Hungary as a nation and a culinary entity, may be said to have begun at the end of the 9th century, when the Hungarian tribes, which had been moving west and south-west for centuries from Asia, accomplished the conquest of what is now their country. (Their linguistic brethren, the Finns, had chosen to move north-west and take up a position distant from them, thus separating the two surviving examples of the Finno-Ugric language group. Whatever culinary links there may have been between the two seem to have disappeared as a result of this divergence.)
