44th National Táncház Festival & Fair • 4–6 April 2025
Issue:
Starting page: 42
Serie:
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Food and Hungarian tradition – home drying fruits – meals made from dried fruits. This article tells us about methods for drying fruit in the Debrecen area and in the village of Cigánd (in Northeastern Hungary) and in Böde (Zala County, Hungary). Apples, plums and pears were the fruits most often used for drying. Construction and use of the drying pit and drying house are described – both employing carefully tended wood fires. Drying fruits took usually 3-5 days. Most places they simply put the fruits to be dried – several times into a still hot wood fire oven after baking the bread. Practices of reconstituting the dried fruits, making soup or compote from them (a meal for Lent or fasting periods) and adding dried fruits to bread dough are described, along with the process for making ’fruit leather’. By ethnographer Juhász Katalin.