The chili pepper reached Europe from the Americas after 1492, but how it specifically reached Hungary is contested: one account has it arriving through Ottoman Turkish territory during the sixteenth and seventeenth century occupation of central Hungary, another traces a Balkan trade route independent of direct Ottoman planting, and a popular but weakly evidenced tradition credits Bulgarian gardeners settled near Szeged.
What would resolve this Earlier dated agricultural or trade records naming the pepper along a specific one of these routes, rather than the general post-1492 diffusion already well established, would settle which path actually carried it into Hungarian cooking.
OpenCulinary and agricultural historyHungarian Cuisine (Wikipedia)