Mini Hungarian language lesson: the secret dish.
"What's a dish universally known and eaten in your country but virtually unheard of outside it?" is a question that makes the rounds on Twitter every few months but I can't be bothered waiting for the next one.
It's "főzelék".
The word itself looks as simple as the dish: "főz" is "to cook" and "-elék" is a suffix roughly meaning "the result of", so "the result of cooking".
Thanks for nothing.
The official definition is "any kind of boiled or parboiled vegetable"; closer, but still a load of bollocks.
So here's mine: "főzelék is made of vegetables and it has a thick sauce".
What kind of vegetables?
Practically any: potato, cabbage, bean, pea, chickpea, spinach, squash, carrot, but usually only one veg at a time.
There is a mixed abomination called "finomfőzelék" but we don't talk about it.
Most of us have been scarred for life by school dinners featuring the pallid little harbingers of death suspended in a beige gel of doom.
In all honesty though, főzelék in general doesn't look very appetising: it has its roots in that old peasant staple of gruel and it has a serious image problem as a result.
Which is why, even in Hungary, you won't see many on restaurant menus, except in specialist outlets.