Saturday, May 22, 2010

Humenné Mangalitsa Pigs

There's Mangalitsa pigs for sale in Slovakia.

What's neat is that it is in Prešovský kraj, a non-Hungarian region. Typically one finds Mangalitsa pigs in Southern Slovakia, in the areas with high ethnic-Hungarian populations.

Assuming the people with the pigs are Slovaks, they'll likely make Slovak dishes. Of course, due to more than 800 years of Hungarian rule, Slovak cuisine and Hungarian cuisine are very similar.



Slovaks raising Mangalitsa pigs is a bit like the Austrians or Ukrainians (check out the Ukrainian ManBearPig) raising Mangalitsa pigs.

One thing that's neat about having Mangalitsa pigs in so many different regions is that you can travel around - through Romania, Slovakia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Austria, Germany and Switzerland and eat a bunch of Mangalitsa dishes and products. They'll all be slightly different and generally very mature (already optimized) dishes or products. You can learn so much that way, so quickly.

It is neat to think that Mangalitsa pigs are a unifying element in the fancy cuisine of so many countries. Somehow I don't think that one will find the tremendous diversity of dishes and products in Spain, where they raise very similar-tasting pigs.

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