Our two year-old daughter has been eating solids since she was five months old and has gone through many dramatic food phases since then. In the beginning she loved plain yogurt, and sometimes ate two, or even three, at one sitting. And she hated milk. The one time that her aunt tried to feed her a spoonful of jarred baby food she spit it out. We never saw the need to buy commercial baby food when we could just make our own “real” food for her. In her first months of eating she was an obsessive eater, and when she was around one we had to start removing the food from the table, because she would just keep eating and eating. She has calmed down a bit, eats normal portions, and still has lots of foods that she really loves.

I suspect that if we were living in America her food preferences might be a little different. We go to a lot of restaurants, and thankfully there are none of those horrible kids menus here featuring French fries, hot dogs, and fried chicken nuggets. Hungarians, it seems, are a lot more relaxed about feeding their children. She eats the same things that we do, and she has been doing so ever since she started eating solids. So far there’s nothing that she really dislikes or severely objects to. But she does have lots of preferences, and a few passions. She loves foods with strong flavors and pronounced spices, and she’s a big meat eater. It’s fascinating to watch her budding food likes, dislikes, and habits. I wonder how much of it reflects her parents habits and preferences?

She goes to nursery school a few days every week, and the food that she is served there actually looks quite good. The menu is posted weekly and the children have things like coffee (more like milk flavored with coffee) or tea with buttered rolls for breakfast. For their tíz órai (ten o’clock snack) there’s juice. It’s all very civilized.* For lunch, the meal usually starts with a soup (which the children amazingly eat nicely by themselves) and often contains some sort of főzelék (a mushy vegetable preparation). Sometimes there’s turkey or chicken breast, and dessert is usually fruit. Sometimes there’s even arany galuska (a tasty yeast-raised dessert), and on those days I wish I were eating lunch at the little tables with the children. The only memories I have of school lunches were greenish tinted hamburgers, coke from the vending machine, and awful steak and cheese sandwiches. Needless to say, I almost always brought my own.

Here are some of Anna’s current favorites:

She loves fatty spicy sausage (kolbász) and asks for it almost daily. This she probably gets from her Hungarian side. One thing that I am not happy that she likes is virsli (the Hungarian hot dog), which she occasionally eats at school.

Scrambled eggs or pancakes are a few of her favorite meals, and not just at breakfast. She likes big fluffy American style pancakes with maple syrup just as much as she likes the thin, stuffed Hungarian palacsinta.

She loves paprika so much that I now think it is some paprika gene in Hungarians. She sprinkles it on her eggs, but she probably likes it just as much for color as for the flavor. She knows, too, that she should stay away from the hot stuff.

We tend to cook pizza a lot, and Anna loves to reach up to the counter and nibble on chunks of raw pizza dough, which she may like more than the pizza itself. She does the same thing with raw cookie and pie dough.

There’s a bakery on the corner of our block and everyday on the walk home from nursery school Anna insists on stopping to buy pogacsa (Hungarian savory biscuits) from the “pogacsa néni” inside. She also loves kifli (crescent shaped bread rolls), but that’s probably mainly because her favorite character in her favorite Hungarian book eats kiflis for breakfast.

She absolutely loves túró rudis. But who doesn’t?

She likes plain yogurt better than the flavored kinds. And she loves sour cream, which if it’s on the table, she almost always ends up eating straight from the container with a spoon. In Hungary, sometimes you’ll see people eating a carton of sour cream and a bread roll for lunch, which might be in Anna’s future.

She’s big on drinks and her favorites are sparkling mineral water, milk, and orange juice.

She also likes lots of things that you wouldn’t suspect a kid to like (and which many adults don’t even like), such as anchovies, pickles, olives, pate, smoked salmon, goat cheese, and lemons (she likes to suck on them).

Her new favorite fruit is kiwi, which she is often served for dessert at nursery school. Just yesterday she ate three whole kiwis.

* At the nursery school, which is a public one, the children even go to a salt room twice a week for salt therapy, which is supposed to be good for the lungs.

–Carolyn