d be sending to Providence that summer was probably unraveling in its tasteless potato shell on the train. Still, I knew that despite the lame flavor and the butchery of technique, my grandma would sympathize with my effort. The dumplings might at least recall the hours she’d spent in her own American kitchen–her own struggle to pit the plums while keeping them whole, to seal the potato dough around the slippery skin, to maximize the breadcrumbs for one final roll—even if they didn’t replicate what might be found in the kávéházak of Budapest. I realized, in my own failed attempt, perhaps I had managed to magnify the nostalgia-inducing effects of the szilvás gombóc.
To my surprise, my grandma thought the dumplings tasted close to authentic. I was in partial disbelief, although I had only tried the smallest, ugliest, most naked dumplings that were left over from the pot, I found them bland, slightly sour and sort of limp. Still, whether or not the plum dumplings were authentic to her taste, I was grateful that I had been able to bridge some of the distance between us–maybe not yet in person, but at least through five sodden szilvás gombóc.
Szilvás gombóc is not a food, it is a vice. Grown men daydream and reminisce about plum dumplings they have known; they brag about how many they can eat at one session. They feel gloomy and deprived if the season passes without a plum-dumpling orgy. In earthbound reality, a szilvás gombóc is a potato dumpling with a pitted purple plum inside it, and a melted sugar cube inside that. To the initiate, the moment of revelation comes even before the first bite, namely when he jabs his fork into the dumpling and hot plum juice squirts out. From then on, it is a riot of sensations, gluey versus chewy, sweet versus bland–a unique item in anyone’s repertoire. Although szilvás gombóc can be served as a dessert, it usually shows up as a snack on a Sunday afternoon in late summer.
The following recipe is for 18 dumplings of the drier type (some aficionados prefer a moisture dumpling that is kneaded, not rolled). It will serve six as a dessert; for a snack, count 5 or 6 dumplings per person.
6 medium potatoes (about 1 1/2 to 2 pounds)
Salt
18 purple plums (the kind called Italian or Hungarian plums)
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
3 eggs
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, at room temperature
18 small sugar cubes
3/4 cup dry bread crumbs
The night before, cook the potatoes in their jackets in salted water until done (when they can be pierced easily with the point of a paring knife) and drain.
As soon as they are cool enough to handle, peel them and force them through a ricer.
Spread the riced potatoes out on a cookie sheet and let them stand overnight in a cool place to dry them out.
When you are ready to make the gombóc, pit the plums and set them aside.
Transfer the riced potatoes to a mixing bowl (there should be about 3 cups, loosely packed), and mix in the flour and 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt.
Add the eggs, and work the dough together with a wooden spoon and your floured hands.
Beat in 5 tablespoons of butter, a tablespoon at a time, and continue to work the dough with your hands until it is smooth.
Let it rest for 20 minutes, then roll it out 1/4 inch thick on a floured board and cut it into 3- or 4-inch squares.
To form the dumplings, flour your hands, place a square of dough in your left palm, put a plum in the middle of it and a sugar cube into the pit cavity. Pinch the dumpling closed, and roll it into a round smooth ball. Place it, pinched side up, on a floured board until ready to cook.
Just before serving, drop the dumplings one at a time into plenty of rapidly boiling salted water. Do not crowd them into the pot. After a minute, give the dumplings a jog with a wooden spoon to keep them from sticking to the bottom. Let them cook 12 to 15 minutes uncovered after they rise to the surface.
Taste one: the plum should be hot and the dough firm but not gummy when done. Do not overcook. While boiling the dumplings, quickly brown the bread crumbs in the remaining 3 tablespoons of butter.
As the dumplings are ready, lift them carefully out of the water with a slotted spoon, roll them in the browned bread crumbs, and keep them warm until all are done. Serve immediately.
