Political paprikás: the recipe for building of a wonder

My mother is a Hungarian immigrant. As the Soviet oppressors swept into Hungary in 1947 at the end of World War II, a mass exodus occurred. My relatives were scattered from Saudi Arabia and Melbourne to Zimbabwe and Buenos Aires. Meanwhile, the Hungarians dug in and made the Soviet occupation as miserable as possible for the Russians. One of my favourite stories is how, when the Russian "liberators" came and commandeered the house of my uncle, the staff had never seen a flush toilet. My uncle told the soldiers that it was a special appliance used for cleaning fish. Russian occupation was just one of many foreign occupations, in a long line that stretches all the way back, practically to the time of Attila. The Hungarians have hardly ever been free. As a result, the national character is based on the ability to be cleverly oppositional. After the Soviet invasion and subsequent Hungarian Revolution, Hungary focused on underground entrepreneurship and a rejection of all things Russian. Folk music and dance thrived. Hungarians united against the common enemy, and maintained its culture at all costs. Our cultural identity is so strong as a result, that even my oldest daughter, who is only one quarter Hungarian, speaks the language fairly well.

Hungary isn't doing as well without a common enemy. With no common enemy to unify the country, it has lacked focus. A well-known Hungarian dish, Chicken Paprikás, is the amalgam of vegetables, spices, meat and dairy, stirred and cooked, sometimes for days. To a certain point, it improves with each reheating. Without its own juices to stew in, the ingredients stay separate, and the joy of the meal, which is somehow more than the sum of its parts, is lost. Like Hungary itself, a fire must constantly burn beneath the pot to allow the ingredients to unify. In the absence of a common enemy, if a nation cannot find a common goal, it falls prey to infighting and decline.

In the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy realised that in order to unite a nation, in order to define greatness in a presidency, in fact, in order to usher in a Golden Age, all that a president, prime minister, or emperor has to do, is to build a wonder.

History forgives the Pharaohs their lack of proper working conditions, the resorting to slavery, because the results were so breathtaking. The same is true of the Romans. The great Roman emperors rallied the people by building a wonder, and including all levels of society in the project.

This leads me to believe that someday, future generations will look at the turn of the millennium agape at the accomplishments of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum of Dubai, and of the posthumous success of Walt Disney. 100 years from now, despite financial ruin, environmental havoc, all will be forgiven by history because of the tangible reality of the wonders these individuals inspired. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, what now has come to be called "the greatest generation" was coming into its own as a political power. President Kennedy proposed the creation of a wonder: The United States space programme. For the first time since the Homestead Act moved people Westward, the nation was united in a single peaceful goal: a manned flight to the moon.

Today we are building no wonders. History has proven time and time again, that when such goals are absent, a country will fall to infighting, partisanship, and decline. This is a lesson that both our nations need to recognise and learn. Self-sustenance is not sufficient incentive upon which to build a great nation. A national goal should be slightly frivolous, a little visionary and slightly out of reach. It should reflect the national character.

To me, Bangladesh is a crucible of courage, forged despite military hostility, natural disaster, and extreme poverty. It is a nation of unlikely heroes who rise from all levels of society to overcome adversity. From the outside it seems, that your greatest natural resources are the energies and passions of the people themselves. You are the least couch-potatolike people on the planet. My Goodness, in our country, buying tickets to a sporting event is a matter of point and click. Yours may be the only nation on earth that expends more physical energy buying tickets to watch a sporting event than the athletes at that sporting event spend performing. In fact, if you could organise a sport in which the goal was to purchase tickets to a cricket match, I would stand in line to buy tickets to watch you stand in line to buy tickets! From a world away, it seems like you are a hard-working nation that spends as much physical energy on days when a work-stoppage is called as any other nation expends on a working day.

However, if I know anything about Nuclear Energy (and I don't), I understand that Fusion creates more energy than fission. In both of our nations, currently, we lack fusion. Could you imagine what would happen if all the energy of all parties in Bangladesh could be united to create a single wonder? If I were the visionary in-charge of Bangladesh, knowing the value of the people themselves, my wonder would be to create a nation whose very landscape was the perfect self-didactic learning environment. I would not confine education to the classroom. I would plaster poetry and art throughout the streets, on every lamp pole. I would make it my business to create a nation in which one could learn, couldn't help learning, simply by walking down the street. I would encourage through contests and competitions through chalk sidewalk art, through encouragement on billboards and television commercials. I would encourage businesses and state interests to dedicate at least a portion of their advertising space to making Bangladesh the world's ideal learning environment. I would sponsor rural invention competitions, where common sense solutions to common problems would be rewarded. The wonder I would create by the end of the decade, would be a nation with a 100 percent literacy rate, and at least six Nobel worthy projects, and at least one self-created innovation per person. Were I Prime Minister, I would invite and encourage all political parties to help fulfil this vision the way Richard Nixon, a Republican president, fulfilled John F. Kennedy's Space Mission vision, despite Nixon's own corrupt character.

I've got about a thousand ideas this can relate to, a hundred internal problems this goal may help to solve. Panhandling children are a problem there, right? Well, make every citizen a teacher. If you want to give money to a child panhandler, begging would be legal, providing the donor carries a "quiz card", which would be distributed for free in public places. This quiz card would be colour coded, and contain one random question from a booklet of knowledge which was available for free to potential beggars, and graded according to colour. Beggars would be have to wear a ribbon of that colour. If you wanted to give money to a beggar child, you could give an amount commensurate with the level of the ribbon. For instance, you might see a child with a yellow ribbon begging. You would pull out your card, which contains one random colour-coded question of each level based on the special booklets. The random yellow-ribbon question on your card might be, "Name the seven continents". If the child answers correctly, you can give the child the recommended monetary amount on the card. The higher the ribbon level, the higher the recommended cash amount. This way, cruel adults, instead of mutilating children, might force them to learn to read and to study. Not an ideal solution, but certainly an improvement.

I have read about the proliferation of billboards in Dhaka. If one fifth of every billboard contained some useful information, a historical fact, for instance, the whole city could be a textbook.

In any case, a national goal may be easier for Bangladesh to define and achieve than it is for the United States. After all, your very existence as a nation proves that only a generation ago, you were able to come together to accomplish an amazing feat. True, it always helps to have a common enemy to rally against, but really, like I tell my children all the time, we all have a constant common enemy. Mediocrity is the enemy. In the developed world, falling prey to this great enemy can force one to live a meaningless, unfulfilled life. In the developing world, Mediocrity can mean death. In a sense, the difference between the two systems is that the developed world can support more dead weight, but in the developing world, existence itself is an accomplishment. The miraculous economies of the world are not so much driven by economic development as they are unified behind a common purpose. Economic development is simply a by-product of that purpose. That is why I am so certain that Bangladesh will emerge as a prominent nation, trusted by all. You are at the fulcrum of the world, having experienced capitalism and socialism, dictatorship and democracy, the religious and the secular. When you finally unify behind a common purpose, the entire world will be better for your success.

I hope I have let these ideas stew long enough to provide you with a little intellectual Paprikás. If this isn't edifying enough…

…Here is my recipe for a good Hungarian Paprikás:

You will need:
A chicken (six pounds, that's about the weight of two cricket bats)
A violinist, preferably gypsy
At least one wooden spoon
An uncooperative child
Two or three large onions
Two large tubs of sour cream, about 2000g.You will only use one. The other will sit at the back of your refrigerator until your grandmother horrifies everyone by using it in her tea instead of milk (or yoghurt)
One can of hot and one can of sweet paprika, the fresher the better.
Salt
Garlic salt
3 Potatoes
Lard or shortening
One half cup of Whole wheat flour
2-3 eggs, taken while the chicken is awake, so it can lament the loss of those eggs for the next 100 years.
A very big, very sharp, very dangerous-looking knife, or Katana.
A small transistor radio
Any two hour videotape featuring the use of tractors, harvesters, or combines.

Start with a Chicken. If you buy a live chicken, make sure it is loud and uncooperative. Criticise it until it loses the will to live, and then pluck it. If your meat comes in packages, legs and thighs work best. Chop the chicken into component parts. Save the gizzards and organ meats for a different meal. Make sure to leave a couple of feathers on the skin, so that your guests can find fault. At the traditional Hungarian wedding, the best man is supposed to criticise the cook, who in turn beats the best man with a wooden spoon. As a child, my head was a frequent dance floor for the wooden spoon.

Rinse the chicken, shout "Death to the Hapsburgs!" Draw your sword and chop the chicken into pieces the size of a baby's fist. If any bone shards shear off, put these to the side and save them in case your enemies demand food.

Soak the chicken in salt water. Warning: you will have to discard this water. There's nothing you can do about that. It's really not good water to reuse, make into soup, bathe the children with. I know. You hate to waste, but trust me, this time, you'll have to.

Chop the onions. If you picture an Ottoman Turk's head as you're chopping, you are a true Hungarian. By the way, you must not cry while you are chopping the onions. Good Hungarians, especially the women, only cry at funerals and for beautiful violin music. If you absolutely have to cry, cover for yourself by having the gypsy play the violin. If you continue to cry, hit yourself in the head with the wooden spoon until you stop. Do not wipe off the cutting board on which you cut the onions, and do not clean the knife

Take a separate wooden spoon and put about a baby's fist-sized dollop of shortening or lard into a frying pan, and melt the lard. DO NOT look at the nutritional information on the tub. It will instantly cause your arteries to harden. This pan will be the "spice base", and all the spices will be introduced to the lard in turn.

Combine flour and water and knead until the paste is thick enough to make your fingers stick to the keyboard of your laptop when you attempt to type in a recipe.

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On the same cutting board that you used to cut the onions, using the onion-cutting knife, cut and knead the dough, and add a liberal amount of sweet paprika. The dough should have enough paprika to look like the ground after the 1241 Mongol invasion of Hungary, in which 50 percent of the population perished. Cut the dough into pieces about the size of a Husszar's finger. Let the dough fry in the lard until it is firm enough to cut, and then steal them from the pan and give one third of the best pieces to the Romanians, some to the Serbs, Russians and Austrians. Do not allow what remains to get too bitter. Put the onions into the hot lard, add at least two tablespoons of sweet paprika, and hot paprika to taste, and salt the onions.

Cut the semi-fried dough into pieces the size of horse's teeth. Add them back into the onion/paprika mixture, and stir until the entire mixture is imbued with flavour. If you end here, you already have a delicious meal.

Your home should be dusted with paprika, and in the pan, a dark, red, sweet-smelling profusion of the onions and paprika should fill your nostrils with such a wonderful fragrance, that you almost forget to lament that while your people struggled for their freedom, President Eisenhower went out to play golf.

Discard the salt water that the chicken is soaking in. I know, I know there must be some clever use for it. Please don't use it in the Paprikás. If you do discover a clever use for it, please comment below.

Pour a couple of cups of milk into a shallow pan, enough to allow the chicken pieces to wade in it. Without cleaning the wooden spoon that you used to stir the spice mixture, move the chicken in the milk. As you stir, pay attention. As soon as the chicken turns from pink to white, turn it over, and continue to cook it at a low temperature. Before the chicken pieces get too cooked, put them and the milk they were cooking in into a separate deep pot.

Cube the potatoes, remembering the Rubik's cube, like the wooden match and the horse-drawn coach, are all Hungarian inventions. Put the cubes in the milky water that the chicken was in. Cook them just a little, until they are slightly cooked, but still firm. Turn off the potatoes and put all the chicken in with the potatoes.

Add about 500 grams of sour cream to the onions. Introduce as many pieces of chicken as you can to the mix, and stir this around. Each piece of chicken should sit in the sour cream/spice mixture for at least five to ten minutes.

Heat up about three cups of milk in the large pot. As the pieces of chicken are cooked in the "spice pot", transfer them into the large cooking pot, cleaning your wooden spoon in the milk water. Add more chicken to the spice pot until all pieces are prepared. Once all pieces are prepared, empty the contents of the spice pot into the deep pot.

Cover the pot and let simmer on low heat. Meanwhile, take the wooden spoon and discipline the unruly child until he laughs defiantly at you and dares you to do it again. That's when you know your parenting job is complete. A child who will stand up to a Hungarian parent will have no problem standing up to whomever invades next.

After the chicken begins to fall off the bone, add more paprika and salt to the potatoes and add them to the pot. Cook until the potatoes are firm but cooked through. Add the other 500 g of sour cream. The ideal thing to do is to refrigerate the potatoes and Paprikás overnight, and then re-heat and add the potatoes the next day.

Serve with too much wine, nice bread and heated conversation, preferably about medical procedure or applied mathematics. Listen to static-laden folk music on the transistor radio, and retire to the sitting room to watch the boring agricultural programming.

The eggs? Incubate them and let them hatch. NEVER let the chicks forget what was done to the chicken that laid them.

You will know that this recipe is authentic if it is impossible to find any Hungarian who agrees that it is authentic.

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Frank Domenico Cipriani writes a weekly column in the Riverside Signal called "You Think What You Think And I'll Think What I Know." He is also the founder and CEO of The Gatherer Institute — a not-for-profit public charity dedicated to promoting respect for the environment and empowering individuals to become self-taught and self-sufficient. His most recent book, "Learning Little Hawk's Way of Storytelling", is scheduled to be released by Findhorn Press in May of 2011