As I have written earlier, you can meet different recipes of stuffed cabbage depending on which part of the country you visit. Its name varies, too: on the Great Hungarian Plain it’s also known as szárma, in Transylvania it’s called takart. The ancestor of stuffed cabbage was the cabbage meat (káposztás hús), a stew-like one pot dish; stuffing the cabbage leaves with ground meat spread in Hungary only during the Turkish occupation in the 17th century.

The following recipe comes from Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg county located in the north-eastern tip of Hungary.  It borders Ukraine, Slovakia, and Romania, its capital is Nyíregyháza. These cabbage rolls are stuffed with the mixture of ground pork, bacon, rice and sautéed onion, and cooked in tomato juice. If you don’t have tomato juice, purée will do as well, just dilute it with water, just enough to cover the food. The cabbage leaves are cut in half lengthwise because the goal is to make as little rolls as possible.