Booze In Your Crepes: Gundel Palacsinta

You there! Yes, you! You with the computer! Do you like pancakes? Yeah? How about crêpes? Alright, do you like fire? Well then do I have a meal for you… I sometimes get the feeling that Hungarian food is a tough sell in America, maybe because the first thing people think of is not any particular dish, but of Hungary’s HILARIOUSLY ironic proximity to Turkey and Greece. BAH HAH HAH HAH, good one.

That ends today with this foolproof gateway drug to Hungarian cuisine: ladies and gentlemen, say hello to palacsinta. That’s PAUL-ah-cheen-tah to you, bub. Are you sick of the same old crêpe? Try these Hungarian pancakes. This particular recipe, Gundel palacsinta, takes its name from one of the oldest and grandest restaurants in Budapest and has everything you could want in a meal. Hell, it has everything you could want in a weekend: Booze! Fire! Chocolate! Cinnamon! Nuts! You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! The results, I promise you, will be nothing short of crêpetacular.

The recipe for palacsinta really doesn’t differ much from that of its French cousin or from any of the other folded, stuffed pancakes eaten throughout South Central Europe. The only difference is a splash of soda water added at the last minute. Does the carbonation really make the pancakes fluffier? Or does the added liquid just make the batter thinner? What do I look like, nineteenth century Hungarian physicist Lóránd Eötvös? It’s tradition, cut me some slack.

What does make palacsinta unique among all its neighboring pancakes are the fillings. The specific recipe I’m writing about is a pretty legendary one, a mixture of ground walnuts, cream, sugar and cinnamon topped with a liquored-up (and potentially flammable) chocolate sauce, but there are plenty of other sweet and savory fillings where that came from. Some other classics include a cottage cheese/sugar/cinnamon mixture (which can also be made with ricotta, as described here), or apricot jam, which I ended up making for some variety alongside the Gundel palacsinta. I also just happened to have a fridge full of another Hungarian favorite, leftover chicken paprikash – a stew of onions, paprika and chicken, and one of my go-to recipes (I usually make this version). I chopped the chicken small into pieces, rolled it up in a pancake and doused it with sauce.

The French might turn up their noses and ask “what is this crêpe,” but my point is that you really can’t go wrong with palacsinta. The pancake is forgiving; you’re eating it more for its texture than it’s taste, which is bland enough to go with just about anything. So keep experimenting until you come up with a winner. My chicken paprikash concoction wound up being a great success – in fact a cursory googling revealed that it wasn’t a new trick at all, but actually an old Hungarian standard by the name of Hortobágyi húsos palacsinta (that’s WHORE-toe-badge-yee WHO-show-sh to you, sonny).

The basic recipe for palacsinta follows, as described in George Lang’s The Cuisine of Hungary and confirmed by my great-grandmother. Recipes for the Gundel filling come afterwards.

Palacsinta – Hungarian Pancakes

Makes 8-9 pancakes

3 eggs

1 cup milk

1 cup all purpose flour

¼ cup club soda

Butter for frying

Mixing this recipe is easy: combine the eggs, milk and flour, beat until smooth; add the soda just before making the first pancake. The cooking technique is where things get interesting. Set the heat to medium, add butter to the pan, and pour in ¼ cup or so of batter. Palacsinta are supposed to be very thin, so don’t use too much. As you add batter, lift the pan and tilt around in a circle so the batter just coats the bottom. It’s not that hard, but it does take some practice so don’t be disappointed if you end up with a worthless piece of crêpe on your first try.

A couple things that can make things easier are the right kind of pan, and the right amount of butter. A traditional crêpe pan is almost completely flat, with very low, sloped sides, so it’s easy to slide a spatula under the pancake. But not everyone has a crêpe pan cluttering up their kitchen, and as celebrity chef Donald Rumsfeld used to say, you cook crêpes with the utensils you have, not the utensils you want: any frying pan with sloped sides will do, but steer clear of big cast iron skillets with tall, steep sides… like the one in all of my pictures. I managed to survive because I kept the skillet well-buttered: started with about ½ tablespoon, and added another small chunk (say ½ teaspoon) before each new pancake.

Even if that fails, a hole-y crêpe is nothing to worry about and can be easily concealed with some artful rolling. There are a number of different schools of thought on palacsinta assembly. Most common is the cigar, popularized by the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer hires Dominican instead of Cuban cigar rollers at his friend’s crêperie, with explosive consequences. This is what I grew up with, because if you’re feeding a small army, say at Christmas dinner, you can pile the rolled crêpes into a casserole and keep them in the oven on low heat. We used to cover the top layer with sour cream, which goes well with our usual fruit or sweet cheese fillings and traps in moisture so that the pancakes don’t get dry and brittle in the oven. But what if you’ve got a really chunky filling? Or say you’ve got a sauce to pour over your palacsinta, and want some more surface area? Try gyro-style: roll two sides of the pancake in, and leave it kind of open at the top. Fold it in half like a taco. Or fold in all four sides, like a wrapping a present, until you’ve got a rectangle. Hell, go crazy: make it a rhombus.

Since the palacsinta are so thin they come off the griddle very quickly, and as a result it really isn’t much work to crank out a stack of pancakes tall enough to feed a crowd. But in case you’re daunted by the amount of work, and are asking yourself “why do I have to put up with this crêpe?” (LAST ONE, I promise), I ask you to just stay tuned through to the end of the following recipe, which is spectacular enough to make it worth while.

Gundel Palacsinta

Nut Filling:

1 cup milk or cream

1 cup sugar

2 cups chopped/ground walnuts

¼ cup raisins

1 Tbsp cinnamon

Zest of 1 lemon

1 shot dark rum (~ 1 ½ oz.)

• Mix milk or cream with sugar. Bring to boil.

• Lower heat and stir in remaining ingredients. Once all ingredients have been added, keep stirring the mixture over the heat for a few minutes until it reaches the desired thickness. You don’t want the filling to be dry, but you also don’t want it soaking through your palacsinta.

Chocolate Sauce:

3 egg yolks

3 Tbsp cocoa

3 Tbsp sugar

1 cup cream

4 Tbsp bittersweet chocolate

2 shots dark rum (~ 3 oz)

(can substitute brandy instead)

• Melt chocolate in a small pot or double-boiler, add cream, stir to combine, and bring to boil.

• Remove from heat and add whisk in beaten egg yolks.

• Add cocoa, sugar, rum. Return to low heat, and stir until smooth (about 5 minutes.)

Serving:
Stuff your palacsinta and set them aside.

Put the chocolate sauce in a serving dish.

Now heat about an ounce or so of rum in a glass or a measuring cup – do this over a candle if you’re being romantic, or nuke it if you can’t be bothered, but just make sure the rum is warm or it will not ignite. Dress each plate with a small splash of hot booze and a dusting of powdered sugar, then quickly place a palacsinta on each dish, drizzle with chocolate sauce, and tell your squeamish friend to put away the fire extinguisher and hit the lights. As soon as you touch a match to each plate, the desserts will be engulfed in blue flame, and they should stay lit long enough for you to carry them out and present them ceremoniously to your awestruck guests.

Unless of course you’ve used paper plates… aw crêpe.