![]() ![]() It is, in fact, hard to be in the Sports Hall for more than five minutes and not be offered a shot of palinka, or three. ![]() He came with a team from Debrecen, in eastern Hungary to make sausage in Bekescsaba’s socialist-era Sports Hall, where bright smiles made up for the somewhat dingy lighting and period decor.Īll manner of food and drink was available in the Sports Hall and several mammoth marquis, but it was possible - and cheaper - to graze, walking past sausage-making tables, where team members offered samples of their wares, bread, cheese, bite-sized “pogacsa” pastries and the ever-present palinka. “The spirit of a beautiful woman is in our sausage,” said Ferenc Bordacs, dressed in the long, skirt-like garment of the Hungarian “puszta” plains, with hat to match. The sausage-making contest provides a focus for the festival, and a chance for one-upmanship among sausage makers. “There are other festivals but this atmosphere, this crazy good spirit, the teams are unrivalled anywhere else,” said Jozsef Nemeth, deputy president of the sausage-judging jury. Visitors also get to watch and cheer on about 500 roughly 10-person teams making the kolbasz from scratch, competing in a good-natured, carnival-like, palinka-fueled atmosphere. People come for the weather, which this year was sunny and mild, for music from local and regional rock and folk bands, for dancing, crafts, amusement-park rides, beer, wine and the ever-present, potent and often homemade “palinka” fruit brandy.īut most of all they come for the kolbasz (“sausage,” in Hungarian), made according to a century-old recipe with pork, paprika, garlic, caraway seeds, but also various tricks of the trade, and available in sizes and shapes from finger-sized to monsters more than a meter (yard) long, ranging in texture from dry to moist and in spiciness from mild to mouth-destroying. While others celebrated Hallowe’en and All Saints Day, many Hungarians and Romanians spent time well-fed at what organizers say is the biggest eating and drinking event in eastern and central Europe - a food-focused flipside to Germany’s beery Oktoberfest. ![]() The 15th year of the four-day festival in a rural area of southeastern Hungary, near the Romanian border, drew an estimated 100,000 visitors over the end-October holiday weekend, winding up Monday. “Any foreigner who ever once tasted the Hungarian sausage will always ask me: ‘That sausage, can you please bring me that sausage again?’,” said Gyula Bodrogi, a Hungarian actor and member of the jury that judges the best of the day’s kolbasz.Īnd people do love it. REUTERS/Laszlo Baloghįrom butchering a pig, complete with blowtorch for searing the bristles, to grinding the meat, mixing it with spices and squeezing it into long, filmy sausage casings that fit just so over the nozzle of a purpose-built stuffing machine, pig to plate is on display with little left to the imagination. Competitors clean a slaughtered pig which will be used to make sausages during Europe's biggest sausage festival in Bekescsaba, 240 km (149 miles) southeast of Budapest, October 29, 2011.
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