Hungarian Heritage

Chicken paprikash, cucumber salad, and spaetzle. The key to success, according to Csilla? More paprika than you think you need.

Churchview Farm is something from a storybook. Chickens roam the green, blooming acreage with ease, stepping around ducks and avoiding the penned-in goats. A run-down barn adds to the rustic ambiance echoed in the open-air kitchen, where Executive Chef Csilla Thackray tells a different kind of story, one woven with flavors of her Hungarian heritage.

The story goes back to World War II: at the end of the war, Csilla’s grandmother, her grandmother’s mother, and sister were forced to leave Budapest. They fled through Austria, staying in displaced people’s camps until eventually the trio was sponsored by a church in Hazelwood. Making their way to the US via Ellis Island, her family settled in the Monroeville area. “And then my grandmother got married to an Italian man, and I was destined never to be taller than five-foot-two,” Csilla laughs.

It wasn’t until later in life, however, that Csilla started cooking with her grandmother. “I definitely didn’t have some storied, amazing, rich Hungarian upbringing,” Csilla says. “I’ve always been self-conscious because [my story] was never ‘Oh, we sat down to bowls of paprikash every night, and it was a beautiful thing.’ It took some effort to get there.”

“My grandmother is an incredible cook, and she cooked so much for my mom and the family growing up, but she wasn’t constantly cooking Hungarian food. It was the ‘50s and ‘60s – she was just trying to assimilate into the kind of housewife mode.”

“It wasn’t until I started cooking and expressed interest in it that she kind of opened up and taught me to make paprikash, spaetzle, and things like that.”

Paprikash is the anchor of Csilla’s family-style celebration of Hungarian culture, a menu showcasing the down-to-earth dining she learned from her grandmother and found roaming the country’s markets, something she calls a “Hungarian version of a Jewish deli.”

Csilla’s recipe for paprikash, tender chicken in a rich, creamy sauce and one of the most well-known Hungarian dishes, and a few others come straight from her grandmother. “She taught me how to make spaetzle, cucumber salad, and then I’ve kind of modernized certain things by fermenting our own sour cream and putting my little touches on it,” Csilla says.

While sharing her recipes for a Hungarian feast, Csilla laughs after being asked if there are signatures to the cuisine: “If I ask my grandma about a recipe, it’s like, such and such, such and such, and then tomato, onion, green bell pepper. Always. The very predictable trifecta of Hungarian cooking. That and more paprika than you think you need.”

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STORY BY MAGGIE WEAVER/ PHOTOGRAPHY BY LAURA PETRILLA/ STYLING BY KEITH RECKER