Paprika Paradise: Travels in the land of my almost birth

For James Jeffrey, his mother’s homeland of Hungary has always featured in family stories – sometimes as a fairytale land, other times as an exotic parallel universe. It is a place where storks build nests as large as tables on chimney tops and grandparents live in suburbs called Uranium Town. People say ‘hello’ when they mean ‘goodbye’, have no word for ‘he’ or ‘she’, and bestow an almost godlike status on cakes and lard.

It is the country where James’s mother, a volatile divorcee who could...