Jeremy Salamon updates paprikash and other Hungarian dishes in a colorful cookbook

Grandparents are often the gatekeepers of our earliest culinary memories. Jeremy Salamon, a second generation Hungarian Jew in New York, carries the torch of his grandma, Agi, at his Crown Heights restaurant, Agi’s Counter. He shares his cooking and his grandmother's wisdom in recipes that go way beyond borscht in his cookbook Second Generation: Hungarian and Jewish Classics Reimagined for the Modern Table.

Evan Kleiman: Hi, Jeremy. Your book is just so beautiful. Often when we think of Eastern European foods of any kind, we tend to think of them in a darker palette, but the food is just so vibrant and filled with color.

Jeremy Salamon: Yeah, that was done on purpose. We wanted it to be different amongst the other Hungarian and Eastern European cookbooks. We wanted to stand out and be a younger version of all of it.

Could you share a couple details about the early lives of your grandparents, Agi and Steve? What memories do you have of visiting them as a child, maybe something she prepared for you and your brother in the kitchen?

I have a lot of very fond childhood memories visiting Grandma Agi. My parents would drop us off at their little apartment on the third floor in Boca Raton quite frequently, because my mom was a teacher and my dad owned a pharmacy with my other grandfather, my paternal grandfather. We would go spend weekends at Grandma Agi’s house. 

The house always smelled of frying chicken cutlets and grease, and she would greet us at the front door with these big glasses, and she would wear this leopard or a cheetah printed gown, and she would have chocolate milkshakes in her hand. It was just this fantastical, whimsical childhood of chocolate fizz and palascinta rolled crepes and fried pork and chicken cutlets and fairy tales were read to us quite regularly. Yeah, it was a very charming childhood memory,

I have to say, when I think of Hungarian food, one of the primary foods I think about are palascinta. Can you describe what they are and how you ate them?

Palascinta is essentially a stuffed crepe. It's made with egg, flour, milk, and soda water. So they're a bit springier than the average crepe, and traditionally, they would be stuffed with a farmer's cheese or quark, some sort of fresh cheese, and apricot jam. They're rolled then finished with a chocolate sauce and maybe a nut or a cinnamon spice mixture would go on top. 

Grandma Agi would serve them to us open, and she would have a big stack of them with a cover over it so they could stay warm. And she would put out all these small accoutrement bowls that had cinnamon sugar or maraschino cherries or whipped cream and four different kinds of jam. She used to call it "Palascinta Americana." It was this version that was a DIY, create-your-own palascinta. So a little different than the traditional Hungarian-style.

Jeremy Salamon named his Crown Heights restaurant, Agi's Counter, after his grandmother, who would greet him at the door of her Boca Raton apartment in big glasses and a cheetah print gown with milkshakes in hand. Photo by Ed Anderson.

I love that. What a loving thing to do for your grandchildren.

Yeah, it was. It was certainly something that's stuck in my brain and in my palate for a very long time, and it's something that I love to break out at parties. Even as an adult, it's just something that is fun and nostalgic, and you get to use your hands. It's a lovely dish.

Was there a moment that propelled you into reconnecting with your Hungarian heritage?

My relationship with Hungarian food when I was younger, it existed. My grandmother made paprikash and goulash and nokedli, these dumplings, and Hungarian was spoken in the house between her and my father and my uncle. But I thought that was normal. I would have this kind of Hungarian life on a Sunday or Saturday night, then go to school the next day, and would tell people that I had goulash and I'd say words in Hungarian, and people would be like, "What?" But it just was very much second nature to me. 

As I got older, Grandma Agi, she didn't really want me cooking. She felt like a man needed to be cooked for. I was very interested in French cuisine and Italian and then I realized that I wanted to create something that was special and unique to me and my food. In order to do that, I had to go back and explore my past and my roots. That's when I revisited Hungarian cuisine. And I've actually found a cookbook called The Cuisine of Hungary by George Lang, and it was an old copy.

Such a wonderful book.

It's so detailed, and he has the most magical way of describing food and describing history, which I did not like in school, and could not read a textbook for my life. It's a hefty history section on Hungary, the beginning of the book. I was just so fascinated and enlightened by it, and to discover that Hungarian cuisine, or this Eastern European cuisine, had these beautiful roots of being influenced by. Of course, there was a lot of war to get there, but the food itself is really influenced by a lot of other different cuisines and flavor profiles and trades and etc, etc. It's kind of like an onion, and I peeled it back and was able to find different flavor profiles that were new and exciting to me. That's really how I started with the concept of, "Well, what if Hungarian cuisine could look like this today?"

What is the first thing we should know about Hungarian cuisine? Paint a picture of the palate, your Hungarian food palate for us.

So my Hungarian food palate is definitely unique to me. For one, I think of stone fruits. I don't think the average person thinks of fruit when they hear "Hungarian cuisine." You might think of paprika, if you know anything but stone fruits grow wild all over Hungary — cherries, apricots, plums. I always grew up loving all of them. I would grow up with chilled cherry soup and plum dumplings and apricots on top of my pork chops. I really wanted to take that concept and expand it. We preserve a lot of our own stone fruits at Agi’s Counter, and we pickle a lot of stone fruits and they're so wonderful because they're high in acidity and they're very floral. 

Also in Hungarian cuisine, there's soup. I think of soup, which is such a communal food, and it's something that my grandmother always had at the table. There were at least two soups, and one might have been chilled, the other one was more of a hot, stewy soup. At my restaurant, I do multiple different soups throughout the year, and we kind of play with the different profiles.

I want to talk about a couple of your takes on traditional Hungarian food dishes that immediately come to mind. One is schnitzel. You have a vegetarian take on schnitzel that I think is so smart. What vegetable do you use?

I use turnips, which have this really fantastic texture when they're steamed. They're slightly watery but they're also meaty at the same time, and underneath this coating of breadcrumbs and seasoning is a really welcome surprise because it's not too heavy. It's not like you're biting into a pork cutlet, which is delicious, but I think it's a really wonderful alternative to the dish, just a reimagining of it. It's a great way to get your children to eat their vegetables in disguise. So yeah, it's a fun dish. 

Jeremy Salamon updates traditional dishes in "Second Generation," an ode to his Hungarian Jewish roots. Photo courtesy of Harvest.

I have to ask you about chicken paprikash. You have actually two versions of it, a traditional version and then a second generation version. First, could you talk about the kinds of paprika that you like to use?

I love to use sweet paprika but also hot paprika, and I am not limited to smoked paprika as well, which is less commonly used in Hungarian cooking. I think most folks probably, if they use paprika, it's going on the top of your Thanksgiving mashed potatoes, to give it some color. But there's this misunderstanding of paprika, and there really is a flavor to it.

One thing that I think people should know if they're going to make paprikash is that they shouldn't use a can of paprika that's been on their shelf for 20 years. They should buy a brand new, beautiful ground spice that is super red with summer peppers.

Absolutely. Paprika should be this ruby red color, if it's anything, but you're not getting the real deal. I will say that it is a struggle to find real paprika in Hungary. Right now, I'm using Burlap & Barrel, which I mentioned in the book. They're a wonderful spice company. They've really done their homework, and they have a sweet paprika called noble sweet paprika and when toasted, because you're supposed to toast the paprika very quickly, for like five to 10 seconds, it releases this beautiful flavor profile that is true to the paprika flavor, which is distinct and of its own. I don't think most Americans know what that actually tastes like.

Could you briefly tell us the difference between the two chicken paprikash dishes you make — the traditional one, and this second gen one?

The traditional paprikash is very simple. It's going to be chicken thighs, high-quality paprika, onions, the broth, the sour cream, and it is pretty faithful to the original chicken paprikash, especially the one that my grandmother would make. 

The unfaithful version pairs my love of roast chickens with a reimagining of paprikash. In my humble opinion, I think roast chicken should always be finished with a dressing or some sort of acidity. So I made a paprikash dressing, if you will, and it smothers the chicken afterwards, while it's still hot and roasted and juicy and sticky, and it just settles into the chicken. The chicken absorbs all of it, and I throw a bunch of fresh dill on top of it. That's my reimagining of the dish.