Honey at a Hungarian Christmas: honey wafers, poppy seed guba and gingerbread 🎄

Roman Catholic families fasted all day on 24 December, and supper began after the evening church bells. According to the Hungarian Ethnographic Encyclopaedia, of all the dishes “the wafer took first place”, and in many places the supper opened with a honey wafer. It was most often eaten with honey, pepper and garlic. In Pereszlény, a village by the Ipoly river, 21 courses were put on the table, among them wafers, honey and mákos guba (a bread pudding with poppy seeds); in Vicsápapáti the head of the household carried in the honey, walnuts and apples in a sieve, with a wafer for every member of the family.

Around 1900 these foods – honey, garlic, apples, walnuts, often wafers – appeared together on the table mainly in the Upland (northern Hungary) and the southern Great Plain. In Calvinist (Reformed) villages the custom was not a fasting supper but rather beans, lentils or cabbage soup with sausage.

In many places the wafers were baked by the cantor-teacher (the village schoolmaster who also led the church singing), and the children carried them round to the houses. This wafer delivery is recorded as early as 1634 in Balog, in the old county of Gömör; wafers were baked at home longest in the Palóc region of northern Hungary, where they were called malomkalács or molnárkalács (“mill cake” or “miller’s cake”). Why honey? According to the ethnographic encyclopaedia, people believed that whoever ate it would be as happy as honey is sweet.

Poppy seeds and honey are an old pairing for the fasting feasts. Relatives of mákos guba – dough dishes that are baked, then softened by pouring a liquid over them – had different names from region to region: guba on the Great Plain, kőtt mácsik in Transdanubia (western Hungary), lőnye in Csík, Háromszék and Moldavia, and elsewhere bobajka, pupácska or doboska. On the Christmas fast the Palóc people ate ferentő: rosettes of kalács (sweet yeast bread) soaked in water, with poppy seeds and honey.

Lőnye is also described in a cookbook from Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania) dating from 1695, as dough soaked in honeyed water, with poppy seeds – in Székely Land (the Hungarian-speaking region of Transylvania) it is still made at Christmas. Around 1900 honey in the peasant kitchen was mainly a festive sweetener, used precisely on poppy seed dishes and boiled pasta. If you feel like trying it, here is our recipe for poppy seed guba with honey.

The Christmas tree appeared in Hungarian aristocratic and middle-class homes in the first half of the 19th century, and in better-off peasant families in the second half of that century. According to the Hungarian Open Air Museum (Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum, Szentendre), edible decorations dominated in peasant houses until the middle of the 20th century: gingerbread, wafers, szaloncukor (foil-wrapped Christmas tree sweets), meringues and home-made biscuits. The gingerbread shapes included the baby Jesus, Mary, the cradle, the heart, the star, the moon, the boot, the angel, the horse and the hussar – baked at home or bought at the fair.

Szaloncukor developed from fondant, which appeared in the early 19th century, and around 1900 it began to be made in factories. It did not push gingerbread off the tree but joined it there. You can read about the history of gingerbread in this article; for baking, here are our recipes for soft honey gingerbread, honey puszedli cookies and a gingerbread house.

According to the Hungarian Catholic Encyclopaedia (Magyar Katolikus Lexikon), there were places on the Great Plain where, during Advent, people ate honey when the bell rang for the Rorate, the dawn Mass, “so that the tongue would be sweet when it greets Mary”. Eating honey was also a custom at New Year: people believed it would bring good luck for the coming year.

In some places a “honey harvest” was held on Christmas Day: the head of the household sent a taste of honey to his friends, who sent the plate back filled with wheat.

Beekeepers also linked many beliefs to Christmas. In Zala county it was said that if the beekeeper took a hazel stick to church on Christmas night and, back home, tapped the hive with it as many times as the number of swarms he wanted, he would get that many swarms. Elsewhere a few grains of the wheat taken to midnight Mass were placed in the hive entrance, or crumbs from the Christmas Eve supper were scattered among the bees.

A few ideas if you would like to celebrate with honey this year: