Lángos Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Lángos is a round of leavened wheat dough stretched to about the width of a palm and fried in hot oil. Straight from the pan, its surface is rubbed with garlic and heaped with sour cream or grated cheese. The image of these rounds coming one after another out of a great vat of oil at an outdoor stall has become the dish's calling card.

The main ingredient, wheat, is a long-established crop of the Hungarian land. Leavening the dough, stretching it, and setting it to the heat all carry on from a life of baking bread. The name draws on láng, the Hungarian word for flame, and the etymological dictionary (TESz) dates the first appearance of the word lángos in writing to 1792. That is the first record of the word, though; the record of the food itself is about half a century older. An encyclopedia of Hungarian ethnography records kenyérlángos—"bread lángos"—appearing in the 1730s among the items handed out to shepherds on the Great Plain (Alföld). As its name says, it was a kind of bread: like the láng-os of 1792, it refers to a native bread called langalló, baked by the flame lingering at the mouth of the oven.

In village households, on the morning each week when the great oven was heated to bake bread, thin dough is said to have been baked quickly against its front or in its leftover heat. In time the practice was carried out to the stalls of markets and festivals, and came to be enjoyed in its present form, fried in oil. The fried style appears widely in the early twentieth century, as lángos took hold as street food.

The dough often seen today may have boiled and mashed potato worked into it (krumplis lángos). The potato spread into Europe from the Americas, and this version is a modern style that arose only after the crop had settled in.

Two accounts of quite different character stand side by side over the origin of lángos.

One treats it as part of a native wheat-bread culture. On baking day, dough left over was baked by the flame of the oven for a village breakfast, which in time changed its shape into the fried snack of the stalls. That the name echoes láng, "flame," is taken as support for this view; the etymological dictionary (TESz) and the linguistics journal Nyelv és Tudomány both read the 1792 first appearance as naming the langalló baked by the oven's lingering fire. The record of the food itself goes back about half a century further: an encyclopedia of Hungarian ethnography names kenyérlángos among the items handed out to shepherds on the Great Plain in the 1730s. Both the record of the word and the record of what people actually ate reflect a bread of the oven, not a round fried in oil.

The other holds that during the Ottoman occupation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the technique of frying bread in oil came from the Turkish side, and that this became the ancestor of today's fried style. Some food historians tell it this way, but no contemporary primary source showing it has been found. Following the order of the dates, the fried lángos appears widely only in the early twentieth century, when it took hold as street food—some two hundred years after the end of Ottoman rule in 1699. The Turkish fried bread pişi is a cousin in the same regional family of fried breads, but nothing on record shows it to be the ancestor of lángos.

As an oven-baked bread, then, lángos can be traced back to the first half of the eighteenth century. The 1730s, however, fall after the end of Ottoman rule in 1699, and the record says nothing about where the technique of frying came from. The oldest form to appear in writing is the native oven-baked bread. The Ottoman-arrival account still carries the weakness of its distance in time from the fried style, and whether it or the bread baked in the oven's embers came first still stands open.