Hungarian sausage commercial

[#1 posted by Evan Rappaport, December 3, 2008 10:41 AM]

With the current internet popularity of bacon, sausage has been completely left by the wayside. Thanks for righting a great injustice.

[#2 posted by Jason Rizos, December 3, 2008 11:08 AM]

That's it I'm moving to Budapest.

[#3 posted by ErikO23, December 3, 2008 11:09 AM]

http://flickr.com/photos/hartnupj/496123074/

how about this Czech sausage can art.. my friend brought some back from Prague recently..

[#4 posted by Birdseed, December 3, 2008 11:17 AM]

Lyrics translation, in case anyone is interested (it's fairly banal stuff, though the ad is cool).

This is Joe, this is George
This on the other hand is a blood sausage
Joe, George, blood sausage
The liver sausage is really good
Oh how good, used for frying
The sausage is good in the winter and the summer
Here's the bread, here's the salt
Eating sausage is always good

Hurka (which I've transalted as sausage above) is basically a cheap-ingredient sausage, considered the roughest and least refined of sausages.

[#5 posted by James David, December 3, 2008 11:22 AM]

That's right up there with 80s Estonian meat commercial, though it's a little freakier.

[#6 posted by the Other michael, December 3, 2008 11:26 AM]

mmmmm.... blood sausage!

[#7 posted by Michael, December 3, 2008 11:46 AM]

The 70's. Wow.

Why did I leave Hungary again? Oh, yeah -- my wife's love/hate relationship with her country. (But we take the sausage tradition wherever we go, and y'know, you can make csalamádé even here in Puerto Rico.)

Bacon is good. But Hungarian cuisine takes that basic goodness and heterodynes it, multiplies it, takes it to its logical conclusion and beyond. Sausage is just a part of what makes Hungarian cuisine the food of the gods. There's jokai bableves, and gulyás, and pörkölt, and csalamádé, and zöldbab fözelék, and hortobágyi palacsinta, and -- just when you thought all those things were more than a single human could appreciate -- there is brassói. Oh good lord there is brassói, a peppered meat dish usually served over fried potatoes. Your serum cholesterol palpably rises just smelling it. It is to bacon what bacon is to ... to ... to oatmeal.

If the Soviets hadn't freed Hungary from the Hapsburgs who freed them from the Turk who freed them from the onus of self-rule, their cuisine alone would allow them to rule the world. It's always been amazing to me how unknown it is. (Probably because it's peasant food.) Because it is the best damn food in the world.

[#8 posted by Michael, December 3, 2008 11:47 AM]

Also: we're currently on a low-carb diet (long story) and the lack of blood sausage, which contains rice, is driving my wife batty.

[#9 posted by Grunt, December 3, 2008 11:56 AM]

You can't beat any commercial where people are laughing and eating suddenly - POOF! They're in swimwear, er - svimvear

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CaMUfxVJVQ

[#10 posted by pewma, December 3, 2008 12:49 PM]

@ #5:

KANA KANA KANA!!! Hakkliha!

Thank you. that will now be in my head all day. again.

[#11 posted by Anonymous, December 3, 2008 1:04 PM]

@7 Michael, thank you for your comment. I'm a Hungarian and I've never heard anybody who speaks about our cuisine with such adoration. Not even popular Hungarian chefs...

[#12 posted by fullerenedream, December 3, 2008 1:46 PM]

This video makes me happy :D

[#13 posted by Art, December 3, 2008 1:49 PM]

Delightful commercial .. and the band is fantastic!

[#14 posted by redjade, December 3, 2008 2:03 PM]

Some of the greatest hungarian adverts in the 80s came from a guy named Sas Istvan.

go to http://www.sasistvan.hu/

You can order many of his best adeverts on DVD for about 30USD (not including postage).
http://www.koak.hu/dvd/

You need not have any knowledge of Hungarian (like me!) to laugh at and with these adverts. They were all made in good fun.

jd in budapest

[#15 posted by Spherical Time, December 3, 2008 2:24 PM]

Darn it. Now I want sausage. I knew I shouldn't have watched that!

[#16 posted by DeWynken, December 3, 2008 2:42 PM]

Rock out with your cock out, I say.

Damn, I'm part Hungarian and now I feel guilty as hell for never stopping in at the Hungarian restaurant in CT I always used to drive by (think it was in Storrs or Mansfield). Oh well.

[#17 posted by edwardsch, December 3, 2008 3:12 PM]

Wow, this is freaking awesome. I grew up on ads like this. I'm going to eat sausage today, just because I'm in Hungary and I can. :)

Funny to see this ad appear here, by the way. :)

[#18 posted by Michael, December 3, 2008 3:15 PM]

So anyway, I told my wife about this ("there's this commercial from the 70's, something about 'itt a kenyer, itt a só'") and she said, yeah, that sounds vaguely familiar. I played it for her and the kids and she says she doesn't remember the commercial, but the song is one everybody knows.

Which means nothing, because it is a tenet of Hungarian culture that there are roughly 5.2 million songs and poems that everybody knows. Literally, everybody knows them. The entire nation is steeped in acculturation.

Anonymous @11, I'm not at all surprised. Given that you have such a delightful and rich culture, I have yet to meet a Hungarian who actually believes there is anything positive about being Hungarian. It drives me berserk. I love Hungary.

The nice thing about showing my wife this ad was that she suddenly started talking about how nice it was going to be to go home this summer. It's been four years. Long past time; the kids are starting to forget the language, despite the books and DVDs and all.

[#19 posted by InsertFingerHere, December 3, 2008 4:23 PM]

There's nothing even vaguely homo-erotic about this commercial.

Oddly enough, I'm eating buckwheat sausage for dinner.

O-Tay !!

[#20 posted by roboroller, December 3, 2008 4:57 PM]

If by "delightful" you mean "the most terrifying thing I've seen since mid-October" then you are correct sir.

[#21 posted by JimXugle, December 3, 2008 6:21 PM]

I'm a language geek. Written Hungarian and turkish to a lesser extent give me headaches. However after watching that video, my head feels fine.

Can any other language geek who is geekier than me explain this?

[#22 posted by numlok™, December 3, 2008 9:14 PM]

Looks like that would compliment some Smithfield Bar-b-Que quite nicely. YaaaaaHoooo!

[#23 posted by Ryan, December 3, 2008 10:55 PM]

#21 Maybe with written languages you have too much time to attempt to process and try to understand the language, but with spoken languages you have almost no chance to focus or get distressed. Listening can be a bit more meditative than reading in some ways, and it's easier to be more passive when it's something you know you won't understand. For a similar effect with speech maybe you could try immersing yourself in a language that you are good at if you have time to think about what you want to say, and then see if you get the same headache by the end of the day.

...

Since we're on the bizarre Finno-Ugrian commercials (we've had Hungarian and Estonian), I thought I'd share a Finnish candybar commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HBsC0QgvdQ

If you recognize those people, they're Armi and Danny of the 'Love you tender' craze.

Love you tender: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aq1Q77LAAOo

I was on a 70s and 80s insanity kick a couple days ago with a friend (it started with compiling a list of Total Eclipse of the Heart covers in numerous languages) and we ended up on Armi and Danny again. Dig around for more of their videos on YouTube... Some of them are positively insane and reek of early Star Trek alien planet sets.

[#24 posted by Anonymous, December 4, 2008 9:20 AM]

to Michael:
I really appreciate what you've written about our cuisine. I saw some tv program last year about some foreigners eating Gulyásleves and they were literally vomiting after each spoonfuls of the soup. I guess it was very spicy, but since then I couldn't imagine anybody to like our cuisine. Even Prince Charles said that our cuisine is horrible. or something like that.
(Actually the Soviets "freed" us from Nazi Germany. During WW1 there was the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, After WW1 came liberty:))
Here is a cleaning company commercial, hope you like it:):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okLNq2HHK2o

[#25 posted by oldJet, December 4, 2008 10:31 AM]

my arteries blocked just watching that..