>>The general Pannonian cuisine tends to be heavy on onion and spicy stuff, with meat mostly well cooked until it's soft and the best of the juices are in the stew. Did I mention onion? :). The Hungarians (also mixed up a lot in this area) have the pörkölt, i.e. "simmered", which is mostly knuckles and tendons, cooked for hours in little or no water, just own juices, where you add red paprika, potatoes etc only during the last 30 minutes. It's delicious, but even if it wasn't, you'd wolf it: by the time it's ready, you've visited the kettle a dozen times to see how's it going, and are almost running out of saliva.
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>Thanks for the explanation(s). I know he was described as Romanian but that must have been by a know-nothing. It did come to me overnight that the name we knew him by was not Michael Dokovic but Miodrag Dokovic.

Now that's entirely Serbian. Miodrag is a specially sweet name, mio means handsome, dear to one's heart; drag means dear (and probably shares a root with the word). (and yes... my name means "sweetheart")

>Still trying to remember the name of that long-ago-eaten stew. If there was any onion in it, it was subtle. The dominating flavors were meat and tomatoes.

Should have been some paprikaš or gulaš (goulash). The onions were probably chopped, fried to glassy in a zaprška and then boiled with the rest.