Lecsó Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Lecsó is a homely Hungarian country dish in which sweet peppers and tomatoes are stewed down with onions until soft. It took root at the everyday farmhouse table as a seasonal staple, a way of putting up in one pot the vegetables the garden gave in high summer.

Its two lead ingredients, the sweet pepper (paprika) and the tomato, both crossed the ocean from the Americas. Paprika arrived in Hungary with the Ottoman incursions of the sixteenth century and appears in a dictionary in 1604 under the name Török-bors, "Turkish pepper." Records of its use as a cooking ingredient come together in the eighteenth century, and market gardening for it spread only in the early nineteenth. The tomato took much longer to reach the same table. Its earliest Hungarian mention, at Pozsony in 1651, comes in the plant list of a private garden belonging to a lawyer, Heindel Ferdinánd, where it stands as poma amoris colore aurantio, the orange-coloured love apple — an ornamental, not something grown to eat. Lippay János's garden book Posoni kert (1664) likewise names poma amoris and says nothing about what to do with it. Tomatoes went on decorating the gardens of nobles and townsmen through the later eighteenth century, and only in the nineteenth do they show up plainly as kitchen stock: the 1840 Pest edition of Czifray István's national cookbook carries two tomato sauces, tomatoes stuffed in the French manner, chicken stewed in tomato sauce, a sauce for a leg of mutton, and even a way of keeping tomatoes in wine and vinegar until late spring. By then peppers and tomatoes came out of the same summer garden and went into the same pot.

The turn came from Bulgarian market gardeners who grew vegetables around Budapest. Around 1865, at Káposztásmegyer on the city's northern edge, they spread the open-field cultivation of sweet peppers. In the Budapest of the 1870s and 1880s, where tomatoes and sweet peppers now stood side by side in the markets, the present form of lecsó settled in, as the scholar of literature and food culture Cserna-Szabó András reconstructs it. The knack of stewing vegetables in a pot was old and asked for no special tool or skill. In the dialect of Diósjenő, a village in Nógrád County in northern Hungary, "lecsó" was the local word for a stew of sweet peppers and tomatoes, and it eventually spread as the name of the dish itself.

Lecsó has two accounts of its birth standing side by side, and neither has been settled in favor of the other.

One holds that it came by way of the Balkans under the Ottomans. A stew of peppers and tomatoes cooked together was made early on by Turks, Arabs, and Sephardic Jews, and it passed under Ottoman rule into the Balkans and on north into Hungary—so writes the food historian Gil Marks in his Encyclopedia of Jewish Food (2010). Hungarians laid their own paprika over it and remade it into a dish of their own. What backs this view is the name of the very first recipe. In 1902, in the cookbook A Hét szakácskönyve, Veigelsberg Hugó, writing under the pen name "Emma asszony," set down a lecsó called rácz omácska, "the Serbian (Rác) sauce." The dish's earliest name pointed to its Balkan neighbors. Some scholars place it in the same family as the Balkan sataraš and the Turkish menemen, one member of the vegetable stews spread across the Ottoman world.

The other view has it growing up in the Hungarian countryside out of local summer vegetables. Rather than being carried over whole from the Balkans, it took form as cooks in the fields learned to handle paprika and tomato, and this view weighs the local settling more heavily. It rests on the Bulgarian gardeners' spread of open-field cultivation and on the way the Nógrád dialect name grew into the name of the dish.

The two do not cancel each other. The dish's name may point to the Balkan neighbors, and at the same time the place where it took hold as a daily stew was the Hungarian farm kitchen; both sides can be true at once.

As for when it took shape, the oldest trace in the local speech is the guide. The dialect word "lëcső, lëcsó = a stew of sweet peppers and tomatoes" appears in print for the first time in the linguistics journal Magyar Nyelvőr, issue 43 (1914), in Horváth Sándor's record of the Diósjenő dialect. The word was set on paper after the dish was already made, but this record shows that by 1914 at the latest the dish already had a name and a place in daily life.

The origin of the word "lecsó" itself, for what it is worth, is still unsettled—one account traces it to the sound of frying, another to lecskedni (to spill or pour), another to a borrowing from Slovak. But this is an argument about the pedigree of a word, a separate thread from the question of when the dish first came to the table.