Generally the Hungarian word “fasirt” (fah-sheert) can refer to different kinds of spiced and fried meat dishes made of ground or sometimes chopped meat that is not filled into sausage casings.
Hungarian Meat Loaf (Fasirt).
It is often translated to English as “Hungarian meat balls” or “Hungarian hamburger” but the same meat can be shaped like a meat loaf.
They generally look like a meat loaf common in North America, but with a much spicier taste.
The meat can be just basic pork sausage meat but there are variations that are less meaty and have bread or rolls soaked in milk mixed with the meat. The most common meat used in this kind of dish is pork. But there are many recipes, some of which use a combination of pork and beef, or chicken, chicken livers, etc. sometimes combined with mushrooms.
The meat is mixed with the spices and the other ingredients (such as bread soaked in milk) and since it has no casing raw eggs are used to bind everything together so it does not fall apart during cooking.
The meat loaves on the picture were made according to the following recipe:
1 kg ground pork, mixed with 20g (one table spoon) of salt, some garlic, ground black pepper, ground hot red peppers (about 20g), caraway seed, and a bit of marjoram and one raw egg. Optionally one could also add finely chopped green parsley, or onions and a slice bread or a breakfast roll soaked in milk.
One of the loaves on the picture has been stuffed with hard boiled eggs (just roll them in the meat as if wrapping some stuffing in dough).
After the meat has been formed into loaves they were rolled in bread crumbs and then oven baked on medium heat for an hour.
Meat prepared the same way could have been formed into meat balls instead and then pan fried in oil or lard on the stove top.