Our
caller asked “When I was a child, my grandmother used to make a cookie with
pork cracklings, the brown bits after cooking pork. They were really good, but she never wrote
down any of her recipes. I think she called them bagachels. Can you help me find the recipe?” Since it sounded like a food related to a
particular ethnic background, the Newton Falls Public Library staff felt they
needed some more information. Talking
with her we found that her grandmother had been born in 1868 in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire.
Searching
online for the terms “bagachel cookie” did not bring up any useful results.
Considering how some letters sound like others, we tried “pagachel cookie.”
Here we found the website, TheWorld's Best Photos of pogácsa - Flickr Hive Mind. The tempting photographs of cookies included
one called Pagachel / Pogácsa. Our
search for pogácsa took us to the website, Mashpedia. The article said
that it
“is a
type of savory scone in Hungarian
cuisine. It is also popularly eaten in nearby Slovakia
. . . As with scones and biscuits, eggs and butter are common
ingredients, as is milk, cream or sour cream.
Many traditional versions exist, with size, shape—the most common is round—and
flavor variations in each region/city of Hungary. A dozen different ingredients
can be found either in the dough, sprinkled on top before baking, or both:
medium-firm fresh cheeses,
aged dry hard cheese(s), pork crackling (tepertő), cabbage, black pepper,
hot or sweet paprika, garlic, red onion, caraway seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds
or poppy seeds.”
The
key ingredient, pork cracklings, was included in this description. Now we were
able to locate a basic pagachel recipe for our patron and she could add the
cracklings to it, as she remembered her grandmother doing.
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