Early Jewish Cookbooks: Essays on Hungarian Jewish Gastronomical History 9789633864302

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Early Jewish Cookbooks

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András Koerner

Early Jewish Cookbooks Essays on the History of Hungarian Jewish Gastronomy

Preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett

Budapest–Vienna–New York

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© 2022 by the author Published in 2022 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary Tel: +36-1-327-3138 or 327-3000 E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.ceupress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher.

ISBN 978-963-386-429-6 (hardcover) ISBN 978-963-386-430-2 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Koerner, András, author. | Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, writer of preface. Title: Early Jewish cookbooks : essays on the history of Hungarian Jewish gastronomy / András Koerner ; preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. s Description: Budapest : New York : CEU Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021052927 (print) | LCCN 2021052928 (ebook) | ISBN 9789633864296 (hardcover) | ISBN 9789633864302 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jewish cooking—History—19th century—Sources. | Cookbooks—Hungary—History—19th century. | LCGFT: Cookbooks. Classification: LCC TX724 .K6255 2022 (print) | LCC TX724 (ebook) | DDC 641.5/676--dc23/eng/20211109 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052927 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021052928

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CONTENTS PREFACE by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VII INTRODUCTION .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Significance of Old Cookbooks Scholarly Research of Old Cookbooks in Hungary The Pioneers of Research of Alimentary Culture University Programs of Food Studies and Culinary History Old Cookbooks as Historical Documents Jewish Cookbooks as Historical Documents PART ONE: COOKBOOKS AND A RECIPE COLLECTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1. THE WORLD’S FIRST COOKBOOK PRINTED IN HEBREW LETTERS . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Recipes from the first cookbook in Hebrew letters .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 2. THE FIRST JEWISH COOKBOOK IN HUNGARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Recipes from the first Jewish cookbook in Hungary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 3. THE EARLIEST HUNGARIAN JEWISH RECIPE COLLECTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79 Recipes from the earliest Jewish recipe collection in Hungary .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 4. A WORLD-FAMOUS NINETEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARIAN JEWISH COOKBOOK . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Recipes from Therese Lederer’s 1876 cookbook .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 5. THE LAST WIZO COOKBOOK BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 Recipes from the 1938 Transylvanian WIZO cookbook . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 PART TWO: CULINARY CULTURE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 6. BÓLESZ, A FORGOTTEN JEWISH PASTRY OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY PEST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 The recipe of bólesz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 7. THE INFLUENCE OF HUNGARIAN JEWISH CUISINE ON THE NON-JEWISH .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Jewish recipes from nineteenth-century Hungarian cookbooks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 EPILOGUE: HUNGARY’S PIONEERING ROLE IN EARLY JEWISH COOKBOOKS . . . . . . . . . 223 Glossary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 Selected Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Index of Recipes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 Index of Personal Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Illustration Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

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BARBARA KIRSHENBLATT-GIMBLETT

is Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University and Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. She was born in Toronto, Canada to immigrant parents from Poland. She is best known for her interdisciplinary contributions to Jewish studies and to the theory and history of museums, tourism, and heritage. She has published pioneering studies of Jewish cooking and cookbooks and has written essays on those subjects for Jewish encyclopedias.

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PREFACE

W

hat joy awaits the reader of this inspiring book! Pour over its pages and discover the story of the earliest Jewish cookbooks ever published, then head for the kitchen. András Koerner is the first to explore these treasures in depth. Who wrote them? Who published them? Who were they for? How were they received? The answers to those questions bring new insights into Jewish life in Europe during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. The story starts in 1815 with the earliest printed Jewish cookbook and concludes in 1938 with the last Jewish cookbook published in Hungarian before the Holocaust. There are many milestones along the way, not least the manuscript cookbook of Koerner’s great-grandmother, who began entering recipes around 1869, when she was about seventeen years old and some eight years before she married, and who still referred to them in the 1930s. In contrast with the early printed cookbooks, this manuscript features distinctively Jewish dishes and is the earliest Jewish cookbook in Hungary to do so. Whereas very little if anything is known about most of the women who authored early Jewish cookbooks, much is known about the author of this manuscript, which makes it all the more valuable. As someone who has always loved cookbooks, a passion I share, Koerner understands that cookbooks are more than manuals. They are works of literature, the recipes themselves poems. They are to be read and relished, and not only followed. Old cookbooks, while purporting to instruct the novice in the basics, actually assume culinary experience, which is why the recipes are more difficult for the modern cook to follow. Increasingly lavish, these volumes become prestige objects, a mark of sophistication, and a popular wedding gift for a young bride, whether to prepare her to cook or to supervise

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her servants. That said, the authors and publishers of these volumes also addressed the experienced cook in search of recipes for special occasions, especially weddings. This is not the first time that Koerner has written on these topics. Indeed, he is the world expert on the culinary culture of Hungarian Jews and, with this book, he has also burnished his reputation as the person who knows more and understands better the nature and importance of the very first Jewish cookbooks to appear in print. They were both preceded and continued to be followed by manuscripts. Even today, with an abundance of printed cookbooks readily at hand, almost everyone has a personal collection of recipes, whether clipped from newspapers and magazines, typed or written on index cards, scribbled on scraps of paper as dictated by family and friends, collected on Pinterest boards, printed out from Internet sites, or―as in the past—dutifully entered by hand or pasted on the pages of a blank notebook. Nor has the infinite number of recipes online stemmed the tide of ever more inventive and beautifully produced printed cookbooks. Early Jewish Cookbooks builds on Koerner’s earlier work, notably Jewish Cuisine in Hungary, winner of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award, and A Taste of the Past; The Daily Life and Cooking of a 19th-Century Hungarian Jewish Homemaker (2004), which is dedicated to his great-grandmother’s manuscript cookbook. Not only is Koerner a meticulous researcher―he leaves no stone unturned, no question unasked―but also and above all, he brings great intellectual imagination to the study of culinary culture. In his work cuisine meets culture in equal measure, as brilliantly here as in his earlier books, this time by exploring these early cookbooks as cultural phenomena in their own right. His primary interest in the present volume is cookbooks published in Hungary, most of them in German, some of which are among the very earliest Jewish cookbooks published anywhere. While these early cookbooks are both the point of departure and the destination of Koerner’s study, they cannot tell their story alone, so he has searched high and low for other sources―letters, memoirs, advertisements, business records, the press, and archival materials―to set these books in their wider context. Above all, Koerner offers a model for thinking about cookbooks as cultural artifacts and as unparalleled source material for exploring the history of Jewish domestic life and the role of women in the embourgeoisement of their families. Early Jewish Cookbooks raises so many interesting questions. Why did “cookbooks for Jews”―I use this formulation advisedly―emerge so late, at

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least fifty years later than mass market cookbooks for other home cooks? Does their late appearance correlate with the slow onset and pace of acculturation, embourgeoisement, emancipation, and emergence of new Jewish elites? Or does their late appearance reflect an anxiety about the price of such advancement, a fear that young brides, eager to be fashionable, might abandon kashrut in their efforts to set an elegant table? Or are we witnessing a newly awakened desire among the still observant to bring greater sophistication to their kosher table? The earliest Jewish cookbooks do not include instructions for keeping kosher. They assume a reader who already knows how to keep kosher. Nor do they include distinctively Jewish dishes―they assume a reader who knows how to make Jewish dishes or who is uninterested in preparing them. What their implied readers want to know is how to prepare the elegant cuisine of their non-Jewish peers without violating the rules of kashrut. While they could turn to general cookbooks, those volumes were not adapted for the kosher kitchen and, with their recipes for pork and shellfish, their mixtures of milk and meat, and their recipes for prohibited cuts of beef, they would have been treif in their own right―hardly the kind of book that should find its way into a kosher home―and a temptation to follow recipes that are not kosher. Even when, by mid-century, Jewish cookbooks began to include instructions for observing kashrut, we should not assume that the intended reader was ignorant of the rules. Such instructions might also serve as reassuring confirmation of what the reader already knew and was already doing―in other words, these instructions may have been more “affirmational, than informational,” as Jeffrey Shandler has remarked. These instructions might also inspire the reader’s confidence in the author and the recipes to deliver reliably kosher results. Since the recipes themselves produced results that were virtually indistinguishable from the treif versions in other cookbooks, it was by including a section on kashrut that these cookbooks made the otherwise invisibly kosher nature of the volume visible. Kashrut, not cuisine, is what made these cookbooks Jewish. We might then describe these books as both affirmational as regards the instructions for kashrut, and aspirational as regards cuisine. That said, we should note that some of these cookbooks were criticized in the Jewish press for including recipes that were not strictly kosher, whether by mistake or out of ignorance—Rebekka Wolf even posted a notice in the Jewish press announcing that in a future edition of her cookbook she would leave out any recipe that mixed meat and fish because some observant Jews consider this mixture prohibited. Sarah Cohn’s Israelitisches

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Kochbuch: Zubereitung aller Arten Speisen nach den Ritualgesetzen (Jewish cookbook: Preparation of all kinds of foods according to the ritual laws. 1888) was roundly condemned in the press for including many recipes that were unequivocally treif. The Jewish press even went so far as to issue a general warning to its readers about “kosher” cookbooks, as they might not realize that some of the recipes were treif. To the extent that these cookbooks were discussed in the Jewish press, the issue of kashrut, usually in a detailed article penned by a critical rabbi, was at the forefront. After all, the women who wrote these cookbooks might know a lot about cooking and have a working knowledge of the kosher kitchen, but they were not specialists in religious law. Consider Joseph Stolz’s cookbooks. His first was the kosher one, Kochbuch für Israeliten (1815), which is also the earliest published Jewish cookbook that we know of. It appeared in only one edition. Although Stolz claimed that everyone, Jew and Gentile alike, could cook from this book, it is difficult to imagine non-Jewish women buying a book addressed specifically to Jews. That said, such a claim might have served to reassure his intended Jewish readers of the quality of the haute cuisine he promised to deliver. As if to make good on his claim, Stolz proceeded to incorporate the majority of the 344 recipes in Kochbuch für Israeliten into his second cookbook, Vollständiges Rheinisches Kochbuch, a year later. At 616 recipes, this volume was almost twice the size of his kosher cookbook and included an appendix, Die Karlsruher Köchin, which featured baking recipes contributed by Stolz’s mother and wife, who were also professional cooks and cooking teachers, but without attributing these recipes to them. The second enlarged edition of Vollständiges Rheinisches Kochbuch appeared in 1840, two years before Stolz’s death. Although the first published Jewish cookbook was written by a man, a professional chef of high standing, almost all those that followed were written by women. The most popular, Kochbuch für Israelitische Frauen, by Rebekka Wolf, appeared in 14 editions between 1851 and 1933. This bestseller was even translated into Polish (1877 and 1904) and Dutch (1881). Although the women who authored these early Jewish cookbooks shamelessly purloined and adapted recipes from other cookbooks, they clearly knew how to cook and touted their experience as a selling point. In contrast, except for Joseph Stolz, the few men who produced Jewish cookbooks were publishers and writers, not cooks. A publisher of Hebrew prayer books might see (or hope to create) a market for a Jewish cookbook, while a writer of popular how-to

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books―language textbooks, letter-writing manuals, translations, and dictionaries―might want to add a cookbook to his list of how-to books. Proficient in several languages, such writers were experienced translators and could easily draw on cookbooks in other languages, which they did. Indeed, they often made the international character of their cookbooks a selling point. What makes these early kosher cookbooks Jewish? In the introduction to his kosher cookbook, Joseph Stolz (1777–1842), the personal chef of the Grand Duke in the State of Baden, writes of visiting the kitchens of “educated Jews,” first and foremost from among the 670 Jews in Karlsruhe, where he lived. In this introduction, he writes that they welcomed his professional advice and encouraged him to publish his collection of gourmet recipes adapted for the kosher kitchen, noting that “as far as I know, no similar book of this kind has been available to the followers of the Mosaic faith.” What made Stolz’s volume a “Jewish” cookbook was neither the author, who was Catholic, nor the cuisine, but rather the intended reader and her kosher requirements. For these reasons, I would argue that such volumes were “kosher” rather than “Jewish” cookbooks, strictly speaking―or, more precisely, they were “Jewish” only in religious terms, consistent with the way Stolz refers to his intended readers: “followers of the Mosaic faith.” Why are all the earliest published Jewish cookbooks in German? By the time the first Jewish cookbook in English appeared in 1846, thirteen Jewish cookbooks had appeared in German, and some of them were translated into other languages in the years that followed―the Polish translation of Rebekka Wolf’s cookbook (1877) was also the first Jewish cookbook to appear in Poland. Not only was German widely spoken well beyond Germany, but it was also prestigious. It was both a Kultursprache and the language of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, which emerged in Berlin in the mid-eighteenth century. Moreover, as Michael Silber has noted, Hungarian Jews were probably the largest German-speaking Jewish population in Europe. This would account, at least in part, for why so many early Jewish cookbooks in German were published in Hungary. There were also several additional factors. First, trade barriers between Germany and Hungary, which limited access to books published in Germany, made it necessary to publish books in German in Hungary. Second, German was the language of Jewish modernization. The Haskalah promoted knowledge of German, and German Jews led the way in modernizing European Jewry and in pressing for emancipation. Third, while religious observance was on the decline in Germany during the first half

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of the nineteenth century, acculturation and social integration were proceeding more slowly elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe. Early Jewish cookbooks were both a barometer of these processes and agents in advancing them. They were manuals for how to acculturate while remaining Jewish, as defined by religion. As such, they are an expression of a particular understanding of Jewish modernity. Of special interest in this regard is a cookbook that is both rare and unique and a centerpiece of Koerner’s new book. He is the first to subject this unusual volume to the close analysis that it deserves: Nayes folshtendiges kokhbukh fir die yidishe kikhe. Ayn unentberlikhes handbukh fir yidishe froyen und tokhter nebst forshrift fon flaysh kosher makhen und khale nemen, iberhoypt iber raynlikhkayt und kashrut (A new and complete cookbook of the Jewish cuisine: An indispensable handbook for Jewish women and daughters, with instructions for koshering meat and separating challah, as well as for general cleanliness and kashrut). This cookbook was published in Pest and printed in Vienna in 1854. No author is identified by name, but from the introduction we can assume that the publisher, M. E. Löwy in Pest, is the “author.” The publisher is forthright about having taken recipes from other cookbooks. Though modest in size, just 78 pages, the value of this cookbook is enormous―it is a transitional object par excellence, a Jewish cookbook in the Jewish alphabet and vaybertaytsh font, and in a language that appears closer to German than to Yiddish. That said, we should keep in mind that the boundaries of languages are fluid, especially when the languages, German and Yiddish, are so close. Nor should we assume that those for whom the volume was intended would identify their languages the way we do today. The late Shlomo Z. Berger, writing about this phenomenon in the Netherlands, considers Jüdisch-Deutsch a written dialect of Yiddish, noting that it could be found in Germany, Austria, Bohemia, Slovakia (and we should add, Hungary), as well as on occasion in England and Eastern Europe. How then to account for the character of Nayes folshtendiges kokhbukh fir die yidishe kikhe in comparison with the preceding Jewish cookbooks in German? First, the earlier cookbooks assume that the “educated women” to whom they were addressed knew how to keep kosher, could read German, and either knew how to prepare Jewish dishes or had no interest in doing so. Their purpose was purely and simply to provide a kosher version of what their non-Jewish peers were cooking, namely a proudly international haute cuisine―Central European, with many French and Italian dishes―rendered

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kosher through a process of elimination and replacement. The result was what I call invisibly kosher gourmet cuisine. The 1854 volume does the same thing, but with a critical difference: it intensifies the Jewish character of the book, but not the cuisine. The publisher has lifted the recipes from earlier German-language kosher cookbooks, but with a difference that is announced in the cookbook’s title, a wording that is consistent with a subtle shift from “cookbook for Israelite women,” which identified the intended reader as Jewish, to titles that identified the cookbook or the cuisine as Jewish―“Israelite cookbook” or “... for the Jewish kitchen.” Nayes folshtendiges kokhbukh fir die yidishe kikhe takes this shift even further by using Jewish characters in a font identified with Yiddish and with women―as if to say, “This is more than a kosher cookbook for Jewish women; it is a Jewish cookbook”―notwithstanding the absence of recipes for characteristically Jewish dishes. Only in 1876 did there appear a cookbook in Hungary that was not only kosher but also featured Jewish cuisine, namely Therese Lederer’s Koch-Buch für israelitische Frauen, which includes the words “Originalgerichte der israelitischen Küche” in the title. Since the publisher took the recipes from other kosher cookbooks in German, why did he not simply publish them as such? Most Hungarian Jews could speak German. However, there was no compulsory education at the time the book was published, so while his intended readers could speak German, many of them might not have been able to read German, the impediment being the Latin alphabet. Since they could no doubt read Hebrew, at the very least to recite the prayers, they would have been able to read a text in the Jewish alphabet. Furthermore, since the publisher used the Yiddish font, which came to be identified with Yiddish texts for women, the intended readers must have been able to read Yiddish texts―there are also traces of Germanized Yiddish in the very title of the book as well as inside. What its readers would call the language of the cookbook remains an open question. Would they refer to it as German, Yiddish, Jüdisch-Deutsch, or German in Hebrew letters? This solution―“German” in Hebrew letters, with its venerable roots in Moses Mendelssohn’s mid-eighteenth-century Biur, a German translation of the Pentateuch and commentary in Hebrew letters―continued to be used up until the First World War. Now consider the orthography of this vaybertaytsh text. As Jeffrey Shandler explained to me: Hebrew words are spelled correctly (‫)רשכ‬. German spelling is simulated (double consonants, “silent” “h,” pey fey for pf). Vowels

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are rendered both according to Yiddish conventions (oyf), yud for ü, but segolalef for ö, which seems like an effort to represent this “oe” vowel sound (which in the Yiddish spelling of the cognate would simply be ayin, e.g., tsvelf), and Yiddish orthographic conventions (the double yud) are also present. Finally, there is the font, vaybertaytsh (literally, women’s translation, meaning the Yiddish translation of Hebrew) or vayberksav (women’s script), a semi-cursive font used for Yiddish, which in time came to be identified with Yiddish texts intended for women, but also read by men. The two other fonts are square or block Hebrew characters for Hebrew and Aramaic classical texts and the semi-cursive Rashi font for rabbinic commentaries. Square Hebrew characters, which became the norm, appear on the cookbook’s title page and in headings within the text. Clearly, multiple linguistic competencies are at play here, some active, others passive: one may understand but not speak a language. Or one may speak but not read (or write) a language, thus writing one language in the alphabet of another language, as we do when we romanize or transliterate Yiddish and Hebrew in English texts, which solves the problem. As for font, as distinct from alphabet, one reader might find vaybertaytsh harder to read than Fraktur (Gothic) letters, and vice versa. More important is what a particular font (and alphabet) signify and what to make of those that we find in this unique cookbook, a transitional object of the first order, which marks the shift among Hungarian Jews from Western Yiddish to German and eventually to Hungarian. By the time we come to the last cookbook that Koerner discusses, the one published in Hungarian by the Transylvanian branch of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO) in 1938, we have traveled a long way from Joseph Stolz’s 1815 kosher cookbook, the work of a professional chef. As mentioned, almost all the Jewish cookbooks that followed were published by women. While we know little or nothing about most of them, we can assume that they, like those about whom we do know something, were writing from experience, which they themselves claim, and that they also lifted recipes from other cookbooks, a common practice. We know from various sources, not least from classified ads, that Jewish women were working as cooks, caterers, housekeepers, maids, and nannies, and that some of them ran cooking classes and even their own cooking school or managed their own pensionat or restaurant. Several of the cookbook authors identified themselves as widows.

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By the early twentieth century, however, a new type of cookbook author emerges, women who are academically trained in home economics and nutrition. Erna Meyer, designer of the rational kitchen in Germany and cookbook author, represents this development. Meyer was born in Berlin in 1890 and died in Haifa in 1975. She earned a doctorate in economics at the University of Berlin in 1913, with a specialization in household management and economics. Her 1926 book, Der neue Haushalt (The New Household), became a classic and quickly appeared in many editions. She also designed the efficient kitchen that was part of the model Stuttgart apartment at the 1927 Werkbund exhibition. A victim of Nazi racial policy, Meyer immigrated to British Mandate Palestine in 1933―she was among the approximately 50,000 German Jews who did the same during the 1930s. Meyer continued to advocate for a rational approach to household design and management, especially as regards the kitchen, and promoted good nutrition in the Yishuv. Around 1936, she published How to Cook in Palestine. Wie kocht man in Eretz-Israel?, in English, German, and Hebrew, for WIZO in Tel Aviv. Meyer introduced her immigrant readers to Mediterranean produce and prepared them to make do with a Primus (portable stove) and a Wundertopf (covered pot, used for baking on the stovetop in kitchens lacking an oven), while promoting Zionist values. Zionist women’s groups in Europe also published cookbooks intended to prepare prospective immigrants for life in the Yishuv, several in German and one in Hungarian, which Koerner discusses in this volume. András Koerner has done a great service to the study of Jewish culinary culture and to the analysis of cookbooks generally. He not only teases out the web of relations that connects these nineteenth-century cookbooks to one another, recipe by recipe, but also examines the circumstances of their authorship, publication, marketing and distribution, their intended and actual readers, their characteristics, and the languages in which they were written. By focusing on cookbooks created for Jews in Hungary, which include some of the earliest and most interesting ones, he has produced a study of extraordinary depth and a landmark account of Jewish cookbooks anywhere at any time. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett New York City August 2021

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1. Teréz Berger’s monogrammed table napkins from the 1870s. Her handwritten collection of recipes is the subject of the third essay in this book. Photograph by Teodóra Hübner.

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[1]

INTRODUCTION

T

he majority of the following essays focus on some of the most significant documents in the history of Hungarian Jewish cuisine. But those who are curious about the other―here not examined―documents of pre-1945 Hungarian Jewish cuisine, can find descriptions of them as well as of all the Jewish cookbooks published in Hungary before World War II in my book, Jewish Cuisine in Hungary.1 The subject of the first essay, a thin book published in 1854 in Pest, deserves our attention since it is the world’s first cookbook printed in Hebrew letters. The importance of Teréz Baruch’s handwritten recipe collection from the 1860s, considered in another essay, lies in its being the earliest document in Hungary that includes recipes for characteristically Jewish dishes―among others: cholent, matzo balls, and various kugels―since the earlier local Jewish cookbooks, including the Hebrew-lettered one, do not describe a single such course. Therese Lederer’s volume, written in German and published in 1876 in Budapest, is significant since it was not only one of the world’s best Jewish cookbooks of its time, but also achieved international success both in the nineteenth and in the present century. What distinguishes the subject of the fifth essay, a Hungarian-language volume published by WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization) in 1938 in Transylvania, is that it was the last cookbook put out by the organization in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust. But why return to these documents which I have already examined in my abovementioned work about the cultural history of Hungarian Jewish

1 Koerner, Jewish Cuisine. The Hungarian edition on which it was based was published in 2017.

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cuisine? One reason is that I was only able to present there nearly all aspects of Jewish culinary culture by avoiding lengthy consideration of individual documents, since their more detailed analyses would have added considerably to the length of a close to 400-page volume and would have placed disproportionate emphasis on them in comparison to other subjects. Here I try to make up for this omission by writing about them in greater detail and in a more scholarly manner. A further reason is that I wished to supplement the descriptions of those old books and manuscripts with numerous interesting facts I learned about them in the past three years. To mention only one example: I managed to locate a Dutch edition, published in Rotterdam in 1892, of Therese Lederer’s 1876 work, unknown to researchers of gastronomic history in Hungary until now, in spite of the fact that it is the only pre-1945 Hungarian cookbook (including the non-Jewish ones) that was translated to a foreign language and published abroad. Yet another reason is that only after the completion of my book was I able to find copies of the extremely rare 1854 and 1938 cookbooks and to study them in their entirety. Before that, I had only seen short excerpts of them, since the Hungarian national library in Budapest has no copies of those two works. Each essay in this volume is followed by recipes selected from the cookbook discussed in it or related to its subject. They are intended here primarily as historical documents, and for this reason I left their original texts unchanged and did not try to “modernize” them. I did not rework them even when they lacked some information that could have made preparing them easier. I did not even do this in Teréz Berger’s handwritten recipes, although they are frequently less accurate than those in printed cookbooks. The only exception I made to this was to rearrange the cooking steps in some of her recipes into a more logical sequence. Unlike the continuous text of my work Jewish Cuisine in Hungary, the essays in the present book are independent from each other. They can be read separately, since none of them assumes familiarity with the others. For this reason, however, in a few rare instances they repeat information from the other studies.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF OLD COOKBOOKS

Nowadays more and more old cookbooks are becoming available in modern editions, which is laudable. It is less commendable, however, that those new

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INTRODUCTION

[3]

editions frequently include only the briefest of introductory studies, which, due to their brevity, cannot analyze all the important characteristics of the book and explain what makes the work significant, not to mention that at times even a brief introduction is missing from the reprints. For example, there is no introduction in the 2003 reprint of “Auntie Giti’s” (Mrs. Aladár Adler, née Gitta Rand) 1935 Jewish cookbook or in the 2011 German reprint of Therese Lederer’s work, originally published in 1876 in Budapest. Although old cookbooks can teach us much about the past, they have only limited value as practical guides for today’s home cooks. Frequently, it is difficult to cook from them since their recipes occasionally require no longer available ingredients and they are almost never as detailed as those in modern cookbooks. Preparing their recipes―especially from books published in the nineteenth century or even earlier―requires such unusual experience and knowledge that most home cooks do not possess. And while reading old cookbooks can be interesting and entertaining even if we do not intend to cook from them (I, for one, have enjoyed reading them since I was a teenager), a non-professional needs the explanations of an introductory essay to point out all the interesting things they can tell us about a past period. Essays about old cookbooks frequently focus only on their authors and publishers. Undoubtedly, this is important information, but it is also essential that in examining such volumes we should describe those particulars of the epoch that influenced their publication and reception. This goal of presenting cookbooks within the context of their age is the reason why in the present volume, to cite only one example, the study about the world’s first Hebrew-lettered cookbook also describes the severe restrictions that limited where Jews could live and maintain stores in Pest and Pozsony (today: Bratislava, Slovakia) in the second half of the eighteenth and in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the their gradual switch from Yiddish to German and Hungarian as the language of daily life. But it is not enough to write about the authors, publishers and epoch of cookbooks; the real significance of such works only becomes obvious if we analyze their contents as thoroughly as historians do when they examine historical documents such as official records, personal letters, and memoirs. In this effort, the methods used in social sciences for examining old documents offer essential help: in-depth analysis of their text and use of language; the study of sources; and the comparison with similar domestic and foreign works.

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SCHOLARLY RESEARCH OF OLD COOKBOOKS IN HUNGARY

Unfortunately, in Hungary essays about historical cookbooks and handwritten recipe collections are rare and, in most cases, quite unscholarly. Most are not based on original research but merely repeat information―often anecdotes of doubtful veracity―from earlier popular articles, thereby perpetuating their errors. One of the few exceptions is Sándor Iván Kovács’s wonderful, pioneering study about a seventeenth-century handwritten recipe collection once used in the household of the Counts Zrínyi in Csáktornya (today: Čakovec, Croatia) and about the first Hungarian printed cookbook, published in 1695 by Miklós Tótfalusi Kis in Kolozsvár (today: Cluj, Romania).2 In the preface to his lengthy, nearly eighty-page study, Kovács states that Hungarian essays about cookbooks “unfortunately fail to examine the document in its entirety, to take earlier results into consideration, to make comparisons with other European works, and to satisfy the demands of scholarly textual criticism.” Kovács wrote this in 1988, but regrettably the situation has hardly improved. True, in the past thirty years some authors (among them András Cserna-Szabó, Béla Fehér, Balázs Füreder, Eszter Kisbán and Noémi Saly) have published outstanding essays about the results of their research on old cookbooks, but with very few exceptions they do not analyse all aspects of the works in as much detail as Kovács in his study. The essays in the present volume are also not as detailed as that of Kovács, but at least they attempt to describe the documents with the help of the abovementioned analytical methods of social sciences. A factor contributing to the rarity of detailed, scholarly studies of the theme in Hungary is that while people there, like in other countries, eagerly buy the many kinds of cookbooks available, interest remains very limited in studies of food as a cultural phenomenon. Many people still do not consider scholarly research of the culture and history of food as important as the study of other areas of social sciences. In Hungary, it is mostly ethnographers, first and foremost Eszter Kisbán, who have studied this subject, while in other countries sociologists and anthropologists have also been studying food and eating as important elements of a culture for decades.

2 Kovács, Szakácsmesterségnek.

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THE PIONEERS OF RESEARCH OF ALIMENTARY CULTURE

Already as early as 1910, the German philosopher and sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) published an essay about the sociology of meals (Soziologie der Mahlzeit), but the pioneers of the research of alimentary culture were mostly French and not German, which is hardly surprising if we consider the unusually important and longstanding role such culture has played in French national identity. For example, in the 1960s, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), published important works about the anthropological aspects of alimentary culture, while Roland Barthes (1915–1980) wrote of the psychosociological aspects.3 Already, some years before them, the historian Fernand Braudel (1902–1985), the editor of the important scholarly journal Annales (Annales d’histoire économique et sociale) between 1956 and 1968, addressed alimentation as one of the essential features of cultures and epochs. Then in the 1960s, historians belonging to his circle started researching the commerce and ingestion of foodstuffs (for example, historical changes in the consumption of meat in different countries) as important characteristics of the structures of everyday life. Braudel not only set an example for such research, but it was he who coined the phrase of “structures of everyday life.”4 While historians of the Annales school examined matters related to food merely as one of the measures of everyday life, the research of alimentary history and the culinary customs of past ages played a central role somewhat later in Jean-Louis Flandrin’s (1931–2001) work. Similarly, the writer, historian and philosopher Jean-Paul Aron (1925–1988), nephew of the famous philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, and journalist Raymond Aron, wrote several works about nineteenth-century French culinary culture.5 In France not only individual scholars have been focusing on food history, but in 2001 the government established in Tours an entire scientific development agency, the IEHCA (Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation, that is, the European Institute for Food History and Cultures), to

3 Simmel, Sociology of the Meal; Lévi-Strauss: Culinary Triangle; Barthes: Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption. Lévi-Strauss also focused on the culture of eating in some of his other works, for example in the 1964 Le Cru et le Cuit and in the 1968 L’origine des manières de table. 4 Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, vol. one: Les structures du quotidien. 5 Aron, Essai sur la sensibilité alimentaire; Mangeur de XIXe siècle.

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promote the multidisciplinary reasearch of alimentary culture and its history (food studies).6 Even this very brief overview of the pioneers of such research would not be complete without mentioning Massimo Montanari (1949–), perhaps the most important scholar outside France to focus on this subject. Montanari is a professor of medieval history who researches not only the agriculture and eating habits of the Middle Ages, but since the end of the 1970s he has also published excellent works about the alimentary history of other epochs. Between 2003 and 2009 he was also the editor of the multilingual scholarly journal called Food & History, a publication of the abovementioned IEHCA institute. Although already before the 1980s works about alimentary history had been quoting from old recipe collections and other historical documents, hardly any of them made an old cookbook the central subject of its investigation. Such monographic analyses of cookbooks started only in the 1980s. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s excellent and detailed study, published in 1987 with the title The Kosher Gourmet in the Nineteenth-Century Kitchen: Three Jewish Cookbooks in Historical Perspective, was one of the earliest scholarly works to focus on old Jewish cookbooks.

UNIVERSITY PROGRAMS OF FOOD STUDIES AND CULINARY HISTORY

In countries other than Hungary, the last decades have seen the publication of not only such scholarly works but also more numerous popular ones about the sociological, anthropological, ethical, environmental, economical, and cultural aspects of human alimentation. These days several universities offer food studies programs that focus on such themes and on the related fields of gastronomy and gastrohistory. One example is the Pôle d’Alimentation program offered by the University of Tours with the support of the IEHCA. Several universities offer food studies not only at the undergraduate but also at the graduate level, and a few of them even have PhD programs. It would be

6 But well before the creation of IEHCA, another institution had already made such research its main goal: the International Commission for Research into European Food History, founded in 1989 by Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg (1929–2015).

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INTRODUCTION

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important to teach food studies and culinary history at Hungarian universities as well, so that specialized scholars in Hungary―as in other countries―could focus on those subjects and not only people with degrees in other disciplines, such as historians, ethnographers, marketing experts, or architects (which happens to be my profession).

OLD COOKBOOKS AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS

Until now no Hungarian researcher has tried to describe what scholarly analyses of documents of gastrohistory―primarily old cookbooks―should include. Although the following paragraphs are not meant as a methodology, perhaps the thoughts outlined in them could be of some help in developing one. In addition to the previously mentioned need of writing about the book’s author, publisher, and epoch, such an analysis should also include information about the publication’s purpose. Even if the author did not specify in the introduction to the cookbook the social or religious group for whom he or she wrote it, one may find cues for this in the recipes themselves. One should also examine to what extent social conditions influenced the book’s publication and contents. If the author’s name is missing from the book or if it is a pen-name (both of which were common among nineteenth-century Hungarian cookbooks), one should offer possible explanations for this. It is also necessary to observe if the contents of the work fall short of the stated goal of the author. Cookbooks occasionally include autobiographical passages―of course, one should point this out too. It also deserves mention if in addition to recipes the book includes suggestions concerning a proper diet, the maintenance of health, and good housekeeping. In addition, the analysis of a cookbook should also describe what the recipe ingredients (or the absence of an ingredient one would expect in that type of dish), units of measurement, cooking methods, and the pots, pans, and kitchen implements suggested (for example, grinders, mortars, or the special metal nippers once used for breaking off a piece from sugarcones) can tell us about the period. Additionally, we should examine how the subject matter of the cookbook has been organized and how this resembles other similar works of the period or differs from them. We must also pay attention to the way the recipes are written: whether they are detailed or laconic, if they spell out the quantities of all the ingredients or leave them to the judgement of the reader, and

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whether the author succeeded in explaining the process of preparing the dish logically and understandably, so that even hard-to-describe details, such as the proper consistency and “feel” of doughs, can be clear to the readers. It is also important to see whether the recipes include troubleshooting suggestions for solving contingencies that might arise during the preparation of the dish. The use of language in the volume frequently also deserves attention. Of course, examining this is especially justified in old cookbooks written in a language different from the official one in the region, for example, in the Hebrew-lettered German volume published in Hungary, the subject of the first essay in the present collection, but it is also important in works written in the official language of the country where they were put out, since the antiquated or regional language in texts can tell us much about the period and the local customs. Furthermore, in the case of the many German-language cookbooks published in Hungary in the nineteenth century, it is important to understand the historical reasons for their use of a language other than Hungarian. In addition to examining the author’s choice of language, the style of the text also deserves attention. Some cookbooks are written in an impersonally objective voice, but it is more common that we can gain a glimpse of the author’s personality from occasional subjective comments. For example, Mrs. Lederer’s 1876 Jewish cookbook is mostly written in an objective style, but we can discern her personal voice in the following part about killing fishes: All nobly thinking women will pay attention to treat―as much as it is in their power―even the smallest creatures gently. In the hands of boorish, uncaring persons the nation of fishes frequently suffers such a painful death, that for some people, who witnessed such horrible scenes, it surely diminishes enjoyment of their favorite dishes.7 In rare cases, this personal voice becomes so dominant that the work can be considered not merely a book of instructions but also literature. Good examples of this are the frequently autobiographical and always highly evocative passages about certain dishes that the journalist and food writer Elek Magyar (1875–1947) included in his cookbooks to complement the recipes for those courses, as well as the Budapest-born physician and writer Alexander

7 Lederer, Koch-Buch, 7.

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Lenard’s (1910–1972) small book, The Fine Art of Roman Cooking, originally published in 1963 in German but also available in English and Hungarian. The way an ethnic or religious group cooks is influenced both by its own traditions and by the dishes adopted from other groups that follow a different religion, have a different ethnic background, or live in distant regions. Cookbooks written for a given ethnic or religious group frequently complement the recipes typical of the group’s cuisine with dishes more or less unique to the region where the book was published and where its author lived. For example, Mrs. Márton Rosenfeld’s Hungarian Jewish cookbook, first published in 1927 in Subotica (until 1920 in Hungary, subsequently in Yugoslavia, and today in Serbia) but later also in Budapest, complements the recipes of the kind of Jewish cuisine typical throughout Hungary with Serbian- or Croatian-influenced dishes, which were common in that region but little known elsewhere. Naturally, an analysis of cookbooks must include a discussion of all these various kinds of influences. Cookbooks are not completely original creations in the sense that, for example, novels are, since the author’s personal experience is supplemented in them with dishes and methods adopted from other similar works. At times― especially in the nineteenth-century works―this can degenerate into copying, but usually it merely means a more or less independent version of a recipe that has appeared in other publications too. For this reason, when we study old cookbooks, we should not only concentrate on their value as sources of information for us, but should also try to determine the sources of the recipes in them. This will tell us much about the author’s cultural orientation, familiarity with the cookbooks of the period, and occasionally also about the demands the author is attempting to satisfy. Furthermore, only by studying cookbooks within the context of other similar domestic and foreign publications can we appreciate their significance and understand their possible weaknesses. In studying printed cookbooks, we not only seek to learn as much as possible about the author, the publisher, the social group for which the volume was intended, and about all the other abovementioned matters, but we should also try to examine what the works tell us about things less closely related to cooking and food culture, such as―for example―the gender roles within families or the influence of class differences. The information we can gather from cookbooks about the alimentary customs and the expected proper behavior at meals could also significantly add to our knowledge of the period and the social group.

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A cookbook primarily reflects the alimentary culture of a group of people at a certain place and time, though here and there it might also contain hints of the evolutionary process that led up to it. A systematic study of the changes in alimentation, however, would require a comparison of numerous cookbooks published in a region over a period of time.8 This would make it possible to see what they could tell us about the historical shifts in consumption, food preferences, dietary ideals, food habits, taste, seasonings, and other areas of culinary culture. But surely, one might wonder, is not such a detailed analysis of old cookbooks a waste of time, work for work’s sake? Is it not “a science of things not worth knowing,” the witty way the writer, critic, and literary scholar Lajos Hatvany (1880–1961) referred to the German microphilological research of antiquity in a pamphlet he wrote in the early twentieth century?9 Why is it important to study the history of food and its culture? The preparation and consumption of dishes, as well as the customs and rituals connected to them, play a central role in all cultures. They do not merely satisfy a biological need but are essential elements in the identities of social groups, since their traditions are to a large degree related to them. The history and culture of a community, its people’s religious beliefs, their aspirations and family traditions, and the local conditions and climate all influence the choice of dishes on the table. What, how, and when people eat is one of the most important facets of everyday life, and through this central role it can evoke aspects of life that seemingly have nothing to do with eating. Studying the lifestyles of past times is an important task of the social sciences, such as historiography, ethnography, historical anthropology, and historical sociology, and such research would be unimaginable without an exploration of the gastronomic traditions. Without this knowledge we would be unable to interpret our current lifestyles and culinary culture in all their aspects, since innumerable things connect them to our traditions. Old cookbooks are perhaps the most important and certainly the most easily accessible documents of culinary traditions, and are therefore central to research on the way people ate in past ages. But only a careful, scholarly study of them will

8 Cookbooks, however, are not the only sources for an examination of such historical shifts, which may also rely on a study of statistics, household accounts, trade and market records, literary sources, etc. 9 Hatvany, A tudni-nem-érdemes dolgok.

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reveal the multitude of information they contain about the ways our ancestors lived and thought, information that goes far beyond the practicality of preparing dishes. This applies to all old cookbooks but especially for those about Jewish cuisine.

JEWISH COOKBOOKS AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS

Religion and the traditions connected to it frequently have an impact on what and when Christians eat but not nearly to the extent as with Jews who observe kashrut rules. For example, while only the Friday-night fish and the specially nice midday meal on Sundays distinguish the weekend meals of a Gentile from weekday repasts, the Sabbath meals of religious Jews are controlled by a long list of ritual laws and nearly obligatory traditions. They have to participate at home in three mandatory Sabbath meals and in the Havdalah ceremony of saying farewell to the Sabbath, after which the family sits down to another traditional meal. Those meals have several customary, in part religiously prescribed courses, and this is yet another difference between the Sabbath of the Jews and the less regulated weekend of Christians. And this is merely one example, the other Jewish holidays also involve many religious customs and traditional dishes. Hungarian Jewish cookbooks published before 1945 primarily reflect the lifestyles of middle-class and mostly urbanized religious Jews. The early Jewish cookbooks―not only in Hungary but also elsewhere―were simultaneously signs of trying to keep up with the surrounding society and of the desire to preserve traditions; in other words, of both change and continuity. Ever since the first such work, published in 1840 in Pozsony (today: Bratislava, Slovakia, but until 1919 part of Hungary), all Jewish cookbooks in Hungary have been intended for kosher households, in spite of the fact that since the second half of the nineteenth century more and more Hungarian Jews stopped observing the dietary rules, and by 1920 represented a very substantial share

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of the country’s Jewry.10 But those Jewish families who ignored kashrut rules mostly continued to eat the same dishes as the observant Jews. They were willing to discard the dietary rules, but most of them were unwilling to give up the traditional dishes and the characteristic flavors that they liked so much and which played such an important role in their identities. Unfortunately, the relatively few surviving contemporaneous documents― official records, newspaper articles, memoirs, letters, etc.―give only an incomplete picture of the ways Hungarian Jews lived and ate in the past. This is why cookbooks are such indispensable sources of research in these areas, and this is true even if we can learn nothing from them about the lifestyles of poor rural Jews. Even for middle-class Jews―the intended readership of Jewish cookbooks―such works should be seen more as reflections of their social aspirations than as lists of the dishes in their active cooking repertoire. They might not have prepared the fanciest recipes in those books, but they liked to read them, because they considered them consistent with the lifestyle they aspired to. But this does not make old cookbooks any less interesting for us, since researching the culinary aspirations of its intended readers is as important as having ethnographically accurate lists of the dishes they ate. These cookbooks tell us much about Jewish social and religious groups to which the authors or editors of the books belonged. By studying the recipes in these works, we can form an idea of the cultural influences and regional traditions that shaped those groups, as well as of their social and financial situations. In addition, the recipes inform us about the foodstuffs available in the stores of the period, the products of the kosher food industry (for example, the parve―that is, neither meat nor dairy―vegetable fats available since the 1910s), the pots and pans used for cooking and baking, the cooking implements (sieves, grinders, etc.), and many other things. Frequently, cookbooks also contain information about the furnishings of the kitchen, for example, about the requirements for storing dishes reserved for dairy products separately from those that come in contact with meat products.

10 There are no statistics about the percentage of Jews who kept kosher after Hungary’s tremendous loss of territories and population in accordance with the 1920 Peace Treaty. Before that, Hungary’s largest Orthodox and Hassidic population had resided in those regions, and, as a result of their loss, traditionalist Jews represented a significantly smaller share of Hungarian Jewry than before. This drastically reduced not only the number of Jews who kept kosher in Hungary but also their share in the country’s Jewish population.

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Most of these volumes include hints about the way the author and the intended readers of the book celebrated some holidays that require special dishes, such as Pesach in the spring and the Nine Days (the so-called Dairy Days) in the summer. In addition, we also get cues from a few of the cookbooks about the author’s strictness in obeying dietary rules. For example, not all recipes in Therese Lederer’s 1876 kosher cookbook satisfy those requirements. Jewish cookbooks generally start with a description of the rules pertaining to a kosher household and the special requirements of religious holidays. The length and comprehensiveness of such introductory texts perhaps tell us something about the degree of familiarity the author assumed the users of the book might have with such things. For example, all such information is missing from the first Jewish cookbook published in Hungary, Julie Löv’s work from 1840, which might indicate that at the time this was not needed, since young women learned those things from their mothers. If we compare the number of poultry, beef, veal, etc. recipes in a particular Jewish cookbook with those featured in similar works published in other parts of the country, we can get some idea of how common such dishes were on the tables of the region’s Jews. For example, compared with other parts of the country, dishes made with the meat of lamb or ewe were far more common in those southern regions that until 1920 belonged to Hungary but are now part of Serbia and Croatia. Provided that we have some experience in cooking and in interpreting historical recipes, it is possible to imagine how a dish would approximately taste when we read the description of it in an old cookbook. I know from personal experience that this can be a virtually physical sensation, almost like tasting the real dish. But no imaginary tasting can substitute for actually preparing those dishes. By preparing the recipe, we get a more direct and visceral connection to the past, and can gain a far better idea of the textures and flavors of the dish. In pursuit of this, I have tried to prepare a recipe or two from most of the old cookbooks described in this book. It was an even more intense experience when twenty years ago, during my work on a book about my nineteenth-century great-grandmother’s daily life and cooking, I recreated close to a hundred dishes from her handwritten recipe collection. It almost felt like sitting at her table and sharing a meal with her. Hopefully, all this proves how much old cookbooks can tell us about the lifestyles of our ancestors―provided that we are able to uncover the information hidden in them. This is what I am attempting in the following essays.

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2. A page from Teréz Berger’s notebook of German-language recipes, which she started to collect in the 1860s. In Hungary, her collection of almost 130 dishes is the earliest surviving handwritten collection of kosher recipes to feature traditional Jewish specialties, such as the cholent recipe (76. Bohnen Scholet) on this page. Her notebook is the subject of the third essay in this the book.

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PART ONE

Cookbooks and a Recipe Collection

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3. The Orczy House in Budapest in c. 1900. Almost all the occupants in this building were Jewish. Photograph by István Goszleth (1850–1913).

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1. The World’s First Cookbook Printed in Hebrew Letters

A

ccording to scholarly literature about the history of Jewish cuisine, the first Yiddish cookbook was published in 1896 in Vilnius.1 This is correct if we consider only the works in Yiddish, but in the late eighteenth and much of the of the nineteenth century Hebrew-lettered editions of German texts also existed in addition to those in Yiddish and Hebrew. If we consider not only the history of those in Yiddish but all the cookbooks printed in Hebrew letters, then the primacy no longer belongs to the Vilnius volume but to a work published in Pest more than forty years earlier, in 1854. This work has not been studied to this day, since most researchers of the history of Jewish cookbooks believed that no copy of it survived. Even Henry Notaker, the excellent researcher of old cookbooks, knew only the title of the work, since it was mentioned in nineteenth-century advertisements: Nayes folshtendiges kokhbukh fir die yidishe kikhe: Ayn unentberlikhes handbukh fir yidishe froyen und tokhter nebst forshrift fon flaysh kosher makhen und khale nemen, iberhoypt iber raynlikhkayt und kashrut (A new and complete cookbook of the Jewish cuisine: An indispensable handbook for Jewish women and daughters, with instructions for koshering meat and separating challah, as well as for general cleanliness and kashrut). But at least the knowledge of the title made it possible for him to include it in his bibliography of Jewish cookbooks.2 Even in his recent, 2017 work about the history of cookbooks, he writes the following about it: “There is unfortunately no known copy of this book, but we know from the title that its aim was to give advice about kashrut,

1 Bloshteyn, Kokh-bukh. 2 Notaker, Old Cookbooks.

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including how to prepare the meat correctly.”3 That contrary to Notaker’s claim at least one copy of the book must have survived is proven by the reproduction of its title page in Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy’s 2011 annotated bibliography of Yiddish books printed in Hungary.4 Bettina Kiss also mentions the work in her 2012 MA thesis, “Zsidó gasztronómia Magyarországon” (Jewish gastronomy in Hungary),5 and so does Eve Jochnowitz in her 2017 essay about vegetarian writings in Yiddish.6 Jochnowitz accompanies an image of its title page with a brief, three sentence-long description of this not at all vegetarian work, which she cites merely as the first printed cookbook in Yiddish.7 In the initial period of my research, I only knew of a photocopy of the book kept in the library of the Department of Assyriology and Hebrew Studies at the Eötvös Lóránd University in Budapest. Unfortunately, the people I asked at the Department could not recall its source. But at least based on it I was able to describe this important historical document and its publisher in my 2017 work about the cultural history of Hungarian Jewish cuisine.8 Only after the publication of my book did I learn about the whereabouts of an actual surviving copy from László Kőszegi, a physicist and researcher of gastronomic history, who managed to locate it in the Amsterdam University Library’s (Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam, Bijzondere Collecties) Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana collection of old Hebrew books and manuscripts.9 It was also his idea that we could tell if the photocopy in Budapest was made from this original by checking whether it reproduces the stamp of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana visible at two places in the Amsterdam copy. This made it possible to prove that the photocopy in Budapest must have been made from another surviving copy, though unfortunately the question remains where that one is kept.

3 Notaker, History of Cookbooks, 240. 4 Komoróczy, Yiddish Printing in Hungary, 58. 5 Kiss, “Zsidó gasztronómia,” 99–100. Also: Kiss, “Egy kéziratos zsidó szakácskönyv,” 94–95. 6 Jochnowitz, “A Younger World,” 47. 7

It is in fact not in Yiddish but in Judeo-German (German printed in Hebrew characters), which she did not realize since apparently she did not have a copy of the whole book but only of a few pages from it.

8 Körner, A magyar zsidó konyha, 82–85. 9 University Library of Amsterdam, Special Collections, OCLC: 150284194.

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4. The title page of the world’s first cookbook printed in Hebrew letters, which was published in Pest in 1854. It is unusual that the name of the Viennese printer features more prominently on it than that of Mr. Löwy, the book’s Hungarian publisher. No author is named on the cover, but according to the publisher’s preface, he himself collected the recipes from the “newest and best cookbooks.”

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The cookbook that is the subject of this essay is a good example of works that interest us less for their contents than for the circumstances of their publication and their historical significance. Those features of the volume, however, more than compensate for its defects, since they give us insights into the lives of Jews in Pest in the middle of the nineteenth century, the publication and sale of their religious books in that period, and the changes in their ways of living, especially in their use of language. In 1854, when this work was issued, its publisher, the firm of M. E. Löwy’s Sohn (M. E. Löwy’s Son), had been one of the best known sellers and publishers of Jewish prayer books and other religious literature in Pest for nearly fifty years. But the origins of the business go back even farther, since Efraim Löwy (c. 1745–1815),10 the founder of the company, originally started his book business in 1765 in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia),11 and decided to relocate it to Pest only in 1809.12 According to newspaper articles recalling

10 “When Efraim Löwy died in 1815...” Budapesti Hírlap, October 22, 1897, 7; Corvina, October 30, 1897, 167; Grafikai Szemle, November 20, 1897, 189. 11 Before it became part of Czechoslovakia in 1919, Pozsony had been not merely one of several important Hungarian cities but from 1536 to 1783 the capital of the Kingdom of Hungary, between 1641 and 1848 the place for crowning the Hungarian kings, and between 1608 and 1848 the place for the Diet of Hungary, the parliamentary assembly. “Until the rise of Budapest in the nineteenth century, it was the most important commercial center of Hungary.” Silber, “Bratislava.” 12 When in 2017 I was writing the Hungarian edition of my book Jewish Cuisine in Hungary, the single source I knew about the founding of the company was the Addresses of Bookstores in the 1895 Magyar könyvkereskedők évkönyve (Almanac of Hungarian Booksellers), which not only incorrectly featured 1786 as the year of founding the M. E. Löwy’s Sohn company but failed to mention that it had been founded in Pozsony. Since then, however, I became aware of the 1897 newspaper articles, which state that the bookstore was founded in 1765 in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia) and moved to Pest only in 1809. István Gazda in his book about the booksellers in Pest’s old Váci Street also fails to mention the bookstore’s beginnings in Pozsony and erroneously states that “a Jewish bookstore existed in 1790 in Baron Orczy’s house, its owner was M. A. [sic!] Löwy.” (Gazda: Könyvkereskedők, 40) This error was probably the result of his misunderstanding of a passage in Aladár Ballagi’s 1877 study on the Budapest book trade in 1790 (Ballagi, “Budapesti könyvkereskedés.”). I find the 1897 newspaper articles about the history of the Löwy bookstore (see footnote 21), which almost certainly relied on information received from the Löwy family, more credible than either the Almanac of Hungarian Booksellers or István Gazda’s book.

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the firm’s history in 1897,13 Efraim still needed a special permit from the Governing Council for opening his bookstore in 1765. The articles also add that he “was the first and only Jew in Hungary to receive a permit for selling Jewish books. Within a short time [the store] became successful and all the Levantine14 merchants bought from him.” Though the store’s exact address is unknown, it was almost certainly not in Pozsony proper but in one of those settlements adjacent to it where Jews were allowed to live and maintain shops, probably in the one called Schlossgrund (in Hungarian: Vártelek). By the middle of the eighteenth century, the Pozsony Yeshiva evolved into the most influential of its age, thereby firmly establishing the city as a “leading center of learning.”15 This must have increased the demand for Jewish books, and in addition to selling such publications to foreign merchants, Efraim was also trying to satisfy this local need with his store. The claim in the articles that this was the first Jewish bookstore in Hungary is plausible, since there seems to be no trace of an earlier one, at least I have not been able to find one. It shows how unknown this has been up to now that the extraordinarily detailed and generally reliable 1929 Magyar Zsidó Lexikon (Hungarian Jewish Encyclopedia) includes no entry for Efraim Löwy or his bookstore, and the other essays in the Encyclopedia do not mention them either. Although finding new information about their publishers is not the primary purpose of researching old cookbooks, this “byproduct” of my work proves how important it is to seriously study the documents of gastronomic history. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, Amsterdam and Frankfurt am Main were the main centers of the Jewish book trade. Most of the Jewish booksellers in those years were also publishers, and in some cases printers too.16 Few such sellers, however, specialized in selling Jewish books by other

13 Pesti Hírlap (Pest Journal), October 22, 1897, 8; Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest Journal), October 22, 1897, 7; Corvina (a journal of the Hungarian book merchants) October 30, 1897, 167; Grafikai Szemle (a monthly journal of printers), November 20, 1897, 189. 14 Levant: countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean. 15 Silber, “Bratislava.” 16 Löwy’s store differed from them, since it seems to have only sold religious books published by others in the first seventy or so years of its existence. It only started to publish books in the 1830s.

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5. A ca. 1900 photo of the former Jewish Street in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia). The street, which ran along the foot of the Castle Hill, followed the former border between the city of Pozsony and the settlement of Schlossgrund (Vártelek). This settlement was where Efraim Löwy opened his Jewish bookstore in 1765, almost certainly the first such store in Hungary. Photographer unknown.

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publishers, and hardly any of them stayed in business for more than 130 years, like the company founded by Efraim Löwy. All this makes the early founding and long existence of the Löwy store all the more significant.17 At the time when Efraim opened his bookshop, Jews were not yet allowed to live and maintain stores in the free royal city of Pozsony but only in the royally licensed communities of Zuckermantl and Schlossgrund, owned by the Counts Pálffy outside the inner city. There were, however, some exceptions to this rule: they could also reside in a few suburbs, which were not part of the Pálffy estates, and after about the mid-eighteenth century they could rent houses on the city side of the so-called Jewish Street (later called Vártelek Street and today again Židovská ulica, that is, Jewish Street) that ran along the border between the Pálffy property and the city. The two sides of the street fell under different jurisdictions. Jews living on the side of Váralja [the Pálffy estate] and on the edge of the city had different rights. Many houses on the city side were built of stone. The other side was like a slum; its houses were pressed against the mountainside, allowing for only minuscule courtyards and gardens.18 At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, about 2,000 Jews, mostly of Czech, Moravian, Austrian, or German heritage, lived on the Pálffy estates, and a few hundred more in the city, that is, on the other side of Jewish Street, which all combined represented about 7–8 percent of Pozsony’s population.19 The gates closing off the two ends of Jewish Street at night were only removed after the 1839–1840 Diet of Hungary. Only after this Diet had passed a law enabling Jews to settle in any free city, could Jews live and operate stores in the inner city, and only after 1860, when Hungary’s

17 According to Jacob Toury, although there were some Jewish booksellers in Germany before the beginnings of the Emancipation who in addition to Judaica and Hebraica sold new or second-hand copies of other kinds of books too, their number was minuscule. In fact, beyond this general statement Toury gives no example of any such bookstore from the period before 1800. Toury, “Jüdische Buchhändler,” 58. 18 Komoróczy, A zsidók története, 729. 19 “…the census of 1785–1787 recorded nearly 1,700 Jews.” “By 1835, there were about 3,500 Jews in a city of some 35,000, it was the third largest Jewish community in Hungary, after Óbuda and Pest.” Silber, “Bratislava.”

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ruler allowed the country’s Jewish population to own property, could they buy real estate. In Pozsony, the majority of Jews were Orthodox, and this persisted into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even though in that period Neológ (moderately reformist) Judaism was dominant in most Hungarian cities. The Pozsony Yeshiva was already well-known in the eighteenth century, but it reached its height of fame in the nineteenth, when it evolved into the most influential Talmud-school of Central Europe under the leadership of the great Orthodox rabbi Moses Schreiber,20 a highly respected enemy of educational and religious reforms, and his successors. Efraim almost certainly made numerous business trips from Pozsony to Pest. He knew that while in the late eighteenth century Pest Jews had mainly bought their prayer books from merchants in Vienna and Pozsony,21 starting in the early nineteenth century local bookdealers, and a little later also local publishers, began to meet this demand. He might well have been familiar with the bookstore Éliás (Eliyah) Rosenthal (1758–1833) opened in Pest in 1804, and we cannot exclude the possibility that he had known Rosenthal personally even before that time, since Rosenthal had studied at the Pozsony Yeshiva for five years. He might have also heard that in 1807 Rosenthal applied to the Royal Governing Office (Königliche Statthalterei) for a permit to publish Hebrew books.22 Though Rosenthal’s application was rejected, he was not discouraged but entered into a partnership with Mátyás Trattner (1745–1828),23 a well-established Lutheran printer and publisher, which turned out to be successful: three years later their similar application was approved on the condition that the printing should be done at the University Press in Buda. All this must have been among the reasons why Efraim felt that

20 Moses Schreiber (1762, Frankfurt am Main–1839, Pozsony) or Mosheh Sofer by his Hebrew name. His students called him Hatam Sofer after his death. 21 “The demand of Pest Jews for prayer-books [at the end of the eighteenth century] was satisfied by firms in Vienna and Pozsony.” Frojimovics et al., Jewish Budapest, 175. Initially the Hebrew-lettered books sold by the booksellers in Pozsony, however, had been printed elsewhere, since the first permanent Hebrew printing shop was established there only in 1832–33. 22 Ibid., 176. 23 Dán, Fejezetek, 17 and 61. While according to page 17 of this work, the name of the applicant was Tamás Trattner, on page 61 the author names Mátyás Trattner, the father of Tamás, as the person who applied to the Governing Council.

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his business would have a greater future in Pest than in Pozsony. According to the newspaper articles published in 1897 about the history of the M. E. Löwy’s Sohn Company, another factor contributing to Efraim’s decision to relocate his business was that at the time Pest appeared to be a more appropriate place for export than Pozsony. This must have been important for him, since a considerable part of his company’s income came from orders by Near Eastern and Russian Jewish merchants. In Pest, even around the end of the 1780s, few Jews received permission to live or open stores within the city walls, and only under the condition if the stores had no shopwindows and exterior signage. For this reason, most Jews lived in the suburbs, mainly east of the city wall, in the vicinity of today’s Madách Imre Square, Deák Square, and Király Street. This was the bustling center of the economic life of Pest Jews. Here, near the New Market Square (Új Vásár tér), where today’s Erzsébet Square is located, was the Jews’ Market (Zsidópiac), where the cattle-, leather-, fur-, wool-, cotton-, and broadcloth-merchants sold their goods. Although the city walls were demolished in the 1790s, Jews continued to need a special permit to live in the inner city, and they had to wait until 1840 to be able to freely reside anywhere in Pest. In 1812, about 2,200 Jews lived in the city, though almost exclusively in its suburbs, primarily in Terézváros. Their number continued to grow, but the most significant increase took place after 1840: by 1850 they numbered 12,600, about 15% of the general population.24 In 1809, Efraim Löwy decided to open a store in this neighborhood, specifically in the enormous Orczy House, at the mouth of Király Street, where the so-called Madách Houses stand today. The Orczy House was the second largest building in Pest, in which nearly all the tenants of the apartments, stores, and storage rooms were Jewish. This building, constructed around two very large courtyards, contained not only many apartments of various sizes and stores accessible from the street or from the courtyards, but already in the beginning of the nineteenth century also had numerous amenities serving the needs of Jews: a public prayer-house, a mikveh (ritual bath), a sochet (ritual slaughterer), a Jewish school, and a kosher coffeeshop as well as a restaurant. In the first decades after their move to Pest, the Löwy bookstore was on the Landstrasse (today: Károly Boulevard) side of the Orczy House, provided

24 Sebők, “Zsidók Budapesten.”

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6. The Orczy House, where the bookstore of the firm, M. E. Löwy’s Son was located after their relocation from Pozsony to Pest in 1809. When Efraim Löwy opened his bookstore there, the building had only two stories, not yet three as in this photo from about 1895. Photograph by György Klösz (1844, Darmstadt–1913, Budapest).

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that the Jewish bookstore in that building mentioned by Franz Schams in his German-language description of Pest, published in 1821, refers to that shop.25 This is all the more likely, since in 1877 the historian and linguist Aladár Ballagi (1853–1928) describes the bookstore similarly: “The Jews had a bookstore on Pest’s Landstrasse in Baron Orczy’s building, which to this day exists in the same building but on the Király Street side of the Orczy House. At that time, just like today, the store mainly sold books of the Talmud.”26 It seems that in the 1850s, the Löwy bookstore temporarily relocated from the Orczy House to a building nearly as large located opposite it, called the Gyertyánffy House, since prayer books published by the Löwys in 185927 and in 187028 give their address as 2 Király Street, the location of that structure.29 But shortly after 1870, they must have returned to the Orczy House, since all their subsequent publications known to me, as well as an 1882 list of Budapest residential and commerical addresses, mention them back at their old place, at 1 Király Street. From the early 1870s until its closing in 1897, the bookstore was on the Király Street side of the building, where Aladár Ballagi described it in 1877, and where also according to an 1897 newspaper article30 they resided.

25 “Auch haben die Juden eine Buchhandlung in Pest auf der Landstrasse, im Baron v. Orczy’schen Hause. Das Lager besteht grössten Theils aus Büchern des Talmuds.” (The Jews also have a bookstore in Pest on the Landstrasse. Its stock consists mainly of books of the Talmud.). Schams, Vollständige Beschreibung, 244. 26 Ballagi, “A budapesti könyvkereskedés,” 45. Ballagi relied here on the previously mentioned 1821 work by Franz Schams. 27 Israelitische Sabbath- und Fest-Gesänge, gesammelt zum Gebrauch bei der öffentlichen Gottesverehrung (Pest: Verlag von M. E. Löwy’s Sohn Buchhandlung, Königsgasse Nr. 2, 1859). 28 Die Himmelspforte. Tägliche Gebete der Israeliten für das ganze Jahr, mit Benutzung der besten Commentaren und Versionen, geordnet und in’s Deutsche übertragen von Dr. M. Letteris. (Pest: Verlag von M. E. Löwy’s Sohn Buchhandlung, Königsgasse Nr. 2, 1870). 29 An advertisement appearing on May 31, 1864 in Sürgöny (Telegram), which was the official journal of the government, gives 2 Király Street as the address of M. E. Löwy’s Sohn, and adds to this that at the time it was owned by Lipót Löwy, bookseller. 30 “The Löwy M. E. Sohn bookstore is on the Király Street part of the old Orczy House” Budapesti Hirlap (Budapest Journal), 22 October 1897, no. 294, 7.

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An 1897 article in Pesti Hírlap (Pest Journal)31 states that Efraim died seventy years earlier, that is, in 1827, but the articles published at the same time in three other magazines32 give the date of his death as 1815, which I find more likely. The article in Pesti Hírlap also mentions that he was laid to eternal rest in the “abandoned cemetery in Angyalföld,” a neighborhood of Pest, referring clearly to the cemetery in the area surrounded by today’s Váci, Lehel, and Aréna Avenues, which was Pest’s sole Jewish burial place in the first half of the nineteenth century, and was only closed after a new one was opened on Salgótarjáni Road. Efraim’s son, Márkus (or Marcus or Márk―alternate ways he is named in the documents) was born in 1792,33 when Efraim was nearly 50 years old. He must have started working in his father’s store shortly after its relocation to Pest, gradually taking over the responsibility of running it. Following Efraim’s death, the name of the company was changed to M. E. Löwy’s Sohn, that is, to Márkus, Efraim Löwy’s son. While in Pozsony and initially also in Pest, the store merely sold prayer books, other religious works, and Jewish religious objects, around 1830 Márkus decided to not only sell religious books but to publish them too. The title page of a German-language prayer book,34 printed in 1833, already names his firm as its publisher. The company kept the M. E. Löwy’s Sohn name even after the death of Márkus in 1859, when his descendants already ran the business. An advertisement in a Judeo-German (German in Hebrew characters) booklet, Amtahat matmonim (Big treasure-bag) and Luach (Jewish calendar), published by the company in 1854 for the year 1855, includes a description of the things sold by them. In addition to including a long list of books available in the store, it emphasizes their most recent publications: a Jewish cookbook (the subject of this essay) and nine booklets of folk tales taken from the One Thousand and One Nights. This is how the store’s owner described in the advertisement the other items one could buy from him:

31 Pesti Hírlap (Pest Journal), October 22, 1897, 8. 32 Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest Journal), October 22, 1897, 7; Corvina, October 30, 1897, 167; Grafikai Szemle (Graphics Review), November 20, 1897, 189. 33 According to a January 21, 1859 announcement in Budapesti Hírlap, Márkus Löwy was sixty-six years old when he died in that year, which means that―unless his birthday was in early January―he must have been born in 1792. 34 Andachtsbuch.

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8. The front cover, title page, and back cover of a mostly JudeoGerman (German in Hebrew characters) booklet published in 1854 by the M. E. Löwy bookstore in Pest. The Hebrew title of the booklet is Amtahat matmonim (Big treasure-bag), and it also includes a Luach (Jewish calendar), as well as advertisements for the books and religious items available in the bookstore. One of the advertisements is for their recently published Hebrew-lettered cookbook (Kochbuch für jüdische Küche ...), the subject of this essay. The last picture depicts a similar booklet from 1855, which also features an advertisement for the cookbook.

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9. The front and back side of a tefillin bag, probably from the 1890s. Jewish men kept the tefillin (phylacteries) in such bags and carried them that way to the synagogue for their morning prayers. The M. E. Löwy’s Sohn bookstore in Budapest’s Király Street sold not only books, but also religious items, such as this bag.

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I also offer a well-selected stock of goods: s’farim, tefillin, mezuzot, and tzitzit. All sorts of tallitot imported from Brünn [Brno, Czech Republic], Boskowitz [Boskovice, Czech Republic], and Poland and made of heavy or light silk, shofarot from Prague, the latest Hebrew prayer books with or without translation, all of them most elegantly bound and at the cheapest price. The biggest selection of all kinds of old s’farim from all the branches of scholarship are available too. Sifrei Torah and megillot are similarly available immediately but can also be ordered. Also purchasable are silver and gold edgebands for the tallitot,35 as well as all kinds of stamped marriage- and matriculation registers.36 The business experienced its heyday in the 1860s under the leadership of Lipót, the grandson of Efraim, the founder: it published more books in this period than either before or after. Appreciating the success and longevity of the firm, Emperor and King Franz Joseph I awarded Lipót the Gold Merit Cross (Goldenes Verdienstkreuz) in 1865 on the occasion of the firm’s centenary. From 1876 on the business was run by Ignác Löwy, the great-grandson of Efraim, initially jointly with his mother, then by himself. After 1892, he shared ownership with his wife and presumable brother-in-law Dániel Leveleki,37 though it seems that he remained the actual manager of the firm until 1897, when the company―by then 132 years-old―went bankrupt. We get a good idea of the bookstore’s last years from a newspaper article published at the time of the bankruptcy: In addition to prayer books, the bookstore sells knotted woolen yarns to remind people of the Lord, tallitot with golden fringes, and white burial gowns, which the victim of eternal transitoriness dons on the Day of

35 These were called atarah (Hebrew for “crown”), ornamental neckbands for the upper edge of tallits. 36 Wolf Schönfeld, Amtahat matmonim. See the Glossary for explanations of the religious items mentioned in the quoted text. 37 “Partnership established on January 12, 1894. Partners: Mrs. Ignácz Löwy, née Jenny Leveleki, book selller and Dániel Leveleki, book seller and publisher, Budapest residents. [...] Ignácz Löwy manager.” Központi Értesítő (Central bulletin), vol. 19, no. 40 (May 20, 1894), 846.

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Atonement, when the devout Israelite is fasting to atone for the sins of his tormented human body. These things were very much in demand in the dark, crowded store as long as all the Jews believed that God was also writing from right to left and loves no other idiom, than that of his chosen people. These days not all the Jews believe in this, and what is more, many of them believe in nothing. The old M. E. Löwy’s great-grandson kept and kept waiting for the time when an army of people would come to his store to buy the red books, the Hebrew calendars, the silky tallitot, and the bells of the Holy Book, just as they once had taken these things from his great-grandfather not only to all parts of Hungary but of the world. But fewer and fewer people took them, and instead of buyers, creditors came to demand their money, the godless people came, and also the telegrams from the distant East, saying that the eastern brethren would not pay, since they have no money, and besides they did not want to pay in any case. Seeing this, the old great-grandson of the old M. E. Löwy took the keys, closed the doors of his store with them, and sent them to the court of law.38 Another article, which appeared simultaneously with identical texts in three weeklies at the time of the bankruptcy, provides us with additional details: The achievements of the present owner include publishing the prayer books and the Bible in Hungarian.39 His goods were shipped as far as to Asia and South-America, and only a few months ago the firm sent fifteen thousand religious books to New York. Disturbances in the East caused the demise of the ancient company. Conditions for credit deteriorated in the Balcan states, several debtors of the firm went bankrupt, and they dragged down the wholesale merchant in Budapest. Presently, the financial state of the firm is still unknown, since the owner is sick, lying in bed in Meran.40

38 Pesti Hírlap (Pest Journal), October 22, 1897, 8. 39 This was clearly a sign of the Jewish reform movement’s influence. 40 Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest Journal), October 22, 1897, 7; Corvina, October 30, 1897, 167; Grafikai Szemle (Graphics review), November 20, 1897, 189.

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But let us return to 1854, the year when the Hebrew-lettered cookbook was published. This was when Márkus decided to issue a cookbook for middle-class Jewish women whose preferred language was already German but for whom reading Hebrew characters was still easier than the Fractur (sometimes also called Gothic) type with which German books used to be printed. Most middle-class Jewish women at the time knew German but not all of them could read books in Hebrew character. Even as late as 1870, only 75 percent of Jewish men and 58 percent of Jewish women could read and write in non-Hebrew characters in Budapest, the city with one of the highest levels of literacy among Hungarian Jewry.41 It is virtually certain that these percentages were even lower in the middle of the nineteenth century. Most of the women who constituted the expected readership of the Hebrew-lettered cookbook could speak Yiddish―in Pest and in western Hungary a very Germanized version of it―and were familiar with at least as much Hebrew as was necessary for reading the prayers. As a result, they could understand the Hebrew/Yiddish terms occurring here and there in the text, for example, dinim (laws), shayle (rabbinical question), or orchim (guests). Although it is true that the language of the book is mostly German, at the same time due to such words it is also an example of translanguaging, a process in which multilingual speakers meet complex cognitive demands through the use of multiple languages. By the 1850s, the University Press in Buda had been printing works in Hebrew letters for decades; they were the first Hungarian printing shop to regularly produce such books. Already before 1854, the Löwy company had asked them to print some of their German and Yiddish books, for example, a Hebrew-lettered calendar in 1852.42 Unfortunately, I was not able to ascertain why Márkus asked the printing shop of Adalbert Della Torre (1795–1871) in Vienna to print their Hebrew-lettered cookbook, instead of the University Press in Buda. Della Torre was well known in the book business as the owner of a shop he had recently purchased from Franz Schmid, the Gentile proprietor of a highly reputable printing and publishing company of Hebrew books. The

41 Kőrösi, Pest, szabad királyi város, 225. The census takers defined literacy as the ability to read and write texts in Latin or Fractur characters, and they excluded those who were only familiar with the Hebrew letters. 42 Hauskalender. Ofen 1852. Gedruckt in der kön. Universitäts-Druckerei. Zu haben bei M. E. Löwi [sic.!] Buchhandler in Pesth.

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10. On this double page from the 1854 Hebrew-lettered cookbook, the end of the publisher’s preface is on the right and the beginning of the instructions (according to the Hebrew title of this part: dinim, laws) for koshering meat on the left. The book’s language is mostly German, although printed in Hebrew/Yiddish letters.

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shop was made famous by Franz’s father, Anton von Schmid (1765–1855), who originally had received the privilege of printing Hebrew texts from Emperor Francis II (1768–1835), later to become King Francis I of Hungary. Not only Viennese publishers commissioned Schmid’s company to print Hebrew and Yiddish works but also publishers from other parts of the Empire, including Pest, where they were the strongest competitors of the University Press. Löwys’ Hebrew-lettered cookbook had only one edition, which was a sign of a lack of success in those years, when two or three editions were by no means a rarity, in part since the publishers only tried to test the market’s response with a first edition of relatively few copies, but also because the subsequent editions were also small in number. It might be a sign of the limited quantity of its only edition that so few copies of it have survived, and none of them in Hungary, where it was published, or in Austria, where it was printed. To the best of my knowledge, no contemporaneous advertisement of it appeared in Hungarian, Austrian, Bohemian, or German Jewish newspapers. It also speaks for its limited distribution that the Hungarian-born writer and journalist Moritz Gottlieb Saphir (1795–1858), who lived in Vienna at the time, knew Yiddish, and was familar with Jewish cuisine, did not bring it up in his magazine Der Humorist, which he edited until his death. Had Saphir been familiar with the book, he probably would have mentioned it, since he wrote a few times about Jewish food in his magazine, and he even reviewed Julie Löv’s Jewish cookbook in 1840.43 I suspect that the reason for this lack of success was that the Löwys came to the idea of publishing such a cookbook a decade or two late, at a time when German or Hungarian started to replace Yiddish as the everyday language of those better-off Jewish women, who could afford to buy it. Although generally those women―as mentioned before―continued to understand Yiddish, it was becoming easier for many of them to read German printed in the Fractur type than in Hebrew characters. Another reason for the limited interest in the book was that some of those women considered reading German books printed in the Fractur typeface, and later also books in Hungarian, as part 43 Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, “Pesther Salon” [Pest salon], Der Humorist. September 28, 1840, 791–92; “Die Gastronomie der Juden, oder Vogls Garküche. Eine Jugend-erinnerung” [The Gastronomy of Jews, or Vogl’s cookshop: Recollections of my youth], Der Humorist, August 30, 1847, 825–26, and August 31, 1847, 829–30; “Badner Kipfel” [Crescent as in Baden], Der Humorist, June 26, 1852, 607.

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and parcel of adapting themselves to majority society in the hope of becoming more accepted by it. The increasing neglect of Yiddish by the majority of Hungarian Jews in the nineteenth century showed the influence of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment. Reformist Jews―especially in the central and western parts of the country, where they were mostly of Austrian or Czech/Moravian origin―gradually stopped speaking Yiddish, because they considered it a sign of backwardness. They regarded it as corrupted German, a jargon. In fact around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it was usually referred to as “jargon” (zsargon) in Hungary, while the term “Yiddish” became common only in the twentieth century. They first switched from Western Yiddish (already fairly close to German) to German, and then progressively from the 1840s on to Hungarian, which made their decisive participation in the country’s modernization possible. Even some of the Orthodox Jews in western Hungary considered Yiddish as a language not appropriate for modern life. They particularly wished to distance themselves from its eastern dialect, which they frequently referred to as “Polish Jewish language,” since in Hungary it was mostly used by Jews who or whose ancestors had migrated from Galicia, the Ukrainian areas in the Russian Empire, or from the Russian-ruled Polish territories. As a result of so many Jews abandoning Yiddish, by the early twentieth century with few exceptions only the traditionalist ones in the eastern and northeastern parts of the country continued using it as their everyday language. The ultimate switch from German to Hungarian among the majority of Jews had different reasons: nearly all of them were highly patriotic and wished to use the language of the nation state instead that of the Habsburg rulers. Notwithstanding their radical linguistic switch, both the reformist and the Orthodox Jews, especially in urban settings, remained the most multilingual cluster within the unique ethnic mixture of pre-1919 Hungary.44

44 While it is a widely accepted among scholars that Jews represented the most multilingual cluster in nineteenth-century Hungary, no contemporaneous statistics exist to prove this. The situation, however, could not have been much different from what early twentieth-century statistics show. In 1910, for example, 68 percent of the Jewish population knew German and/or other languages in addition to Hungarian, far more than any other denominational group in the country. Karády: Zsidóság, polgárosodás, asszimiláció, 161.

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In Germany, one of the early signs of linguistic assimilation was Moses Mendelssohn’s famous 1783 German translation of the Torah, printed in Hebrew letters in Berlin. This was followed by numerous German books printed that way in early nineteenth-century Germany and Austria,45 for example, by Herz Homberg’s (1749–1841) Imre Shefer (Beautiful words), a religious and moral reader for young people, published in 1802 in Vienna. Although such books were mostly religious texts, occasionally schoolbooks, poems, tales, and parables were also published that way. This kind of Hebrewlettered German is sometimes called Jüdisch-Deutsch,46 though in some older sources this term could also refer to Yiddish.47 Since the influence of the Haskalah reached countries east of Germany, such as Hungary, with some delay, this kind of linguistic assimilation started there later, but its process lasted longer. In western Hungary and in centrally located Budapest, Paks, and Vác, for example, German books printed in Hebrew letters were published even as late as the first decade of the twentieth century, while in Germany hardly any such books appeared after the middle of the nineteenth century. As mentioned before, even the majority of Orthodox Jews in western Hungary used Yiddish less and less in everyday life and as a result could hardly understand traditional Yiddish texts. This can be seen from what Juda Krausz48

45 “[Mendelssohn’s] translation was one of the early examples of the publication of works in High German in Hebrew letters […] Many translations of the prayerbook and religious works of various kinds were published in this form during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. Its use in private correspondence lasted even longer.” Lowenstein, “The Complicated Language Situation,” 21. 46 “In actuality writing of High German in Hebrew letters (sometimes called Jüdisch-deutsch) was not a completely uniform transitional stage. Writers of Jüdisch-deutsch differed in their spelling systems, their insertion of Hebrew words in their German texts, and in the degree of their knowledge of all the rules of German grammar.” Lowenstein, “The Yiddish Written Word,” 180. 47 “…some German-Jewish bibliographers indiscriminately refer to Yiddish and German works in Hebrew script as Jüdisch-deutsch…” Ibid., 180—181. But in addition to Yiddish and Hebrew-lettered German, the term Jüdisch-deutsch could sometimes also refer to other things. According to Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy, it could also mean German spoken with a Yiddish intonation. See Komoróczy, “Jiddis, német vagy jüdisch-deutsch?”, 81. 48 Juda ha-Kohen Krausz, 1858–193?, an Orthodox rabbi in Lakompak (today Lackenbach, Austria), the author/translator of dozens of religious books.

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wrote in 1886 in his translation of Tsene-rene,49 a Yiddish work from about 1590 by the Polish rabbi Jacob ben Isaac Ashkenazi (1550–1625): Since it was written in Polish Yiddish language [that is, in Eastern Yiddish], with time it has been read less and less [...], because few people could read and understand it. [...] Many devout and scholarly people came to me [...] requesting that I should adapt the Yiddish Bible [that is, the Tsene-rene]50 to a clearly understandable [that is, Judeo-German] language.51 German publications printed in Hebrew letters in German-speaking regions represented a transitional state of language, which reflected the changes happening in Jewish life. As Szonja Ráhel Komoróczy puts it: The Western Yiddish first changed to “daytchmerish” (Germanized Yiddish), then to Hebrew-lettered German, and only at the end to German. [...] Hebrew-lettered German is generally a sign that the authors and the readers already spoke German―or Judeo-German, also called Jüdisch-Deutsch, which is German with a Yiddish intonation (as they used to say: “like a Jew”), in addition to the occasional use of Yiddish declension of adjectives, Yiddish word order, and a few Yiddish words― but they were still more familiar with the Hebrew letters than with the Latin alphabet. This Hebrew-lettered German can be considered as the last station before complete linguistic assimilation.52

49 The title of this work is known in several kinds of transliteration, such as Tsene-rene, Tseno Ureno, and Tz’enah Ur’enah. This work was primarily used by Jewish women, who before the middle of the nineteenth century generally were more familiar with Yiddish than with Hebrew. This is why it was popularly known as the “women’s Bible,” though occasionally men used it too. See Jacob Elbaum and Chava Turniansky, “Tsene-rene,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https://yivoencyclopedia.org/ article.aspx/Tsene-rene (accessed March 9, 2021). 50 The Tsene-rene consists of adaptations of biblical passages grouped according to the weekly Torah portions and of related commentaries. 51 Juda Krausz, Tsene-rene. Eynleytung [Introduction]. (Paks: Rosenbaum, 1886), quoted in Komoróczy, “Jiddis, német vagy jüdisch-deutsch?,” 83. 52 Komoróczy, “Jiddis, német vagy jüdisch-deutsch?”, 81.

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The emergence of printed Jewish cookbooks in Germany and a little later also in Hungary can by itself be seen as a part of the assimilatory process. Both the publishers, who put out those books because they sensed a potential market for them, and the middle-class Jewish women, who bought them, were obviously aware of the many non-Jewish cookbooks in existence, and they wished to have Jewish equivalents. In their desire to be like their Christian peers, they sought a more refined version of Jewish cuisine, but they did not want to abandon kashrut, at least not in this period of the mid-nineteenth century. It is conceivable that one of the reasons why typical, traditional Jewish specialties (cholent, kugel, etc.) are missing from so many of the early Jewish cookbooks is that although they adhered to kashrut rules, they wished to deemphasize ties to traditional Jewish culture. In this sense, they were manuals of culinary acculturation and upward social mobility. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls the recipes in such books “invisibly kosher,” meaning kosher by a process of elimination (elimination of treif) and adaptation (kosher versions of Christian dishes). The kosherness of the adapted dishes drew no attention to itself, and this was another reason why they were “invisibly kosher.” According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, this is a cuisine all about class, not about Jewish specificity, since it defines “Jewish” largely as a matter of religion, of keeping kosher, and much less as that of culture, of keeping the cultural heritage alive.53 Of course, ever since antiquity Jewish cuisine has been much influenced by the non-Jewish ones, but this adaptation of hundreds of dishes was quite a different matter. As part of the process of acculturation, it was conscious borrowing from the culinary culture of the surrounding society. Except for the title page and the titles on the inside pages, the 1854 cookbook was not printed with the typical square typeface of Hebrew texts but with the so-called vaybertaytsh (“women’s translation”, referring to Yiddish translations of Hebrew texts) type, a half-cursive variety used for Yiddish works mainly between the sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth

53 “Kosher cookbooks in Europe instructed the reader in the preparation of an ‘invisibly’ Jewish, gastronomically superior culinary art, the result of the ritual purification of haute cuisine. The implied reader was someone familiar with kashrut, and presumably with traditional Jewish specialties but not with culinary elegance.” Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Kitchen Judaism,” 78.

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11. The beginning of the chapter about soups in the Hebrew-lettered cookbook, published in Pest in 1854. The titles are printed in the square font of Hebrew letters, while the text is in a semi-cursive typeface, called vaybertaytsh (lit. “women’s translation”).

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centuries.54 Square print began to replace it in Yiddish books in the 1830s, but even in the early twentieth century there were some volumes printed that way. Vaybertaytsh was associated with devotional books printed for women, for example, with the previously mentioned Tsene-rene or Tseno Ureno, the so-called Women’s Bible, though the readership of books printed this way also included men. The publisher probably wished to enhance the cookbook’s popularity by using this typeface. He must have realized that while many women had only limited knowledge of Hebrew and were familiar only with the Hebrew texts of their prayerbooks,55 they were acquainted with works like the Tsene-rene and could read the Yiddish typeface of such books easier than the square letters of Hebrew or the Fractur type of German texts.56 The decision to print the German text in Hebrew letters helped to distinguish it from the German-language Jewish cookbooks printed in Fractur letters, for example from Julie Löv’s 1840 work published in Pozsony (Bratislava). This essentially conservative, traditionalist decision made its Jewish character go beyond the fact that it contained kosher recipes, and this intensification of Jewish specificity was heightened by its inclusion of a section about kashrut rules, something missing from three of the four Jewish cookbooks published previously in Germany and Hungary (the only exception was Rebekka Wolf’s 1851 work). But this heightened Jewish character did not extend to the recipes

54 “Along with this pan-Yiddish standard language-in-print came the special Yiddish type font, known as mashkit or meshit, or simply vayber-taytsch (literally women’s translation, because of the many classic works published in Yiddish versions, ostensibly for women but also widely read by men).” Dovid Katz, “Language: Yiddish,” in YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https:// yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Language/Yiddish (accessed March 9, 2021). 55 Girls were typically educated by their mothers in their homes, and while they were allowed to study in some cheders, Jewish religious elementary schools, they could never attend yeshivas, higher Talmud schools. Generally, their knowledge of Hebrew was limited, and they could not be taught the Torah and the Talmud. As the Jewish Women’s Encyclopedia describes this and the exceptions to it: “Since women were kept away from the Jewish canon in general and Haskalah literature in Hebrew in particular and separated from men by the linguistic culture reserved for them, it is surprising to find women proponents of the Haskalah, or maskilot, who read Hebrew literature, wrote in Hebrew, and saw themselves as part of the of the Haskalah movement.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/maskilot-nineteenth-century (accessed March 10, 2021). 56 I thank Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler for their help in describing the book’s typeface.

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themselves, which remained merely kosher versions of essentially non-kosher dishes, like nearly all the courses in those previous works.57 Unlike Moses Mendelssohn, who through his translation of the Torah and other parts of the Bible into elegant High German wished to promote the comprehension of Scriptures among Jews proficient in the language,58 Márkus Löwy, the Hungarian publisher of the 1854 cookbook, was not guided by ideology but by business considerations: he hoped to create a market for his cookbook printed in Hebrew letters, but―as we have seen―he failed in this effort. The name of the author is missing from the cover of the thin volume, which in the case of cookbooks almost certainly meant that their publisher/ editor/author had translated or copied substantial parts of them without permission from a foreign publication or a much earlier domestic one. In the German-language preface he wrote for the book, Mr. Löwy did not even attempt to hide that the recipes came from other works: “In the present small cookbook I tried to collect from the latest and best cookbooks the best, healthiest, and tastiest dishes, as well as their methods of preparation.” We can also see from this first-person sentence that the book was compiled by the publisher himself, or perhaps by an unnamed editor contracted by Löwy for this project. The book represented a transitional state not only in its language―German printed in Hebrew characters―but also in the gender of its probable editor, Mr. Löwy, since almost all the authors/editors of later Jewish cookbooks were women. The preface also deserves attention for failing to mention that the book was intended for religious Jews, though perhaps this was not necessary, since it was already clear from the work’s title. Only the penultimate sentence includes a barely noticeable reference to the expected readership: “Therefore I intend this work, written in an easy and understandable style, for my nation’s

57 The few Jewish specialties in Rahel Aschmann’s 1835 cookbook and the slightly more numerous such dishes in Rebekka Wolf’s 1851 work represent only partial exceptions in this respect. 58 “At the time of Mendelssohn, German-speaking Jews still constituted an elite, but they already formed a considerable minority. […] The translation was to promote further the comprehension of Scriptures for them. […] His translation was not accessible to and, indeed, not intended for the masses of Jews, especially those who lived in smaller towns or in rural areas. These Jews then spoke Judeo-German, practically to the exclusion of High German.” Weinberg: “Language Questions,” 204, 206.

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previously mentioned gender [women], and I suggest to all of them that they should use it frequently and diligently.” A closer examination of the volume supports the publisher’s statement that he took the recipes from other books: more than half of the recipes (140 out of 242) come from Julie Löv’s German-language work, Hungary’s earliest Jewish cookbook, published in 1840. Mr. Löwy, the publisher of the 1854 cookbook, also expropriated―without mentioning his source―Löv’s general suggestions about the various ways to prepare meats and vegetables. He copied the recipes mostly without any change, and presumably used the same approach with those taken from other sources, most likely also works in German, though I have been unable to identify them. By copying German recipes, he made his (or his editor’s) work easier, since it was not necessary to translate them, but merely to rewrite them in Hebrew letters. Henry Notaker’s bibliography mentions only three German Jewish cookbooks published before 1854.59 The first two, Joseph Stolz’s work from 181560 and Rahel Aschmann’s one from 1835,61 were the first and second Jewish cookbooks in the world. As I am familiar with both, it is clear that they could not have been the sources of those recipes in the Hebrew-lettered volume that cannot be found in Löv’s cookbook. As to the third such work, Rebekka Wolf’s cookbook, originally published in 1851,62 although I had access only to its fourth edition from 1865, I find it likely that the recipes that cannot be traced to Julie Löv were also missing from the first edition of Wolf’s cookbook. But it is not at all certain that Mr. Löwy used only Jewish cookbooks as his sources. He could have just as easily based some of the recipes on works intended for Gentiles, since all the dishes in his cookbook are of Christian origin; the only difference is merely that he or his editor adapted them to conform to kashrut rules. Not only cookbooks published anonymously contained recipes taken from other works, but frequently also those that named their author. A good example is Julie Löv, who took nearly all the recipes in her work from Rahel

59 Unfortunately, Notaker’s bibliography is not complete. For example, his list of the early Jewish cookbooks written in German does not include Julie Löv’s volume published in Pozsony in 1840. 60 Stolz, Kochbuch für Israeliten. 61 Aschmann, Geprüftes Kochbuch für Israeliten. 62 Wolf, Kochbuch för israelitische Frauen.

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Aschmann’s previously mentioned Jewish cookbook, published in 1835 in Quedlinburg and Leipzig. It seems that this was by no means an exception: on the contrary, it was rare when an author herself tested and wrote all the recipes in a cookbook. As a result, most recipes in the 1854 Hebrewlettered cookbook can be found not only in Löv’s, but also in Aschmann’s volume. I am nevertheless sure that the publisher of the 1854 cookbook used Löv as his source, because some of the recipes in it can only be found in Löv, while they are missing from Aschmann’s work. For example, this is the case with Hungarian goulash meat (Ungarisches Gulaschfleisch), one of the three Hungarian-style recipes he copied from Löv, while the other two (Wurzelwerk auf ungarische Art, that is, root vegetables the Hungarian way, and Ungarischer Äpfelkuchen, that is, Hungarian applecake) can be also found in Aschmann’s volume. It is also true, however, that Hungary only enacted a copyright law in 1884, and how this law and its later versions apply to recipes and cookbooks has been in dispute to this day. Both in Hungary and in other countries it is generally believed that the selection and quantities of ingredients cannot be protected by copyright, though it can cover the description of how the dish should be prepared. In a cookbook, it is only such descriptions of the cooking process, explanations of a more general nature, and the way the book is structured that enjoy copyright protection. Notwithstanding, copying recipes word for word from another book without permission and without naming the source was at the very least questionable practice in the nineteenth century, and still is today.63

63 In her 1851 German Jewish cookbook’s preface, Rebekka Wolf considers it inadvisable to copy recipes from another work: “It would have been easy for me to copy all this from the first best cookbook, but one of the reasons why I would never do this is because then I could not vouch for the success of the recipes’ preparation.” (Es wäre mir ein Leichtes gewesen, alles dieses aus dem ersten besten Kochbuche abzuschreiben, doch würde ich es schon deshalb nie thun, weil ich alsdann für das Gelingen in der Anwendung nicht haften könnte.). I am virtually certain that Julie Löv, who copied nearly her whole book word for word from another cookbook, did not test all the recipes, at most only a very few. And this was probably true for most of the other authors who copied dozens, even hundreds of recipes from other books without mentioning their sources. Eliza Acton, the famous nineteenth-century English cookbook author, also complained about “the unscrupulous manner in which large portions of my volume have been appropriated by contemporary authors, without the slightest acknowledgement of the source from which they have been derived.” Acton, Modern Cookery, XXI.

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When, in 2017, I was working on my book about the cultural history of Hungarian Jewish cuisine, I had only a few pages from the 1854 cookbook transliterated into the Latin alphabet at my disposal and, based on them, I mistakenly assumed that the volume was in Western Yiddish, a dialect much closer to German than Eastern Yiddish.64 Now, however, when I have the benefit of the transliteration of the whole volume, I realize that it is not in Yiddish but in German, although here and there―as we could see from the previously mentioned examples―it includes a small number of Hebrew words. But even when I was still unaware of this, I asked Larissa Hrotkó, who assisted me in my work, to translate the text into German instead of Hungarian. I wished to work from such a version, since I knew that it would be much closer to the original than a Hungarian translation. The result justified this decision, since―as it turned out―the task involved more a transliteration of the original, than a translation of it.65 Any Hebrew-lettered transliteration of a German text inevitably somewhat distorts it, since the letters used reflect the sounds of the Hebrew or Yiddish language, instead of the German. According to Steven M. Lowenstein, “Writers of Jüdisch-deutsch [German in Hebrew letters] differed in their spelling systems. [...] All spelling systems of Jüdisch-deutsch were based subconsciously on the old Yiddish spelling systems (e.g., Vav yud for au) with suitable modifications.”66 The example of the many books in Hebrew-lettered German available at the time probably helped in the task of transliteration, but the results were far from perfect. As I know from Larissa Hrotkó, the publisher or his editor was rather inconsistent in transliterating the German recipes he copied: for example, he wrote the German word Schokolade (chocolate) at some places with the Hebrew letter shin, at other places with samekh, and the German double “s” sometimes with one, at other times with two samekh. The many printing errors in the book are also signs of carelessness. The merely 78-page volume is significantly shorter than Julie Löv’s work. Therefore, Mr. Löwy or the person he hired to edit the work was forced to

64 Körner, A magyar zsidó konyha. 65 I wish to thank Larissa Hrotkó, who transcribed the Hebrew-lettered text of the volume into Latin script for me and gave me advice concerning the language of the book. 66 Lowenstein, “The Yiddish Written Word,” 180.

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omit numerous recipes from the chapters he adopted from Löv. He probably did the same with those taken from other works. But in spite of the omissions, he generally did not alter the sequence of recipes within the chapters. The editor of the volume worked also rather sloppily when he copied recipes from his various sources. For example, in the third chapter about appetizers (Vorgerichte) he messed up the numbering of the recipes: after number 9 he jumped to number 12. But even this is outdone by his carelessness in the fifth chapter about vegetables (Vom Gemüse): in one of the recipes the ingredient mentioned in the title is completely missing from the description of the course itself. When I compared his volume with Julie Löv’s work, the cause of this became obvious: the editor started to copy the recipe called potatoes with mustard (Kartoffeln mit Senf), but after eight words he accidentally skipped to the next recipe (Kartoffeln mit Fettsauce, that is, potatoes with fat-sauce), which contains no mustard. The first chapters of the book sketchily describe the religious requirements of koshering meat at home, the need to separate and burn a small piece―the challah―of a larger batch of dough, the blessing that should be told over the piece, and the ritual rules for handwashing, but much other information necessary for kosher households is missing from the volume. It contains no chapter, for example, about the complicated demands of preparing the household for Pesach and the characteristic dishes of that holiday, a subject most later Jewish cookbooks describe in some detail. Most, though not all, early Jewish cookbooks similarly include short descriptions about the requirements of kashrut and occasionally also other rules of religious daily life. While such passages are by no means comprehensive, and they do not carry the weight of rabbinical rulings and the Shulchan Aruch, the definitive compendium of rules about daily life, their conciseness and easy availability make them more convenient. Just as in Julie Löv’s 1840 work, all the characteristic traditional Jewish dishes are missing from it: we cannot find recipes in it for cholent, kugel, ganef, matzo balls, and many other specialties. It also resembles Löv’s book in that the Jewishness of the recipes merely consists of not including meats forbidden by kashrut rules and not mixing meat and dairy ingredients. The majority of the recipes describe well-known dishes, but the volume also includes some unusual ones. Of those, probably the kidney soup (Nierensuppe) is the most surprising, since Ashkenazi Jews hardly ever ate kidneys, though some Sephardim did not object to them. Religious laws do

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not prohibit eating kidneys, provided that the fat on them and the blood in them are removed, nevertheless Ashkenazim avoided them. Other offal― for example, liver, lungs, brain, sweetbreads, spleen, tongue, and once in a while even tripe―do turn up in Ashkenazi cooking, but I know only one other nineteenth-century Jewish cookbook, Bertha Gumprich’s work, that includes a kidney dish.67 But it must have been consumed in Talmudic times, since the Babylonian Talmud includes the following passage: “A three-year-old calf used to be prepared for Rabbi Abbahu on the termination of the Sabbath, of which he ate a kidney” (Shab. 119b). It could perhaps be seen as progress that―unlike the works of Joseph Stolz, Rahel Aschmann, and Julie Löv―this 1854 cookbook includes brief descriptions of some kashrut rules, though it is equally possible that familiarity with this had been earlier so common that no explanation of it was necessary. But instead of this not very significant innovation, it is the fact that this small volume was the world’s first cookbook printed in Hebrew letters that makes it such an important document of Jewish gastronomic history. As a result, it is the predecessor of not only the Yiddish volume printed in 1896 in Vilnius, but also of the numerous Yiddish cookbooks published between 1898 and the 1930s in the United States (fourteen different ones, according to Henry Notaker’s bibliography) and of the even more numerous later Hebrew ones in Israel.

67 Nieren in Madeirasauce [Beef kidneys in Madeira sauce], in Gumprich, Vollständiges praktisches Kochbuch, 71.

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RECIPES FROM THE FIRST COOKBOOK IN HEBREW LETTERS

Kidney soup (Nierensuppe) Place kidney, a little fat, and leftovers of a roast in a pot, pour meat broth over them, season it with a little [dried, ground] ginger, nutmeg and cloves, add a piece of poultry fat, and let it all simmer. Then lay slices of toast or bread fried in poultry fat onto the bottom of a bowl, pour the soup over them, and place a few eggs fried in poultry fat around it.

Clear meat soup (consommé), primarily for the sick (Kraftsuppe, besonders für die Kranken) One cuts a half-roasted old hen into small pieces, pours one Halbe [old measuring unit, approximately 0.7 liter] of good meat or chicken soup over them, and adds six to seven coarsely chopped almonds, as well as a small piece of cinnamon and lemon peel. When all this is well cooked, let it run through a sieve or a piece of cloth, and pour it over toasted bread slices.

Soup made of fresh cherries (Kirschensuppe aus frischen Kirschen) Remove the pits from one or two pounds of cherries. Cook a small spoonful of flour in a piece of poultry fat or butter until it turns yellow, add the pitted cherries to this, and let them steam under cover. Pour a mixture of half water and half wine over this, add the grated zest of half a lemon, a little ground cinnamon, three pounded cloves, and

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sugar according to taste. Brown pieces of a bread roll in poultry fat or on a grill, and pour the cooked cherries over them.

Fish soup (Fischsuppe) In a dish that can be covered, place a small piece of butter, one onion, parsley root, carrots, and kohlrabi, all of them diced or sliced. Place this on coal [i. e.: on a range], add the head of a pike or carp, and let it cook under cover until nicely brown. Sprinkle a few spoons of flour over it, allow this to cook a little in the covered dish, pour as much pea broth [vegetable broth] to it as is necessary for a soup, and add a little salt and spice. Then strain it onto toasted bread and serve.

Chocolate soup (Schokolade-Suppe) Lightly brown a spoonful of flour in a piece of butter, and mix this well with good milk. Then add as much grated chocolate as you wish, and mix this with milk to achieve the desired thickness. Add to it a small piece of sugar and a little cinnamon too. When it has cooked for a while, beat a few egg yolks and thicken the soup with them [in the original: “werden ein paar Eierdotter verklopfert und mit abgezogen”]. Serve it over lightly toasted thin slices of bread.

Baked apple dessert (Apfelmus) [The original German title is misleading, since the recipe is not for apple purée, but for a torte baked from a dough similar to the one used for an apple and bread pudding.]

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Cut a bread roll into cubes, dampen them with milk or water, dice four peeled apples, one by one mix a piece of butter or poultry fat with three whole eggs and two yolks, add the bread rolls, the apples, as well as lemon peel, transfer this into a well-buttered or poultry fat-coated torte baking pan, bake it slowly until it turns yellow, and sprinkle sugar over it.

Big stuffed onions (Grosse Zwiebeln gefüllt) [The editor of the volume copied this recipe from Julie Löv’s 1840 work.] One peels the onions, cooks them in water for quarter of an hour, lets them cool in cold water, hollows them out [leaving a ¾ inch-thick shell], stuffs them with good veal, pours some meat broth over them, covers them with pieces of fat, and bakes them until they turn yellow.

Root vegetables in the Hungarian way (Wurzelwerk auf ungarische Art) [The editor of the volume copied this recipe from Julie Löv’s 1840 work, who in turn took it from Rahel Aschmann’s Jewish cookbook, published in 1835.] Slice rather thinly kohlrabi, carrots, parsnips, artichokes, and cabbage, then sweat them separately in fat [in the original: “lässt jedes besonders in Fett durchschwitzen”], sprinkle some flour over them, and add meat broth to this. Then coat a baking form with fat, cover its bottom with fine pieces of fat, add first the cabbage with thin slices of boiled smoked tongue placed on top of it, then add the kohlrabi and again the tongue, then―by laying slices of tongue between each

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of the layers―add the carrots, the artichokes, and finally the parsnips. Steam this for quarter of an hour, turn it out onto a platter, and quickly remove the fat. One can garnish this vegetable dish with roasted veal or beef.

Hungarian goulash meat (Ungarisches Gulaschfleisch) [The editor of the volume copied this recipe from Julie Löv’s 1840 work. But Löv also took it from another work: probably from Walburga Schiffler’s non-Jewish cookbook, called Die deutsche Hausfrau in der Küche, Speisekammer und im Keller (The German housewife in the kitchen, pantry, and cellar) and published in 1837 in Prague, Leitmeritz, and Teplitz.] Use meat from the round, from the rib section, or―best of all―from the tenderloin, pound it well, cut it into small cubes, heat a piece of fat in a pan, add finely chopped onions, a parsley root split into halves, and the meat. Pour some soup over this, and braise it well covered. From time to time add a spoonful of soup to this, also some vinegar and salt, toss in some caraway seeds tied into a small piece of linen, and let all this nicely cook under cover until serving. Now, remove the parsley root and the caraway seeds, transfer the goulash meat to a serving bowl, season it well with marjoram and paprika or black pepper, garnish it with roasted potatoes, and serve it.

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12. Pozsony’s (Bratislava, Slovakia) Vártelek Street, formerly called Jewish Street (Judengasse), in 1903. When Julie Löv’s cookbook was published in 1840, the right side of the street still belonged to the city of Pozsony and the left (hidden in this photo) to the settlement of Schlossgrund. Photographer unknown.

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2. The First Jewish Cookbook in Hungary

J

ulie Löv’s German-language Jewish cookbook, published in 1840 in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia) under the title Die wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin, oder neues vollständiges Kochbuch für Israeliten: Ein unentbehrliches Handbuch für wirthliche Frauen und Töchter; Nach vieljähriger Erfahrung herausgegeben von Julie Löv (The thrifty Jewish cook, or a new and complete cookbook for Jews: An indispensable handbook for hospitable women and daughters, published by Julie Löv, relying on her many years of experience) is not only the first such publication in Hungary, but also one of the earliest in the world. It is preceded by only two Jewish cookbooks, both published in Germany: Joseph Stolz’s 1815 work that came out in Karlsruhe and Rahel Ashmann’s 1835 volume from Quedlinburg and Leipzig.1 This means that Hungary was the first country after Germany where a Jewish cookbook appeared, ahead of countries such as Britain, the USA, France, and Holland, not to mention the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Poland controlled by it, the home of the world’s largest Jewish community in the nineteenth century. My 2017 book about the cultural history of Jewish cuisine in Hungary was the first to describe this cookbook in some detail. It is strange that it had previously escaped the attention of researchers, since a copy of its first edition is in the collection of the Széchényi Library, Hungary’s national library, and already at the time when I worked on my book, a copy of the 1842 second edition of the work was available online. It shows how little it has been known until recently, that even Henry Notaker, an outstanding Norwegian researcher of old cookbooks, seemingly knew nothing about it, since he left it out of

1 Stolz, Kochbuch für Israeliten; Aschmann, Geprüftes Kochbuch für Israeliten.

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his bibliography of Jewish cookbooks published between 1815 and 1945.2 Although I included in my book just about everything that I had managed to discover about Löv’s work until then, I have continued my research, and the present essay is an account of its results. Löv’s work was published by Philipp Anton (Fülöp Antal) Korn (1815– 1885), a writer and journalist who had a bookstore in Pozsony. What we know about his adventurous, energetically active life to a degree compensates for the unfortunate fact that we could discover virtually nothing about Julie Löv. Korn was a mere twenty years old when he opened his bookstore in the so-called Schlossgrund, a settlement with a large Jewish population on the eastern side of the Castle Hill, just outside the city limits. We can get some idea of the kind of books he sold from the catalogs he put out with the title Bibliotheca Hungarica in 1837 and 1838. From the huge number of non-religious titles written in Hungarian, German, or Latin about literary, historical, legal, and other subjects listed in those catalogs, it is obvious that not only Jews came to his store to buy books, but Gentiles as well. Like many other booksellers at the time, he not only sold books but also published them. Julie Löv’s kosher cookbook from 1840 and a prayerbook in Hebrew and Hungarian, published in 1841 with the title Israel’s Pleadings,3 are examples of the things he put out for his Jewish customers, while his 1837 publication about the legend of the Castle ghost in Pozsony4 and the 1844 collection of anecdotes he published with the title of Penny Stories (Kreuzergeschichten), were presumably read by Christians and Jews alike. Korn promoted the use of Hungarian among Jews and he supported some religious reforms. This can be seen from a preface he wrote

2 Notaker, Old Cookbooks. 3 Rosenthal, Tefilot Yiśrael. 4 Joseph Alois Gleich, Emmerich von Wolfsthal, oder das Pressburger Schloss-Gespenst: Eine wundervolle Sage aus den Zeiten Mathias Korvinus, Königs von Ungarn [Emmerich von Wolfsthal, or the ghost of the Bratislava Castle: A miraculous legend from the age of Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary] (Bratislava: Korn, 1837).

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13. Above: The title page of Julie Löv’s Jewish cookbook, published in 1840 in Pozsony. Below: The label of Philipp Korn’s bookstore, the publisher of Löv’s cookbook. According to this label from the second half of the 1830s or the first half of the 1840s, the bookstore was located in a settlement adjacent to the city of Pozsony proper, called Schlossgrund (Vártelek).

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for the abovementioned Israel’s Pleadings, the first Jewish prayerbook in Hungarian.5 In this preface, he argues that Jews should learn Hungarian, the Jewish schools should teach the prayers in that language, and those parts of the prayers which call for a return to Palestine should no longer be taken literally: Trying to make the previously fallow field of the Hungarian language fertile, our young and old are completely devoted to learning to speak this tongue instead of foreign ones. [...] You should teach these pleadings in Hungarian in your schools, so your children could learn at an early age that they have to become Hungarians in heart and speech if they wished to make themselves worthy of full rights as citizens. [...] Even if we have prayers about our moving to Palestine, in the favorable conditions under our current mild government they should be merely seen as sad reminders of a mournful period, when the downtrodden, homeless Jews could only hope to find their resting place in their Canaan.6 In 1848, following a wave of anti-Semitism in the second half of April and the murderous pogrom in Pozsony that was part of it, Korn became the secretary of the local section of the Central Emigration Society (Központi Kivándorlási Egylet), established in Pest under the leadership of the

5 Korn’s choice of writing the preface in Hungarian showed the influence of the reform movement. He was much influenced by Móricz Bloch (Mór Ballagi). Bloch was the “foremost Jewish intellectual championing the cause of Hungarian Jewry. Believing that emancipation called for Jews to embrace the Magyar language, he proposed various educational projects, often with the backing of his friend Philipp Korn, a book dealer and publisher in Pressburg.” Silber, “Ballagi, Mór.” 6 Rosenthal, Tefilot Yiśrael, v–viii. Korn’s preface is in part a response to the law enacted at the 1840 Diet in Pozsony, which gave the Jews several rights as citizens, including the right to reside in most cities, to buy and own properties, to found factories, to pursue all professions, even those that were protected by guilds, etc. Korn makes a clear reference to this at the beginning of his preface: “Not a full year has passed since the glorious parliamentary assembly during which we heard those generous expressions of religious tolerance and liberalism that all Hungarian Jews will forever carry in their hearts.”

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journalists Ede Horn and Adolf Dux, a Pozsony native.7 Korn’s bookstore served as the local headquarters of this movement that promoted immigration to America. A little later he closed his shop in order to serve as an army officer in Hungary’s freedom struggle against the Habsburg rulers, in which he was wounded and awarded a medal. At about this time―before the end of October 1848, according to Michael K. Silber8―Korn converted to the Lutheran faith. In the army, he was charged with various organizational and recruiting tasks, which he must have performed well, since he was first promoted to second lieutenant, then to first lieutenant, and finally to captain. After the defeat of the freedom fight, he fled to Turkey, going from there to Britain and then to America, and returning to Hungary only around 1860. Some of his books, all of them written in German, deal with the freedom fight and the emigration of Kossuth, the fight’s leader; others are about the organization of general education in Hungary, the history of the country’s industry, and about the first conference of German women, held in 1856―a gathering about which he not only reported but where he was also in charge of drawing up the reformist proposals. Instead of asking a local shop to print Löv’s book, Korn gave the job to Sándor Czéh, a printer who had founded his business in 1836 in nearby Magyaróvár. Czéh (1813–1883), a Lutheran, was born in Győr, a city in northwestern Hungary, and lived until 1835 in Pozsony. Korn could have known him from there or he could have heard of Czéh’s recently opened printing shop from his acquaintances in the book business. Initially, Czéh was mainly asked to print advertisements, prayer booklets, and official publications of the county, but soon he was also publishing calendars, dime novels, song booklets, fairytales, and other similarly inexpensive popular works. Compared to them, the printing of the 228-page, hardbound cookbook must have seemed to him an important commission. But before focusing on the contents of Julie Löv’s work, I would like to briefly describe the previously mentioned two Jewish cookbooks published in

7

“Deeply disappointed by pogroms and vacillating liberals, Jewish literati in Pest, Prague, and Vienna issued a call to immigrate to America. In Pressburg, this movement, numbering several dozen families, was led by the publisher Philipp Korn, who had been a close collaborator of Moritz Bloch [Mór Ballagi] in his Magyarization projects.” Silber, “Bratislava.”

8 Silber, “Hungary: Hungary before 1918.”

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14. The first two Jewish cookbooks in the world: Joseph Stolz’s Kochbuch für Israeliten (Cookbook for Jews), published in 1815 in Karlsruhe, Germany, and Rahel Aschmann’s Geprüftes Kochbuch für Israeliten (Tested cookbook for Jews), published in 1835 in Quedlinburg and Leipzig, Germany.

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Germany, since without this it would not be possible to compare Löv’s work to them. Joseph Stolz’s Kochbuch für Israeliten, oder praktische Anweisung, wie man nach den jüdischen Religions-Grundsätzen alle Gattungen der feinsten Speisen kauscher bereitet (Cookbook for Jews, or practical instructions for preparing all kinds of the finest dishes according to the rules of kashrut), published in 1815 in Karlsruhe, Germany, was the earliest printed Jewish cookbook in the world. Stolz (1777–1842) was not Jewish, but a Catholic, the personal chef of the Grand Duke in the State of Baden (Grossherzoglich badischer Mundkoch). As he states in the introduction to his book, the need he felt for such a volume was his motivation for writing it: As far as I know, no similar book of this kind has been available to the followers of the Mosaic faith, and for this reason and for trying to be useful to many, I gladly assented to the frequently repeated requests of educated Jews, and decided to let my manuscript be printed.9 In addition to writing this volume for the 670 Jews who lived in Karlsruhe, a year later, in 1816, Stolz published another cookbook for Christans, called Vollständiges Rheinisches Kochbuch (Complete Rhenish Cookbook).10 The fact that he included the vast majority of the 344 recipes from his Jewish cookbook in the more voluminous (616 recipes) work for Christians11 is not as surprising as it first seems, since in the earlier volume Stolz satisfied the demands of the kosher kitchen only to the extent of not using prohibited meats,

9 “Für die Bekenner der mosaischen Religion war nun, so viel ich weiss, noch gar kein solches Buch vorhanden: und hauptsächlich aus diesem Grunde, und um vielen zugleich nützlich seyn zu können, gab ich den öfteren Aufforderungen gebildeter Israeliten gerne nach, und entschloss mich zum Druck meiner Handschrift.” Stolz, Kochbuch für Israeliten, iv. 10 The Jewish cookbook was published by the C. F. Müller bookstore (Verlag der C. F. Müllerschen Buchhandlung), while the Rheinisches Kochbuch by the D. R. Marrischen Buchhandlung, both of them located in Karlsruhe. The C. F. Müller bookstore, founded in 1797 by Christian Friedrich Müller, was one of the oldest German publishers. It had a very long life: it existed until 1986 in Karlsruhe. They mainly published legal literature, such as compendiums of laws and regulations. A cookbook was highly atypical for them. 11 For example, of the 29 soup recipes in his Jewish cookbook he repeated at least 24 in his work about Rhenish cuisine.

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not mixing dairy and meat ingredients, and having a separate chapter about desserts and pasta to go with dairy menus (Mehlspeisen zu Milchspeisen). Since all the typically Jewish dishes are missing from his work, he could safely repeat its recipes in his volume intended for Christian homes. But already in his introduction to the Jewish cookbook, Stolz expressed his hope that Christians would also use it: In this respect, the present cookbook will satisfy a deeply felt need. As it is organized so that it can also be used by Christians, I perhaps may flatter myself with the notion that it will leave the expectations of no male or female cook completely unmet.12 Stolz was not alone among the authors of early Jewish cookbooks in recommending his work to non-Jewish readers. Judith, Lady Montefiore also mentions in the preface to her 1846 Jewish cookbook, the first one in Britain, how much she hopes that her work “may not prove wholly unacceptable even to those ladies who are not of the Hebrew persuasion.”13 Both Stolz and Lady Montefiore were consciously trying to create kosher versions of elegant, refined cuisine, something that would be equally appealing to Jewish and Gentile middle-class families. They hoped that Christians would also read their books, and they tried to communicate to them something more than merely the way various dishes should be prepared. This is especially perceivable in Lady Montefiore’s work. As Sandra Sherman observed, Lady Montefiore wanted to present her Christian readers “with an image of Jewish domesticity that is decorous, refined, acceptable to middle- and upper-class Victorian society.”14 One could say that she pursued culinary integration as a means to a social one. Authenticity was clearly not Stolz’s major consideration, since he wrote the following about the way he had become familiar with Jewish cuisine:

12 “Das gegenwärtige Kochbuch wird in dieser Rücksicht einem tiefgefühlten Bedürfniss abhelfen; und da es überdies so eingerichtet ist, dass es auch von Christen gebraucht werden kann, so darf ich mir vielleicht schmeicheln, dass es keinen Koch und keine Köchin in ihrer Erwartung ganz unbefriedigt lassen werde.” Stolz, Kochbuch für Israeliten, v. 13 Montefiore, The Jewish Manual, v. 14 Sherman, The Politics of Taste, 73–74.

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As much as possible constantly wishing to perfect myself in my trade, I gladly took advantage of the opportunity that had arisen to observe the art of cooking in the houses of the most educated local Jews, and after becoming thoroughly familiar with its practice, I decided to improve certain things in the Jews’ method of cooking. Those parts of the dishes and ingredients whose enjoyment the Mosaic laws forbids or only at certain times permits, I substituted with other kinds, and used them so that the whole dish should not only be healthy and pleasing to the digestive organs, but at the same time in regard to taste it should also meet the requirements of the finer art of cooking.15 While it is easy to be amused by such disregard of authenticity, it is quite possible that in his effort to rework the recipes in order to make them conform “to the requirements of the finer art of cooking,” Stolz was relying not only on his own professional judgement, but he was also responding to the expressed or perceived wishes of his middle-class Jewish acquaintances to have kosher food that approximates haute cuisine. Perhaps this is reading too much into what Stolz wrote, but if my interpretation is correct, this would be quite consistent with the aspirations of early Jewish assimilation. Already, the mere fact that local middle-class Jews had such social contact with Stolz deserves attention, since this would have been impossible without a degree of mutual openness. Examining the pioneering work of Stolz brings up the question: Why were Jewish cookbooks not published before 1815 when for centuries plenty of printed and handwritten books had existed about various kinds of Gentile cuisine? Although rabbinic literature from before the nineteenth century frequently mentions dishes, foods, and ingredients, hardly any handwritten

15 “Stets bemüh’t, mich in meinen Fach möglichst zu vervollkommnen, benutzte ich mit Vergnügen die Gelegenheit, welche sich darbot, die Kochkunst in den Häusern der gebildetsten hiesigen Israeliten zu beobachten, und, nachdem ich den Gebrauch derselben hinlänglich kennen gelernt hatte, Manches in der Kocherei der Israeliten zu verbessern. Denjenigen Speisetheilen und Zuthaten, deren Genuss das mosaische Gesetz ihnen entweder gar nicht oder nur zu gewissen Zeiten erlaubt, unterstellte ich andre, und richtete es so ein, dass das Ganze nicht nur eine gesunde und für die Verdauungs-Werkzeuge passende Speise werde, sondern auch zugleich rücksichtlich des Geschmacks den Forderungen der bessren Kochkunst entspräche.” Stolz, Kochbuch für Israeliten, III.

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Jewish recipe survives from those centuries. Rare exceptions to this are the six Jewish recipes included in an anonymous handwritten Andalusian cookbook of the thirteenth century. In Hungary, too, no handwritten Jewish recipe survives from the period before 1840, the date when Löv’s cookbook was published, and as far as I know the situation is by and large similar in other European countries. I have seen references to eighteenth- or early nineteenth-century Yiddish manuscripts of recipes kept in the Prague Jewish Museum, but unfortunately I could not find any detailed study of them.16 One of the reasons for the late emergence of Jewish cookbooks has to do with the social structure of Jewish society in previous centuries. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, it was mostly the chefs of kings, noblemen, and prelates who wrote cookbooks, and although in a few instances there had been cookbooks written for the middle class, only after this date did they become more numerous. Of course, there were also wealthy Jews, a kind of Jewish aristocracy (for example, the financial managers and creditors of royal courts, the so-called court Jews [Hofjuden], as well as a few international banking families, like the Rothschilds), but incomparably fewer than the Christian rulers and aristocracy. Their small number, however, was not the only reason why no cookbooks were published for them. This was also because rich Jews usually did not consider luxurious dishes to be as important expressions of their social status as the “real” aristocracy had done. Not only did rabbinical rules forbid conspicuous consumption, but in the pre-capitalist age rich Jews primarily used their money for useful investments and for increasing their working capital, and only in rare instances for expensive dishes, clothing, palaces, etc. Jewish women did not need cookbooks in those centuries, since they learned the know-how of cooking and baking from their mothers and grandmothers. True, this has been frequently so later on as well, but after the eighteenth century not always. In the age before modernization, cooking skills, the repertory of traditional Jewish dishes, and what was customary to eat on different occasions were organic parts of traditional Jewish culture, things

16 According to a letter by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett to the author: “I actually examined these manuscripts, three of them, which I thought were late eighteenth-century, but were probably early nineteenth-century. They are slim booklets, very similar to each other, which makes me think they were texts for a cooking class.”

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handed down within families. The demand for Jewish cookbooks only arose when modernization increasingly affected a significant share of the Jews and the society around them, resulting in the emergence of a Jewish middle class. Assimilation changed not only the language Jews used, the education they chose, and the kind of clothing they wore, but also the dishes they ate, and this had an impact even on those middle-class Jews who continued to keep a kosher kitchen. Influenced by the Jewish Enlightenment, middle-class Jewish women became increasingly aware of the customs and lifestyles of the surrounding majority society. As part of their upward social mobility they wished to have a cuisine as refined as the Christians of similar social standing and―just like the Gentiles―to have cookbooks with recipes reflecting those standards. This is why Stolz wrote in the introduction to his book that he intended it for “educated” Jews. In many―perhaps most―such middle-class households, servants or cooks did the actual cooking, but the housewives instructed them to follow the recipes from the cookbooks. Although the early Jewish cookbooks adhered to kashrut, the cuisine they presented had little Jewish specificity: as previously mentioned, their “Jewishness” had more to do with religious rules than with cultural heritage.17 In the early nineteenth century, several German states partially emancipated the Jews, granting them more equal rights, though they had to wait decades longer for full equality. In 1809, Baden, which included Karlsruhe as its capital, was the first independent German state to grant the Jews partial equality (although complete emancipation was achieved only in 1862), and this could have played a role in making it the place where the world’s first Jewish cookbook was published. It is also possible that the Jewish Enlightenment, so influential in Germany, also contributed to the appearance of such cookbooks by preaching, ever since the late eighteenth century, the necessity of knowing how to read and write German. The first Jewish cookbooks were primarily written for the increasing number of middle-class Jewish women in German cities and towns.

17 Several of the reasons given in these two paragraphs for the relatively late emergence of Jewish cookbooks reflect Victor Karády‘s and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s suggestions. As always, I am most grateful for their help.

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But the widespread knowledge of German among the middle-class Jews in other European countries also contributed to the fact that the first Jewish cookbooks were in German: from Lemberg to Alsace or Amsterdam, middle-class Ashkenazi Jews entered modernism, that is, Western culture, primarily―at times even exclusively―through the German language.18 Throughout Europe, the overwhelming majority of German-speaking Jews were Ashkenazim, this is why most cookbooks published for them feature no Sephardic recipes. While it appears that Stolz’s work was little used in other German regions19 and even less so abroad, some nineteenth-century German Jewish cookbooks became highly popular in other countries as well, since many local Jews were familiar with the language. Rebekka Wolf’s cookbook was the most successful among those volumes: it not only had 14 editions between 1851, when it was first published in Berlin, and 1933, but it was also translated into Polish and Dutch. The more extended market of such publications could have been one of the reasons why in the nineteenth century so many Jewish cookbooks were published in Germany. Nevertheless, even in Germany one had to wait twenty years for the next Jewish cookbook, that of Rahel Aschmann, published in 1835 in the Saxon cities of Quedlinburg and Leipzig. Saxon Jews represented a lower share of the population than in many other German states, and they were granted emancipation relatively late. For this reason the work’s Christian publisher must have counted primarily on Jews living in other German states and in other European countries to buy the book. Like Stolz, who was a Catholic, Aschmann, who was most probably Jewish,20 offered no advice in her work about keeping a kosher household, but at least she included―the first time among Jewish cookbooks―some Jewish

18 This, too, is partially based on Victor Karády’s suggestions. 19 I could find only one advertisement for it in papers from other German regions. It appeared in the Leipziger Zeitung on September 11, 1817. As a selling point, the brief text of this advertisement mentions that Stolz’s cookbook can also be used by Gentiles. 20 Though neither Rahel nor Aschmann were exclusively Jewish names, they were more common among Jews. Even more indicative of her religious background are the seven or so Jewish specialties (versions of cholent, kugel, and lokshen) included in her book. The recipe for one of those specialties contains advice how it could be adapted for dairy menus. All this combined makes it all but certain that she was Jewish.

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specialties, even if she did not devote a separate chapter to them, but virtually hid them in her book’s appendix. Unfortunately, we know nothing about her, except for her “many years of experience,” which she (or the publisher who thereby wished to increase the book’s credibility) mentions on the title page. It is, however, clear that her work fulfilled its publisher’s expectations of reaching readers in other regions, since it was also available in Pozsony, where presumably Julie Löv lived and where her cookbook was published in 1840. Though nothing can diminish Julie Löv’s achievement of publishing the first Jewish cookbook in Hungary, today I am a little less enthusiastic about her work than when I worked on my 2017 book and was not yet familiar with Aschmann’s volume, because it has become obvious that Löv copied nearly all the recipes from her. Among the 712 recipes in her book, there are only 59 that she did not copy from Aschmann, although this is not very apparent at first glance, since she mostly changed their sequence and in several instances changed also the word order in their titles. In addition, in a few places she substituted words in Aschmann’s work with their equivalents in the dialect spoken in the vicinity of Pozsony: this is how here and there Pflaume (prune-plums) became Zwetschke and Kartoffel (potato) turned into Erdäpfel, though elsewhere she left those words unchanged. I have no idea whether printing errors or Löv’s unfamiliarity with French are to blame, but in her book the French profiterole (cream puffs) is distorted to Profetenrolle, and the croquanttorte to Croqueantorte. On the other hand, it is certainly her fault that the chapter about fish dishes, which in Aschmann logically follows those of the various meat dishes, in Löv is sandwiched for no good reason between the chapters about “Flour-based dishes for dairy courses” (Mehlspeisen zu Milchdingen) and “Baked goods” (Backerei). Although Aschmann was a German, her 1835 cookbook featured three Hungarian-style dishes, all of which Löv chose to repeat in her work: Hungarian bits of meat (Ungarisches Bröckelfleisch), root vegetables in the Hungarian way (Wurzelwerk ungarische Art), and Hungarian applecake (Ungarischer Äpfelkuchen). Of these, the Hungarian applecake, which in fact is not a cake but a preparation distantly related to strudels, deserves special attention, since with nearly identical text, though of course in Hungarian, it appears in the 1829 third edition of István Czifrai’s Magyar nemzeti szakácskönyv (Hungarian National Cookbook), first published with a slightly

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15. All seven of these Hungarian and German, Jewish and non-Jewish cookbooks feature versions of a multi-layer applecake under titles that differ slightly but invariably call the dessert “Hungarian-style.” The cookbooks are: Magyar nemzeti szakács könyv (Hungarian National Cookbook) from 1829, Rahel Aschmann’s work from 1835, Julie Löv’s work from 1840, Therese Lederer’s work from 1876, Katharina Prato’s work from 1878, Die Kochkunst, an Austrian cookbook from 1893, and finally Szegedi szakácskönyv (Szeged Cookbook) from 1897.

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different title in 1817.21 István Czifrai was the pen name of the theologian and attorney István Czövek (1777–1828). Although the book’s cover names Czifrai as the author, in his excellent essay about this cookbook22 Béla Fehér finds it likely that it is in fact not an original work, but a translation. According to Fehér, Czifrai/Czövek probably translated the book from German, as he had done with all his other works, none of which had anything to do with cooking. The recipe of the applecake, renamed applecake à la Pest (Pesti almás kaláts), first appears in the work’s third edition (on page 125), while it is missing from the previous editions. Aschmann, who did not understand Hungarian, is unlikely to have known Czifrai/Czövek’s work; instead, I suspect that both she and the author of the Hungarian version of the recipe borrowed it from an earlier, almost certainly non-Jewish German cookbook. But the career of this recipe did not stop with the 1829 cookbook by Czifrai/Czövek, the 1835 one by Aschmann, or the 1840 one by Löv. In addition to them, it shows up―renamed to Hungarian strudel (Ungarischer Strudel, Pittah)―in Katharina Prato’s Die süddeutsche Küche (SouthGerman Cuisine), the most popular Austrian cookbook, first published in 1858 and followed by no less than 77 (!) editions. While it is missing from the work’s first edition, I managed to find it in the 34th from 1903, although probably some of the earlier editions featured it too. In addition, a version of it appears under the title Apfelstrudel, Ungarisch (Hungarian apple strudel) in a cookbook published by Wiener Mode, a fashion magazine, which differs from the earlier versions only in the number of balls of dough that have to be stretched.23 It is also included as applecake of Pest (Pester Aepfelkuchen) in Therese Lederer’s German-language Jewish cookbook, published in Pest in 1876, and finally in 1897 it appears as apple pie from Pest (Pesti almás lepény) in the sixth edition of Auntie Rézi’s, that is, Teréz Doleskó’s Szegedi szakácskönyv (Szeged Cookbook)24 a work named after a city in south-east Hungary, where the author lived. This last publication mistakenly features the recipe in the

21 Czifrai, Magyar nemzeti szakács könyv (3rd edition, 1829). 22 Fehér, “Ügyetlen kezekkel öszvefértzelt zavarékok.” 23 Die Kochkunst. Kochbuch der Wiener Mode (Vienna, Leipzig, Berlin, Stuttgart: Verlag der Wiener Mode, 1893), 355–56. 24 Rézi néni, Szegedi szakácskönyv (6th corrected and expanded ed., 1897).

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subchapter devoted to yeast cakes, though its dough is not made with yeast. This, however, is not the fault of the nearly always reliable Doleskó, since she died in 1883, a year after the third edition had come out, and the subsequent editions of her cookbook are to a large extent the work of unknown editors who expanded the original book with all kinds of recipes copied word for word from other publications.25 The incorrect characterization of the “apple pie from Pest” recipe as a yeast cake is merely one of the many examples of their careless work. But all in all, the career of this recipe, involving seven cookbooks published in three countries in the course of seventy years, is most impressive, especially if we consider that in order to prepare it we have to take the trouble of stretching 25 balls of dough one by one into rectangular sheets. In addition to the three Hungarian-style recipes she copied from Aschmann, Löv’s work also features a fourth such dish: Hungarian goulashmeat (Ungarishes Gulaschfleisch). It is not at all surprising that, like the other three, this one is also not original. It is from Walburga Schiffler’s non-Jewish cookbook, called Die deutsche Hausfrau in der Küche, Speisekammer und im Keller, oder: Kochkunst und Haushaltung unserer Tage (The German housewife in the kitchen, pantry, and cellar, or: The art of cooking and household in our days), published in 1837 in Prague, Leitmeritz, and Teplitz.26 Löv slightly reworded the recipe but otherwise followed it in all details with the exception of substituting animal fat for butter in order to make the dish conform to kashrut rules and offering the alternative of using paprika instead of pepper as seasoning. In her two-page preface, Löv does not mention that she wrote the work for Jewish women who kept a kosher kitchen. As a matter of fact, the words “Jewish” and “kosher” do not even occur in the text, therefore I would not be surprised if she had copied the preface from a non-Jewish cookbook. Except for one paragraph about koshering beef in the chapter of general instructions,27 she fails to include anything about the requirements of a kosher kitchen or about the special demands of Pesach meals. Furthermore, while she copied nearly all the recipes in Aschmann’s book, she left out the few characteristically Jewish dishes featured in the appendix to that work, so one cannot

25 I am grateful to Béla Fehér for bringing this to my attention. 26 I thank László Kőszegi, who brought this to my attention. 27 Löv, Die israelitische Köchin, 2.

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find even a single traditional Jewish dish in her cookbook. But at least she kept the suggestions Aschmann offered in some of her dairy and fish recipes about the ways they could be modified to make them also appropriate for meat menus. A good example of this is the recipe for chopped carp, which I quote at the end of this essay, although some of its advice is treif, since kashrut does not allow the use of animal fat in fish dishes. It is interesting to note that both Aschmann and Löv, who copied her, used gelatin made of the dried swim bladders of fish (in German: Hausenblase) in their recipes for sweet jellies, perhaps since such gelatin was always accepted as kosher, while the status of certain other kinds was controversial. As mentioned, we know virtually nothing about Julie Löv except for her many years of experience, which she emphasized on the title page of her work. Just as she copied nearly all her recipes from Rahel Aschmann’s cookbook, she also lifted from there the exact wording of this boast. Both books claim that their author “relied on her many years of experience in publishing it” (nach vieljährigen Erfahrungen herausgegeben). Like them, Joseph Stolz wrote his Jewish cookbook for middle-class women, but he represented an earlier generation of cookbook authors, many of whom were male and in the service of aristocrats. So on his book’s title page Stolz did not refer to experience in a middle-class home to establish his credentials, but to his official title in an aristocratic court: the personal chef of the Grand Duke in the state of Baden. Ashmann, Löv, and all the later female authors of Jewish cookbooks, however, chose a different path.28 They tried to convey the message that―except for their greater experience in cooking―they were just like their middle-class readers. And although they did not state it explicitly, it was fairly obvious that their experience was a domestic one. This made it easier for those who used their cookbooks to relate to them and thus inevitably generated market appeal. Although there had been some earlier examples of female Jewish authors, with the social changes brought upon by modernization their number kept increasing throughout the nineteenth century, and we can find numerous cookbooks among their works. Such books are, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observed, “the single largest body written by and for

28 For example, Therese Lederer, the subject of the fourth essay in the present volume, stated on the title page of her 1876 work that she relied on her thirty-year experience to collect and test the recipes in it (Nach 30-jährigen Erfahrungen gesammelte u. geprüfte Recepte).

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Jewish women.”29 They wrote the vast majority of Jewish cookbooks before 1945.30 In Hungary, this was even more lopsided: all the known authors of Jewish cookbooks were women, although it is possible that some of the editors of anonymously published cookbooks were men.31 The situation was markedly different among non-Jewish cookbooks. Both in Hungary and in other countries, a large share of them―the majority of such volumes before the nineteenth century32 and, by my estimate, close to half of them during that century33 and the subsequent ones―were written by men. What could be the reason for this difference? I suspect it mainly had to do with the fact that in Jewish homes women were in charge of both cooking and the Jewishness of the household. Their duties at home also included the performance of several religious rituals, such as the burning of a small piece separated from the unbaked dough and the lighting of the candles at the beginning of Sabbath. It is no coincidence that Jewish cookbooks frequently include not only recipes but also instructions for keeping a Jewish household. The combination of those responsibilities was not at all arbitrary, since cooking and religion had a far closer relationship in Jewish life than among Gentiles. Löv was almost certainly Hungarian. Not only was her work published in Pozsony, a city that belonged to Hungary until 1919, but the librarian and

29 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Cookbooks.” 30 Notaker, Old Cookbooks. 31 Several nineteenth-century Jewish cookbooks in Hungary were published without the author’s name. 32 Perhaps the best-known exceptions to this are the important early cookbooks written by women in Britain and America: Hannah Woolley’s The Cook’s Guide from 1664 and The Queen-Like Closet, or Rich Cabinet from 1670 (these works included all kinds of household and medicinal advice in addition to recipes), Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy from 1747, and American Cookery by Amelia Simmons from 1796. Woolley’s The Queen-Like Closet was also published in 1673 in German with the title Frauenzimmers Zeitvertreib. The earliest printed cookbook by a female food writer is also from Germany. It is Anna Wecker’s 1597 work, called Ein Köstlich new Kochbuch. 33 In nineteenth-century Hungary too, a substantial share of non-Jewish cookbooks continued to be written by men. According to research by Eszter Kisbán, among the real and fictitious authors of Hungarian-language, non-Jewish cookbooks, published between 1816 and 1891, nine had female and four male names. Among the German-language non-Jewish cookbooks published in Hungary during the same period this was more balanced: four had female and four male names. See: Kisbán, “Female name, female voice.”

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bibliographer József Szinnyei included her name and the title of her work in his multi-volume Magyar írók élete és munkái (Lives and Works of Hungarian Writers), a highly comprehensive encyclopedia published between 1891 and 1914. In the late 1880s, when he started to work on the encyclopedia, Szinnyei sent out 3,200 questionnaires to authors about their list of published works and basic biographical information.34 Based on the responses and on other sources available to him, he usually included a short biography of the authors in his encyclopedia, but unfortunately he failed to provide one for Löv. As one of the leaders of the University Library in Budapest and later of the library in the National Museum, he must have found Löv’s work listed in a catalogue or perhaps he even came across a copy of it. But it seems that already in the 1880s, he could not find any additional information concerning Löv (who by that time might not even have been alive), therefore he had to make do with her name and the title of her work. Another possibility is that Julie Löv was an invented name, just like the “authors” of numerous nineteenth-century Hungarian cookbooks, who never existed but were dreamed up by the publishers. Although there is nothing to prove this, it could be that Philipp Korn, the publisher, realized the need for a new Jewish cookbook, and so he invented Löv’s name to hide the fact that he had hired someone to create one based on Aschmann’s several-years-old work, probably little known in Hungary. But, of course, this is merely a guess. The Hungarian-born Austrian writer, humorist and journalist Moritz Gottlieb Saphir (1795–1858) wrote the only contemporaneous review of Löv’s book I could find. Saphir, who was a converted Jew and knew traditional Jewish food well, rightly objected in his review that Löv’s work excluded all the specialties of that cuisine: The new book, called Die wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin [The thrifty Jewish cook], was published in Pressburg, home of classic cuisine and romantic gourmandise, and it treats its elevated theme with as much thoroughness as taste. The assiduous researcher of Jewish food will miss the way to prepare the historic dish of cholent with all its sumptuous versions and a whole chapter on variations of the so-called kugel, as well as a significant section about matzo-dishes.

34 Fenyves, Képzelt asszimiláció?, 13–14.

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But nobody is perfect, so why should the “wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin” have to be? I hereby warmly recommend the Kochbuch für Israeliten [Cookbook for Jews]!35 Löv’s cookbook must have been successful, since a second edition of it appeared in 1842. The work was distributed not only in Hungary but in Germany as well. German papers probably featured more advertisements for the 1842 second edition than the two I managed to find: one in the Leipzig paper Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums and another one in Augsburg in the Allgemeine Zeitung. The Leipzig newspaper was a voice for moderate religious reform, and thus it seemed an appropriate place to advertise a cookbook intended for culturally assimilated, middle-class women. According to the ad in it, “the book is in stock in all the bookstores of the Austrian Monarchy, and it can be ordered at Mr. Ed. Kummer in Leipzig.” In addition, I found another, somewhat ambiguously worded notice in a January 1848 issue of the same Leipzig paper, which could be interpreted as naming Herrmann Wohl in Prague as the book’s publisher.36 But since Herrmann Wohl was the owner of a second-hand bookstore in Prague, the notice probably did not refer to a new edition but merely to copies of the―by that time several years-old―book that could be purchased in his store. It appears that the German Rahel Aschmann’s 1835 cookbook was less advertised in Germany than the 1840 work by the Hungarian Julie Löv. I could find only one ad for it, and even that was not a newspaper advertisement, but merely a very brief description of it in a list of recent books their publisher, the Quedlinburg- and Leipzig-based firm of Gottfried Basse, included at the

35 Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, “Pesther Salon” [Pest salon], Der Humorist, September 28, 1840, 791. 36 The text of the newspaper-notice: “Bei Herrmann Wohl in Prag ist erschienen: Löw [sic!]: Die wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin, oder vollständiges Kochbuch für Israeliten.” (At Hermann Wohl in Prague is published/available: Löw [sic!]: The thrifty Jewish cook, or a new and complete cookbook for Jews.) The German expression “ist erschienen” in the context of a book usually means that it was published, but here it probably denotes that it has become available.

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end of one of its publications.37 This scarcity of advertisements and the several years separating the dates when the works were published might have been the reasons why by the early 1840s Julie Löv’s cookbook was seemingly better known in Germany than Aschmann’s volume. Perhaps this is why the aforementioned Mr. Kummer in Leipzig apparently failed to notice that the vast majority of Löv’s recipes had come from Aschmann’s work. As shown by the international popularity of such German-language Jewish cookbooks published in Hungary as those of Julie Löv and Therese Lederer (the subject of another essay in the present collection), up to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Jewish culture in Hungary had a closer connection to Ashkenazi culture elsewhere in Europe than what was possible after the near-complete switch to Hungarian as the predominant everyday language of most of the Hungarian Jews. In spite of this switch, the vast majority of those Jews continued to understand German, which gave them access to Western cultures. But the cultural exchange worked less well in the opposite direction. Since almost all local Jewish publications were in Hungarian after the switch, the absence of a shared language made them inaccessible for German-speaking Jews living in neighboring countries. The same way as with the Hebrew-lettered cookbook, the subject of our first essay, the significance of Löv’s work lies less in its contents than in the interesting circumstances of its publication. But even more than that, it is distinguished by the fact that it was the first Jewish cookbook published in Hungary and one of the earliest in the world.

37 Dr. Stephan Kunze, Geschichte des Augustiner-Klosters Hamersleben, nebst alten historischen Nachrichten von einzelnen Städten, Dörfern, Klöstern und Burgen des vormaligen Bisthums und Erbfürstenthums Halberstadt. Nach ungedruckten Urkunden und Handschriften bearbeitet von Dr. Stephan Kunze. (Quedlinburg and Lepzig: Gottfr. Basse, 1835).

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RECIPES FROM THE FIRST JEWISH COOKBOOK IN HUNGARY Julie Löv, the author of this 1840 work, copied all the following recipes from Rahel Aschmann’s Jewish cookbook, published in 1835 in Leipzig.

Soup with rice biscuits (Suppe mit Reissschöberl) Cook ¼ pound rice in one Kanne (1 liter) milk (for meat menus use water or meat broth). Stir a spoonful of butter (fat) until it is foamy, then add 6 yolks, parsley, the cooled rice, and some mace. Coat a baking pan with butter (fat), pour in this dough, and bake until it turns light yellow. Turn it out, cut it into rectangular pieces, and serve it with hot water (meat broth).

French soup (Französische Suppe) Cut equal quantities of tight cabbage, kohlrabi, and carrot into narrow strips and braise them in a pan with butter (goose fat) for a good half hour. Then add mace, black pepper, and hot water (meat broth) to the pan and cook until tender. Serve it over lengthwise sliced and toasted bread rolls (white bread).

Eggs, Piedmont style (Eyer auf piemontesische Art) Coat a well-buttered platter with breadcrumbs, place sliced Swiss cheese on it, break 12 eggs over this, bake the platter at moderate heat, and then glaze the chopped eggs.

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[The last words of the recipe in the German original are: “...und glacirt die gehackten Eyer.” This probably means that the baked eggs should be cut into small pieces, but this still leaves it unclear how they should be “glazed.” In recipes, the word “glaze” mostly refers to a thin, glossy coating. Savory coatings are usually made with reduced meat stock, while sweet coatings with melted jelly, chocolate, or sugar, but in this recipe there is no mention of reduced meat stock, and a sweet coating would be clearly inappropriate.]

Eggs with herring (Eyer mit Häringen) Cut 7 hard-cooked eggs lengthwise into halves and lay them onto a platter. Cut a well-soaked herring into pieces, and bake the pieces with carp milt and butter. Now add some butter and sour cream to the eggs, place the herring and carp milt pieces on top, spread some sour cream over this (as a sauce), sprinkle it with parsley, and cook it.

Hungarian bits of meat (Ungarisches Bröckelfleisch) Cut two pounds of beef cutlets into small rectangular pieces. Place them in a pan together with one Kanne (1 liter) water, 3 onions, caraway seeds, salt, and one carrot. Cook them for 4 hours. If the broth cooks down too much, add more water. Serve it with boiled potatoes.

Polish beef tongue (Polnische Ochsenzunge) One cooks a nice beef tongue with salt and spice, then removes its skin. Now one heats fat, adds flour to it, stirs it until it gets brown, then adds some sugar, dilutes it with the broth in which the tongue

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cooked, and adds some vinegar. When this sauce has cooked well, one adds big and small raisins, slivered almonds, and the tongue.

Chopped carp (Farschirter Karpfen) Slit the scaled carp lengthwise on its back and pull off its skin from both sides, but leave the head and the tail in the skin. Remove the rest of the meat and chop it finely. Then mix ¼ pound butter with heavy cream, break 4 eggs into it, add one soaked dairy-type bread, chopped shallots, lemon peel, salt, crumbs made of white bread, and the carp meat. Mix all this well, fill the skin with it, and sew the skin closed. Place the fish on a wooden grate in the baking dish, sprinkle it well with grated Parmesan cheese, and add some butter to it. When it has finished baking, serve it with an anchovy-sauce. For serving it in a meat menu, use some fat instead of butter [this is treif, since one is not permitted to use animal fat in fish dishes], common white bread instead of the dairy-type bread, and omit the cheese.

Fried carp (Gebackener Karpfen) Cut the fish into nice pieces, salt them, roll them in a mixture of coarse semolina and flour, and quickly fry them in butter. You can also fry small fishes the same way.

Spit-roasted stuffed carp (Gebratener Karpfen gefüllt) Insert butter into slits in the fish. Fill its belly with [a mixture of] butter, lemon slices, salt, black pepper, and mace. Sew it closed, push a spit through it, baste it with butter, and roast it so that it stays juicy. Serve it with anchovy sauce.

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Hungarian-style applecake (Ungarischer Äpfelkuchen) Make a pasta dough of 3 Seidels [3×3.5 deciliters] flour, 6 Loths [6×1.75 dekagrams] butter, one egg, and milk. Knead the dough well, divide it into 25 small loaves, cover them with a warm cloth, and let them rest for half an hour. Meanwhile, smash ¼ pound sugar, chop ¼ pound almonds, 12 Loths [12×1.75 dekagrams] raisins, and the peel of one lemon, and mix them well with cinnamon and bread crumbs. Then peel tart apples and cut them into small slices. Butter a flat baking form [perhaps: baking sheet] or platter. One by one stretch the loaves of dough over the form or platter, butter each of them, and continue until you get 8 sheets of stretched dough. Spread the apple slices and half of the filling over this. Now comes 8 more sheets of dough and the rest of the filling, and finally the remaining 9 sheets of dough. Press this tightly down with your palm. Smooth the sheets of dough that hang over the edge of the platter with a rolling pin, brush egg white over the cake, prick it a few times with a fork, and bake it.

Potato torte (Kartoffeltorte) Peel good starchy cooked potatoes and grate 12 Loths of them. To this, add 4 Loths sugar, the rind of one lemon, 2 whole eggs, and 6 yolks. Stir them for half an hour, fold in 4 whipped eggwhites, fill the torte mold with this batter, and bake it at a steady heat.

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16. The first pages of Teréz Berger’s (1851–1938) notebook of recipes, which she started to write in 1869 or a few years earlier, her wedding photo from 1876, and another notebook from about 1870, in which she copied her favorite poems and lyrics of opera arias. Photograph by Young Suh.

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3. The Earliest Hungarian Jewish Recipe Collection

A

lthough I have previously written about the recipes my great-grandmother, Teréz Berger, née Baruch (1851–1938), started to jot down in 1869 or possibly even a few years earlier, I believe it is justified to return to the subject in order to examine it in greater detail and in a more scholarly manner than before, since the notebook containing those nearly 130 recipes is not only a family keepsake, but an important document in the history of Hungarian Jewish cuisine as well. I have been studying this notebook for more than two decades, trying to interpret the recipes in it, and understandably today I know considerably more about them than in the late 1990s when I started to decipher my great-grandmother’s old-form German handwriting (the so-called Kurrentschrift, Kurrent script), to adapt her recipes for my use, to prepare them for my family, and―based on this―to write a book about her household.1 In the following essay, in addition to presenting the results of my ongoing research related to her manuscript, I also quote some parts of my book about her, since the new research results would be hardly understandable without the context of the quoted passages about her life. The main significance of her manuscript is that it is the earliest document in Hungary to include recipes of typical Jewish specialties. This is so, since― strange as it sounds―neither of the two Jewish cookbooks published in Hungary before she started jotting down her recipes feature a single such dish. As for the other nineteenth-century manuscript collections of Jewish recipes in Hungary, hers is probably the earliest among them. Most handwritten collections consist only of recipes for baked desserts. Recipes for desserts make up two thirds of her collection as well, but luckily

1 Koerner, A Taste of the Past.

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it also includes numerous examples of all the categories of dishes, such as appetizers, soups, fish- and meat-courses, vegetables, other types of side dishes, pickles, and preserves. The reason why such categories of dishes are missing from the majority of handwritten collections is because most women did not need a recipe to prepare such courses, since familiarity with the ingredients and the steps of preparation was sufficient in cooking. For savory dishes it was not necessary to weigh the ingredients as accurately as in baking, since the quantities used could to some degree vary according to personal taste. Riza, as Teréz was called by her friends and family, wrote most of the roughly forty recipes for savory courses, pickles and preserves at a time when as a teenager she wished to learn how to cook. This is probably why the vast majority of savory recipes are in the first three quarters of the collection, while with two exceptions the remaining pages feature only baked desserts. But there is yet another thing that makes this document exeptional: we do not know anywhere near as much about the authors of other Hungarian handwritten or printed Jewish cookbooks as we know of her. For example, nothing is known about Julie Löv, the author of the first Jewish cookbook in Hungary, or about Therese Lederer, who published an important such work in 1876. While we possess far less information even about much later authors, we can easily reconstruct my great-grandmother’s life, her household, and lifestyle from her surviving letters and recipes, as well as from the highly detailed eyewitness account of her granddaughter (my mother), who was raised by her. Some of her surviving artifacts―among them cups, bowls, cutlery, and table linen once used at her family meals―provide further help in such a reconstruction. All this is significant, since food is an integral part of lifestyles, therefore, if possible, it should be examined within that context, not in isolation. My great-grandmother was born in 1851 as a daughter of deeply religious, but not Orthodox, well-to-do, but not rich merchants in Győrsziget (Győr-island), which at the time was still a separate town, not yet incorporated into Győr, its larger neighboring city in northwest Hungary. Riza remained religious throughout her life, kept a kosher household following her marriage, and diligently observed the Jewish holidays. But at the same time, she accepted that her children were hardly or not at all religious, since remaining close to them was even more important for her than religion. When in 1932, already past eighty, she moved from Moson, a small town in northwestern Hungary, near the border with Austria, where she had spent her life after her marriage,

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17. Híd (Bridge) Street in Győrsziget in about 1905, approximately at the time when this previously independent town became incorporated into the city of Győr, its much larger neighbor. Teréz Berger grew up in the last house on the right side of the street, in the building where her family lived and where their sewing accessory store was located. The family’s narrow house is barely visible behind its taller and wider neighbors in the foreground. She started writing her collection of recipes in this house in the 1860s. Photographer unknown.

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to live with her daughter in Budapest, she knew perfectly well that they did not observe the dietary rules, but she was willing to close her eyes to it. She told her daughter: “Whatever you give me is kosher; I will not ask and you should not tell.”2 Her secular studies consisted of only four years in grade school, since the local Jewish school had only four grades for girls in those years. In the late 1850s, when she studied there, most of the subjects were still taught in German, and only in the 1860s did Hungarian begin to replace German as the primary language of education. It tells us a lot about what society expected of young middle-class women that in the 1850s needlework was still considered the most important subject in this school. Although they knew Hungarian, Riza and her parents spoke German at home, which at that time in western Hungary was equally common in Jewish and Gentile middle-class families. It was, on the other hand, less typical that Riza kept up her preference for the German language well into the twentieth century, while most of the assimilated Hungarian Jews, even many of the Orthodox, were much more willing to embrace Hungarian as their everyday language. This is well reflected in her recipe collection, in which not only the recipes written in the nineteenth century are in German, but―with the exception of two in less than idiomatic Hungarian―also those that she wrote after the turn of the century. She tried to compensate for the brevity of her schooling with self-education. Like the subjects emphasized in her school, the studies she pursued at home were consistent with society’s image of the ideal middle-class woman. In the years before her marriage, she studied French and piano, participated in amateur theatre performances, learned to cook, and sought to improve her writing skills and vocabulary by reading books, copying her favorite poems and lyrics into a notebook, and―last, but not least―by writing carefully worded, long letters. Luckily, another of her surviving notebooks contains drafts of 85 letters she wrote in the three years prior to her marriage in 1876, letters that provide us with a continuous narrative of her life during this period, making it possible to reconstruct almost day by day what preoccupied her.

2 Even when she lived in Moson, Riza was slightly flexible in keeping the kashrut rules, which was typical of many (though by no means all) Hungarian Jews who tended to be less strict in this respect than observant Jews in some other Eastern European countries, for example in Poland.

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Her letters show that she considered herself a Hungarian. But when she wrote about her “Hungarian temper,” she did this in German. As she wrote half teasingly, half seriously to a friend in Vienna: How easily someone like you can laugh at the ideas of another person, given that you do not have to bear the shackles of womanhood. But I will engrave your advice in my mind and, whenever possible, will try to switch from the quick temper of a Hungarian woman to the quiet and steady one of a jovial German. Judging from her letters, she was a typical, but in no ways exceptional representative of her social group, the partially assimilated, but still religious urban Jewish middle class. At the same time, it is touching how diligently she tried to prepare herself in the years before her marriage for the social role, the role of a middle-class housewife and mother, that in her opinion God assigned to her. As she writes in a letter: Women like me have been raised to be ordinary housewives. Is it not God’s special gift to assign a guardian spirit to a young girl that programs her for an education commensurate with her social standing? And indeed, young Riza tried hard to get ready for this. Her conscious self-education, her desire to learn how to write in good style, her occasional work in the family’s haberdashery, and, last but not least, the recipes, which as a teenager she started collecting into a notebook, are all testimonies to this effort. Although her letters frequently refer to her Jewishness and they show that most of her friends were Jewish, she also had close Gentile friends, attended balls organized by Gentiles, and acted in amateur theater performances where, as she writes, she and a young man were the only Jews among the performers. Nowhere in her letters is there any hint of anti-Semitism experienced in her social contacts. This was not necessarily the case for Jews in all towns and across all social strata in the 1870s, but apparently it was characteristic of the social groups she had contacts with. By the standards of her time, she married relatively late, at age 25, but she must have been already thinking of her future marriage when at age 17 or so she started to record her mother’s recipes in a notebook. While another

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18. Teréz Berger (1851, Győrsziget–1938, Budapest) in the early 1870s, a few years after she started writing her notebook of recipes. Photographs by Vilma Skopall, the widow of the photographer József Skopall (1814–1870).

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notebook, comprising copies of her favorite poems and song lyrics, which she must have started at about the same time as her recipe collection, still retains its thin paper cover, the one containing her recipes was re-bound at a later date―probably since it started to fall apart―and its original red-marble-paper front was pasted onto the new cardboard one. Her recipe collection is not a “fair copy,” a carefully penned text, but a working document with many corrections and crossed-out words and lines. Even whole recipes are crossed out on a few pages near the beginning of the notebook, indicating that she was dissatisfied with the results and preferred those versions of them that she later copied into her manuscript. The recipes are written in the German dialect typical of the AustroHungarian Monarchy, but within this they also reflect my great-grandmother’s personal use of language. These days some of the words she used, such as Häfen or Hafen (pot), Fähnen or fahnen (to sift), Derndl (cornelian cherries), and Fanzel (soup biscuit) are rare even in Austria. Other words are still common there, but with the exception of Bavaria, are rarely used in Germany. Some such expressions are, for example: Erdäpfel (potato, in Germany mostly called Kartoffel), Fisole (green bean, in Germany: grüne Bohne), Kren (horseradish, in Germany: Meerrettich), Marille (apricot, in Germany: Aprikose), Reine (skillet or pan, in Germany: Kasserolle, flaches Kochgefäss), Ribisel (red currant, in Germany mostly Johannisbeere), Waidling (mixing bowl, in Germany: Rührschüssel), Weichsel (sour cherry, in Germany: Sauerkirsche), Zibebe (big raisin, in Germany: grosse Rosine), Zwetschke (prune plum, in Germany: Pflaume), but one could easily extend this list. The style of recipes in cookbooks is generally more concise and sketchy than the grammatical construction of sentences in literary works, but, even if we acknowledge this, it is strange that Riza frequently leaves out the words “ist” and “sind” (is and are) used as predicates in sentences. This is surprising, since she could write well, as can be seen from her grammatically correct letters displaying an almost overly literary, at places even slightly pretentious style. Her spelling is also not always correct in the recipes. This could be the result of the brevity of her formal education or of spelling certain words phonetically according to their local pronounciation. For example, initially at most places she wrote auswalgen instead of auswalken (to roll out dough), Zwiefel instead of Zwiebel (onion), and Kitte instead of Quitte (quince), but toward the end of the collection such unusual spellings mostly disappear, probably since by then she had learned the correct way of writing them. In

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addition to such small errors, here and there her spelling is inconsistent: at places she capitalizes the first letter of nouns, as one should, but elsewhere she writes them incorrectly with lower case, sometimes she writes Zimt, at other times Zimmt (cinnamon), at various places she spells Kasserolle (skillet or pan) as Casserole, Casserolle or Kasserol, etc. The cooking ingredients and measuring units reflect the period when Riza wrote the recipes. For example, where today we use baking powder, my great-grandmother used a little yeast to lighten the texture of baked goods. Unlike with typical yeast cakes, one does not have to let such doughs rise, since only from the heat of the oven during baking will they become airier. Though baking powder had been known since the 1850s, it became widely used in Hungary only in the first years of the twentieth century, when the Austrian affiliate of Dr. August Oetker’s German company made its uniform-weight small packets more available throughout the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. This is the reason why only in the recipes toward the end of her notebook does she use baking powder, which―typical of the popularity of the standardized packets―she invariably calls by its brand name: Oetker. It is also indicative of the nineteenth-century origin of most of her recipes that they carefully specify whether the pieces broken off the tall, conical sugarloaves―which was the way sugar was sold in those days―should be pounded to a fine powder or to coarser granules. Presumably, Riza used special sugar nippers, a metal tool, to remove pieces from the sugarloaf, which she then pounded in a mortar to the desired fineness. Confectioners’ sugar and crystal sugar occur only in the last few recipes, undoubtably written in the twentieth century. The units of measurement in the first half of her collection are typical of those used in Austria and Hungary in the years before the introduction of the metric system: the Halbe (0.7 liter), the Seidel (0.35 liter), and the Loth (1.75 dekagram). In the final third of the collection Riza gradually switched to the metric system, introduced in 1876 to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. But since some of the recipes in the second third of the collection might well have been written between that date and the end of the century, it appears that for years after 1876 she remained loyal to the old-fashioned units of measurement. Thanks to a lucky coincidence we know the latest date by which she must have started to collect the recipes into the notebook. The reason for this is because the last pages of the notebook feature drafts of the letters my eighteen-year-old great-grandmother wrote in late August 1869 to her parents and

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19. Teréz Berger’s TB monogrammed silver bowl, cutlery, and napkins. If these objects―as I suspect― belonged to her trousseau, her parents must have purchased them a few years before her wedding in 1876. Photographs by Young Suh and Teodóra Hübner.

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20. China bowl and KB monogrammed, Biedermeier-style cup and saucer that Teréz Berger inherited from her mother, Katharina Baruch (1818–1912). The pictures at the bottom depict Katharina at about ages 45 and 80. Photographs by Young Suh, Teodóra Hübner, Adèle Perlmutter-Heilperin, Molnár and Brodszky, and by an unknown photographer.

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grandparents on the occasion of the approaching Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, to thank them for all the love they had shown for her throughout the year. The exercises of penmanship and attempts at calligraphy on some of those last pages seem to be the work of someone even younger than eighteen, of a person who was trying to prepare for her role in later life. So it is quite possible that she started gathering the recipes well before August 1869, perhaps even a year or two earlier. The later recipes can be approximately dated with the help of two methods. The first method attempts this by examining the units of measurement used in the recipes. Among the 128 recipes of the collection the word “liter” first comes up in the 74th, the weight “deka” in the 94th, centimeter in the 105th, and “kilo” in the 119th. In addition, only from the 107th recipe on does she use exclusively metric measurements, in the approximately thirty preceding ones she mixes the new system with the old. Since―as we have seen―the metric system was not used in Hungary before 1876, I believe she wrote the larger part of her collection still in the nineteenth century. Luckily the validity of this statement can be checked by a second method. This has to do with Riza’s endearing habit of specifying some of the more valuable ingredients by their price: chocolate, vanilla, citron, and capers for 4-10 krajcárs (pennies), and an Oetker packet of baking powder for 20 krajcárs. In 1892, korona, consisting of 100 fillérs, became the main monetary unit in Hungary, replacing the forint and the krajcár. But the earlier coins remained in circulation until 1897. Since Riza last uses krajcár (Kreuzer by its German name) to specifiy the quantity of an ingredient in the 121st recipe,3 near the end of her 128-recipe collection, this reinforces the impression that the vast majority of the recipes were written in the nineteenth century. For years after 1897, however, some people kept calling the two-fillér coin a krajcár, so it is quite possible that Riza also continued using the “Kr.” (Kreuzer) designation for a while.4

3 “1 20 Kr. Pak. Öttker,” that is, one packet of Oetker for 20 krajcárs. 4 This is all the more possible, since a factory near Vienna affiliated with Dr. Oetker started only in 1908 to produce the packets and to make them more available in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, although Dr. August Oetker had been producing such packets since 1891, first in his pharmacy in Bielefeld, Germany, and then in a factory there. It is likely that in Moson, her town, Riza could only buy the packets made in Austria, not those manufactured in Germany. If this was so, then the two recipes (nos. 121 and 126) calling for Oetker products must have been written already around 1910.

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My great-grandmother, however, kept using the collection almost until her death in 1938, though she added relatively few recipes to it in the first decades of the twentieth century, and after 1932, when she spent her last years with her daughter in Budapest, presumably she stopped cooking from it altogether. It is almost certain that her mother dictated the first few dozens of recipes in the notebook, but probably the later ones also came from family members, friends, and acquaintances. Apparently, she copied few if any recipes from cookbooks and magazines, which might be the reason why I could not find any printed sources she might have used. The illogical sequence of cooking steps in some of her recipes also seems to indicate oral sources: as if something only belatedly occurred to the person who dictated the description of the dish to her. At places, she adds the name of the person from whom she received the recipe in parentheses after the recipe’s title, which allows us to learn a little about her social contacts. The collection includes multiple versions of several recipes, for example, no fewer than four variants of Catalonian bread (Catalaner Brot), a type of fruit cake known today as bishop’s bread (Bischofsbrot, püspökkenyér) in Austrian and Hungarian cuisine. Clearly, this was one of her favorites. But she was not alone in accumulating more than one recipe for the same dish. Other collections also feature such variant recipes, which had to do with the open-ended nature of such manuscripts. Women were always in search of the most reliable and perfect versions of their favorite dishes, so when they particularly liked the way such a course was pepared in a friend’s house, they asked for its recipe and copied it into their collections. The predominantly oral origin of her collection is an important feature of it, since, had she copied the recipes from printed sources, we would not find among them so many unusual versions of courses still popular today, as well as delicious dishes that have become forgotten by now. The richness of a living and constantly evolving culinary culture is to no small extent due to such individual, idiosyncratic versions of recipes and to those that have remained unrecorded in cookbooks. Such books have many advantages, but at the same time they have standardized and thereby impoverished culinary culture, since people have increasingly relied on printed recipes instead of preparing their own versions or those of their families and regions. It has been another unfortunate result of this process of standardization that the dishes left out of cookbooks have gradually disappeared from the culinary repertoire of families.

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21. The beginning of a two-page table of contents in Teréz Berger’s notebook of her German-language kosher recipe collection. She started to write the recipes into this notebook in the late 1860s.

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Bean cholent (Bohnen Scholet) is an example for the individual versions of known dishes in Riza’s collection, since, unlike most cholents in Hungary, it does not include garlic, while ginger-flavored soup biscuits (Semmelfanzeln für Suppe), braised chicken with game sauce (Hühner wild bereitet) and bread pudding in noodle dough (Semmel Scheiterhaufen) are some of the dishes in her collection that have become undeservedly forgotten since they have been left out of cookbooks. Although her notebook includes some characteristically Jewish recipes, the majority of dishes in it are courses of the Gentile cuisine adapted to satisfy the ritual dietary rules. The influence of Hungarian cuisine is far less perceivable in those dishes than that of Austrian and Czech/Moravian/Slovak. This might has to do with the fact that Riza’s family lived in the northwestern region of the country, and she herself spent most of her life in Moson, a small town in the same region, to which Vienna and Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia) were much closer than Budapest, not to mention eastern Hungary. But her family’s origin also explains these influences: her ancestors mostly came from Czech and Moravian regions to Hungary in the eighteenth century. The German-speaking, urban, middle-class, and, in some respects (for example in clothing and language), assimilated culture they represented obviously had an impact on their culinary traditions. Her collection includes a great many Austrian-type dishes, such as ginger-flavored soup biscuits (Semmelfanzeln für Suppe), crumbled mixture of toasted flour and hot fat (Mehlstertz), Linzer torte, Sacher torte, Pischinger torte, and biscotti in memory of the late Crown Prince Rudolf (Weiland Kronprinz Rudolf Theebäckerei), but one could easily continue this list. On the other hand, the many kinds of dumplings, tongue in the Czech way (Böhmische Zunge) and cookies à la Brno (Brünner Küchel), named after a city in the Moravian region of the Czech Republic, are typical of the Czech/Moravian/Slovak influence. At the same time, all the traditional, most characteristically Hungarian dishes are missing from her collection. One cannot find in it any of the traditional cabbage dishes so common in Hungarian cuisine or the Hungarianstyle stews, such as gulyás, pörkölt, paprikás, and tokány. Clearly, the Austrian and Czech influence was stronger in her cuisine than the Hungarian, but Riza’s old-fashioned style of cooking could also have played a role in the lack of those stews. The way she cooked was much influenced by what she had learned from her mother, who was born in 1818, at a time when such Hungarian-style stews were still little known. For example, gulyás meat made

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with paprika seasoning started to show up in Hungarian cookbooks only after 1819.5 This was because such stews first appeared in peasant cooking and only later in middle-class cuisine. Another reason could have been that Riza’s mother and she herself lived in western Hungary, and initially such dishes were less known there than east of the Danube.6 Among Riza’s recipes only Dobos torte, invented around 1879 in Budapest,7 is clearly a Hungarian specialty. Due to their popularity in Hungary, strudel and palacsinta (Palatschinke in German, a very thin pancake, similar to crȇpe), both of which can be found in her collection, could perhaps also be considered as local specialties, though they are known in other countries too. Jewish culinary culture influenced not only the traditional specialties of that cuisine in the collection, but also her choice of non-Jewish dishes and the way they were modified to meet the requirements of kashrut. The complete lack of tomato dishes in the collection is a good example for the way culinary traditions influenced her choice of dishes. True, tomato appeared in Hungarian cooking relatively late, only in the first years of the nineteenth century, but by the last quarter of the century, when Riza wrote most of her recipes, dishes made with it were already highly popular throughout the country. Although Riza’s rejection of tomato could be a product of her rather antiquated style of cooking, the lack of such courses in her collection might also reflect that none of the traditional Jewish specialties include tomato. Jews frequently modified the flavors of dishes adopted from Christians, for exemple, they added more sugar than usual to certain vegetable dishes, soups, and sauces, and they sprinkled sugar onto a few such dishes as noodles with cottage cheese, noodles with toasted semolina, and noodle squares with sautéed chopped cabbage, courses that non-Jews typically seasoned with salt and pepper. An example of sweeter than usual dishes in her collection is braised, diced kohlrabi, which she flavors with surprisingly much caramelized sugar. I slightly reduced this quantity in the modernized version of this recipe in my book A Taste of the Past, since I felt that these days few people would like to eat this dish so sweet.

5 Kőszegi, “A paprika útjai Közép-Európába,” 258 . 6 Kisbán, Népi kultúra. 7

Fehér, “Dobos C. József.”

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Nearly half of the meat dishes in the notebook (four out of nine) are braised preparations. In the nineteenth century, beef and poultry were less tender, though more tasty than today. Meat was more expensive than in our times, so people tended to use the flavorful cheaper cuts, which are usually tougher. There was also another problem with beef: the hindquarters of the cow contain the most tender cuts, such as the tenderloin and the porterhouse steak, but this part of the animal is not sold as kosher meat because it is too hard to remove from it the forbidden sciatic nerve and certain undesirable fats. The slow, moist cooking process of braising was ideally suited for the tougher cuts of meat. But beyond these factors, there are special reasons for the frequent use of braised or boiled beef dishes in Jewish cooking. Few Jews raised beef cattle, so they had to buy beef at a kosher butcher, which made it somewhat of a luxury. It is possible that this was what motivated Jews when they considered beef so appropriate for the traditionally finer menus of the holidays, primarily Sabbath. As a result, in some religious Jewish homes, boiled beef with a sauce became an almost mandatory course of the Friday evening meal and of some other holiday repasts. While previously goose had been the typical Ashkenazi Jewish festive food, beginning in the seventeenth century beef took over this role, though goose fat continued to be the main animal fat used in cooking in Hungary and in some other countries. About half of the meat dishes, the majority of fish courses, as well as some vegetable preparations and sauces in the collection are characterized by the combination of sweet and sour flavors, one of the typical features of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. The majority of Hungarian Jews were Ashkenazim, representatives of the Ashkenazi culture, which had evolved in the Middle Ages in some regions of today’s Germany and France, eventually becoming characteristic of most Jews in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. The combination of sweet and sour flavors sometimes occurs in Hungarian cuisine too, but not nearly as frequently as in the cooking of Jews. In addition to some uniquely Jewish specialties and the role of some foods in the celebration of holidays, such taste preferences provide another common element in the tremendous diversity of regional Jewish cooking. The combination of salty and sweet flavors also occurs in Hungarian cuisine, such as in boiled meat served with some kind of fruit sauce. But―as with sweet-and-sour dishes―it is more common in Jewish culinary culture. Riza’s collection also features two slightly sweet dishes intended to go with

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savory ones: gooseberry sauce for boiled beef and bread kugel with raisins and apples, usually eaten as a side dish to cholent. It is possible that such combinations of contrasting flavors are vestiges of the medieval and Renaissance gastronomic culture in Jewish cuisine, which preserved ancient culinary traditions in many of its dishes, though in other instances could be open to new influences. These kinds of taste-combinations could be remnants of a cooking style quite common until the end of the sixteenth century, which considered those dishes most healthy that displayed a balance of contrasting and, by today’s standards, incompatible flavors. The culinary style in which the dishes are either predominantly savory or sweet and where the dishes of such contrasting flavors are generally served as separate consecutive courses evolved only in the seventeenth century. Massimo Montanari, an outstanding scholar of medieval history and the history of food, wrote the following about the taste ideals of the culinary cultures prevalent in much of Europe before the seventeenth century: The perfect food was considered that in which all the tastes (therefore all the virtues) would be simultaneously present. […] A typical example of this culture is the sweet-salty taste dynamic characterizing many of the medieval and Renaissance food preparations. Or take the bittersweet, a mixture of sugar and citrus fruits (thanks to two new products brought to Europe by the Arabs), which reinterpreted and refined the old combination of honey and vinegar already typical of Roman cuisine. These tastes have not completely vanished, however, since even today they can be found in more conservative European culinary traditions, as in the Germanic countries and, more generally, those of Eastern Europe.8 According to their ancestry and cultural traditions, Hungarian Jewry can be divided into two groups: the culture of those whose ancestors came from regions west and northwest of Hungary and those whose roots lie in regions to the east of the country, mainly in Galicia and the Russian-ruled Polish territories. Riza’s family belonged to the first group, and her recipes mainly reflect the culinary traditions of them, while the Yiddish culture of immigrants from the east left it largely untouched. This is the reason why

8 Montanari, Food is Culture, 63.

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some characteristic dishes of Hungarian Jews with eastern roots, for example gefilte fish (Yiddish: “stuffed fish,” though in its most common form it is a dumpling made of chopped fish), are absent from her collection. Riza grew up in a culturally assimilated, but strictly observant family, and after her marriage she maintained a traditional Jewish household, so naturally all the recipes in her collection conform to kashrut, the system of religious rules controlling what Jews may eat. We can observe this not only in the way the recipes never mix meat and dairy ingredients, but also in some other features. For example, since religious Jews had to wait several hours before they could eat a dairy dish after a meat one (though a half hour wait was sufficient the other way around), Riza gave the alternative of using either fat or butter in her recipe for tea biscuits, plain flat cookies (she calls them Cakes, Keks in today’s German and keksz in Hungarian, but of course her spelling merely reverts to the English origin of the German/Hungarian word), so that they should be appropriate for either meat or dairy menus. And in her recipe for jam-filled walnut or hazelnut slices (Nuss oder Haselnuss Confeckt) she allows the dough to be made with either butter or oil, since oil, being a pareve, that is, a neutral ingredient, could be used in meat menus too. Possibly, the same consideration made her include recipes for cookies (Kleine Marchbäckerei) and a torte (Marchdorten) made with beef marrow instead of butter: this way they could be served in meat menus. Interesting as the kosher versions of Gentile dishes are, even more important is the fact that―as previously mentioned―for the first time among the documents of Hungarian Jewish cuisine, the collection also includes uniquely Jewish dishes: bean cholent, two kinds of bread kugel, apple kugel, and some Pesach dishes, such as apple-matzo kugel, matzo balls, and matzo fritters. These courses are complemented in her notebook by other, not uniquely Jewish dishes that nevertheless can be considered as characteristic courses of such cuisine since Jews consumed them far more frequently than Gentiles. Such recipes in her collection include pickled herring, calf or beef liver spread, poached carp in vinegary broth with horseradish, pike in sour aspic, as well as potato flour torte and a large variety of macaroons, which are desserts she might have served during Pesach. We have already seen that the lack of Hungarian-style stews in Riza’s collection had in part to do with her mother’s influence on the way she cooked, and this is also noticeable in several of her recipes, which are in some respects closer to the style of early nineteenth-century Hungarian cuisine than that

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22. Teréz Berger’s gold-embossed name on the crimson leather binding of her 1878 Haggadah, which she used during the Passover Seder ritual. Her recipe collection includes several Passover dishes, some of which might have been served at the dinner after the Seder ritual. Photograph by Young Suh.

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23. In Teréz Berger’s Haddagah, the German translation on the left side helped to understand the Hebrew text on the right. The woodcuts in the volume were based on Haggadah illustrations from hundreds of years earlier. For example, the depictions of the ten plagues on these pages were copied from a 1609 Venetian Haggadah.

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of the last quarter of the century, when she recorded them. The antiquated nature of her recipes can be seen not only in the absence of tomato, but also in her near complete avoidance of paprika, which she rarely uses and then only in tiny quantities as a coloring agent. Although paprika could be occasionally found in Hungarian cooking already in the eighteenth century, it only became a common ingredient of dishes in the early nineteenth century, when it started to be used in generous quantities for its characteristic flavor. Initially, only peasants cooked with it, but after a while middle-class cuisine adopted it too,9 so much so that within a few decades it evolved into the predominant spice in Hungary, displacing most other kinds. While Riza hardly used paprika, we find dried ginger unusually often in her dishes: it is an ingredient in 11 recipes, a rather large share of the approximately 30 savory courses in her collection. This is another old-fashioned feature of her cooking, since by her time ginger was hardly ever used in Hungary, though it had been one of the most common spices there from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century. In addition to the absence of tomato and the rarity of paprika, it is also characteristic of the conservative nature of her collection, that potato occurs in it only as an ingredient in potato dough, but never as a side dish or in a main course. This also harks back to a much earlier period, since although potatoes had been occasionally used already in the late eighteenth century,10 they, too became common in Hungarian cuisine only in the first half of the nineteenth century. But by the time Riza started her recipe collection in the late 1860s, potatoes had been a ubiquitous ingredient in local cooking already for decades. Garlic is also missing from my great-grandmother’s recipes. This is all the more striking as garlic has been one of the most characteristic foodstuffs of Jews ever since antiquity; it is already mentioned that way in the third-century Mishnah and the sixth-century Talmud. For example, according to the Babylonian Talmud (Bava Kamma, 82a:3), Ezra, the Scribe, instituted ten ordinances, one of which was to eat garlic on Sabbath eve. According to ancient Jewish and non-Jewish tradition, garlic was a potent aphrodisiac. Since having marital relations was a mitzvah during Sabbath, it made sense

9 Kőszegi, “A paprika útjai Közép-Európába.” 10 According to the earliest known data, members of the German minority in (Vértes)Kozma, north-western Hungary, grew potatoes already in 1745, while Kristóf Simai was the first author to include a few recipes for potato dishes in the handwritten cookbook he started in 1795.

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(presumably for men only) to eat garlic on Friday night. From another place in the Talmud (Bava Kamma, 82a:11), we learn that the Sages listed five qualities of garlic: “It satisfies, it warms the body, it brightens the face, it increases semen, and it kills parasites in the intestines. Others add that it also instills love and eliminates jealousy.” A sixteenth-century depiction of a German Jew holding a bunch of garlic documents that the fondness of Jews for garlic was common knowledge in later centuries too. But unlike the avoidance of tomato and the rarity of paprika and potato in Riza’s cooking, the reasons for her shunning of garlic have nothing to do with alimentary history, but merely with her apparent dislike of its flavor. Perceived class and cultural differences possibly also contributed to her rejection of garlic. In nineteenth-century Austria and Hungary, assimilated, “cultured” Jews frequently considered eating too much garlic inconsistent with their social aspirations, as we can see from what the converted Jew Moritz Gottlieb Saphir wrote in 1852: Not only the Jews themselves, but also their cuisine has become emancipated! By abolishing beards and banishing garlic, they hoped to have a better religion and a better cuisine!11 Many Gentiles and some assimilated, middle-class Jews in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accused poorer Jews―in Hungary especially the Yiddish-speaking ones of Galician, Ukrainian, Polish, or Russian origin―of smelling like garlic. So Riza’s avoidance of garlic and the “bad smell” that comes with eating garlicky meals could have been an intuitive effort on her part to distinguish herself from them, to have a more upscale and “refined” lifestyle.12 11 Moritz Gottlieb Saphir, “Badner Kipfel” Der Humorist no. 150 (June 26, 1852), 607. 12 In Hungary not only Gentiles considered Jews as “others,” but the acculturated Jews also felt that way about their Orthodox brethren, especially about the Yiddishspeaking ones and the Hassidim who mostly lived in the eastern and northeastern regions of the country, wore traditional long black coats, kapotes, and liked garlic. The westernized Jews tried hard to distance themselves from such eastern ones. According to Marion A. Kaplan, the situation was similar in Germany: “GermanJewish housewives exhibited a true horror of garlic and scrubbed and polished their ‘Jewishness’ away. Both Gentiles and Jews believed that dirt could lead to decadence, but for Jews it could also lead to the dreaded identification with their proletarian, eastern, nonacculturated brothers and sisters living in the ghettos of Berlin and other major cities.” Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 35.

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24. Depiction of a sixteenth-century Jew from Worms, Germany, holding a bunch of garlic and a money bag in the Thesaurus Picturarum (Visual thesaurus) by Marcus zum Lamm (1544–1606). At the time, Jews were forced to wear such yellow, ring-shaped distinguishing badges (Judenzeichen) as this man has on his cape. While one can consider this drawing as a true-to-life image of a typical figure, it could also be interpreted as playing up the negative stereotype of the Jew as the usurer with an unpleasant, garlicky breath.

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Some of Riza’s recipes give charming and evocative descriptions of lunch preparations. Instead of the usual way of describing the time needed for various cooking steps, such as “cook this for thirty minutes,” they tell at what time in the morning one should start those tasks in order to have the midday meal ready by noon. Riza’s recipe for green beans (Grüne Fisolen), for example, goes like this: Wash and cut enough greeen beans for 6 people. Heat a quarter Seidel [about 0.8 deciliter, 1/3 cup] fat, including beef fat, add 2 finely chopped onions and let them brown. Then at 9:30 add the green beans and cook them covered until 11. At that time you should dust them with half a Seidel [about 1.7 deciliter, ¾ cup] flour and allow this to steam until 11:30, stirring diligently. Dilute this with half Seidel [about 1.7 deciliter, ¾ cup] vinegar and one Seidel [about 0.35 liter, 1.5 cups] water; add to this enough ginger to fit on the tip of a knife, part of a cinnamon stick, and salt. Let it all cook well. As this shows, the green beans were “ready” by noon, although after two and a half hours of cooking they must have been terribly overcooked. Perhaps green beens were a little more fibrous in those years, and therefore needed more cooking, but almost certainly not by this much. Traditional Jewish cooking, just like Hungarian cooking in this respect, has many wonderful features, but crisp, lightly cooked vegetables are not among them. And finally the question: how did she use her notebook of recipes? It seems likely that initially she herself tested the recipes, but I know from my mother that by the 1910s (and probably also earlier) Paula, Riza’s live-in domestic servant, did the actual cooking. Middle-aged, heavyset Paula, a member of Hungary’s German minority, had been with the family for decades. She was a young farm girl from a nearby village when she started working for them. Riza taught her how to cook. Although Paula was a Catholic, after all the years with Riza, she knew the Jewish customs and dietary laws as well as any born Jew. Every day in the morning Riza told her what to cook for lunch and dinner. My great-grandmother might have flipped through her notebook of recipes to get inspiration or to look up some less common dish, but usually there was no need for this because both she and Paula knew exactly how to prepare

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the usual repertory of dishes. There are no food stains in her notebook of recipes, so it seems likely that it was not used in the kitchen during cooking and baking, but only as a reference work away from the range. Although Paula was in charge of preparing the dishes, Riza herself baked the cakes. On the days when they were putting up fruits and vegetables, Riza was also always in the kitchen to help and to supervise Paula. Riza’s collection is mainly significant as a historical document, not as a compendium of recipes that can be easily used by a home cook today. She wrote her recipes for her own use, not for others, especially not for those a hundred and fifty years later. Like in most collections of handwritten recipes, the descriptions of cooking steps are laconic: they hardly contain more information than the list of ingredients and their quantities, and at times not even the quantities. It is difficult to use them today not only due to their outdated units of measurement and the frequently very incomplete descriptions of how to cook the dish, but here and there also due to the errors in them. Even if one is well versed in cooking from centuries-old cookbooks, in the case of her most obscure recipes this is only possible by studying versions of the same or a similar dish in roughly contemporaneous cookbooks and using those versions to interpret her descriptions. My 2004 book about her household includes versions of about two thirds of her recipes adapted for the modern cook, but such adaptations unavoidably involve compromises. In updating her recipes, for example, I had to make substitutions for ingredients that are hard to find today or would be unappealing to the modern cook. Few peope these days would wish to make their sweet Sabbath pudding with finely chopped beef tallow. Some recipes, however, for example the puff paste made with beef marrow instead of butter, seemed unsuitable for updating even at the cost of such compromises, since it is unlikely that anyone would wish to try them. Teréz Berger―it seems―was a good home cook, but certainly not a gourmet one. Her recipes are valuable not because they are uniformly outstanding, or because they include all the important specialties of Hungarian Jewish cuisine, but since they offer a fairly detailed, though not complete, picture of the kind of dishes a middle-class woman of that background cooked in a small town in western Hungary in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. While printed cookbooks can give us only an imperfect idea of what their intended readership actually ate, recipe collections of housewives are better records of their repertory of dishes, even though for the aforementioned reasons they typically include fewer savory dishes than

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desserts. Nevertheless, they give us a more realistic picture of the actual daily meals of a distant period than what we can get through the study of cookbooks and frequently not very reliable recollections. One could consider it a limitation of her collection that its choice of dishes is based on her personal preference. But in my opinion, her notebook of recipes is able to complement the information coming from printed cookbooks precisely since it reflects the taste and habits of a specific person. Handwritten recipe collections were not only memory aids for the women who wrote them, but with time they became important sources of family memory and identity for their descendants. My grandmother, who had been taught to cook by Riza, frequently prepared her mother’s recipes after her marriage, and she developed more detailed versions of about a dozen of them, which she then recorded in her own handwritten recipe collection. She also prepared notebooks of recipes for her daughters. As this essay and my book about my great-grandmother’s household show, for me her recipes also represent treasured links to my family heritage. But in addition to such a chain of transmission within a family, recipe manuscripts like Riza’s have also been irreplaceable sources of collective memory. As Janet Theophano desribed this: Women have conserved a whole world […] in the idiom of food. In their personal manuscripts […] women have given history and memory a permanent lodging. The knowledge contained in cookbooks transcends generations. Grandmothers and mothers, sisters and aunts, friends and relatives of friends invest what tidbits and wisdom they can for the next generation.13 Despite all its deficiencies, my great-grandmother’s collection of recipes is not only one of the most important documents in the history of Hungarian Jewish cuisine, but it is also significant in the history of Hungarian food in general, a culinary culture shaped by the traditions of numerous minorities, including the Jews. Jewish food has been an organic part of Hungarian food, which can be easily seen in the many shared features and in the interaction connecting those cuisines.

13 Theophano, Eat My Words, 49–50.

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Teréz Berger’s luckily surviving recipes and letters depict a woman who tried hard to make up through self-education for the inadequacy of her schooling, to maintain a traditional Jewish home for her family, and to prepare dishes and desserts for them in harmony with the laws of kashrut. But at the same time, she felt it was equally important to remain close and understanding to her children and grandchildren who were no longer religious. Though we never met, I am glad to be acquainted with her.

RECIPES FROM THE EARLIEST JEWISH RECIPE COLLECTION IN HUNGARY Outdated units of measurement in the recipes: Halbe (0.7 liter), Seidel (0.35 liter), pound (50 dekagram), Viennese pound (56 dekagram), Loth (1.75 dekagram). JEWISH SPECIALITIES

Bean cholent (Bohnen Scholet) For four servings, a little more than ½ Seidel of beans is sufficient. Add ½ spoon of flour to the beans, as well as 1 onion, some salt, a piece of fatty meat, a pinch of ginger, black pepper, and paprika. Pour ½ Seidel water over this, and it is ready.

Bread roll kugel (Semmelkugel) Blend ½ pound of very finely chopped beef fat with 1 kitchen spoon of solid poultry fat, ¼ Seidel water and a pinch of salt. Then mix into this 8–10 eggs, ¼ pound sugar, 4 apples cut into small dice, and 1 kitchen spoon of cinnamon, stirring all this for half an hour. Add to this dough 5 soaked and 5 dried and grated bread rolls, ½ Seidel coarse semolina, and then transfer it into a well-greased pot.

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Bread roll kugel another way (Semmelkugel) Of 10 bread rolls soak 6, and dry and grate the remaining 4. Finely chop ¼ pound beef fat and work a little water into it. Thoroughly mix 1 kitchen spoon solid poultry fat, 8 eggs, ¼ pound sugar and apple, 2 big pinches of cinnamon, some large raisins [and the beef fat]. Now add first the soaked, then the grated bread rolls, and finally ½ Seidel coarse semolina.

Apple kugel (Apfelkugel) Prepare a strudel dough from 2 Halbes flour, but the sheets of dough should not be as thin as the kind used for strudels. Fill it with a filling similar to what is used in apple strudels, and roll it up somewhat tightly. Place it in a well-greased, paper-lined kugel pot, and bake it.

Matzo kugel (Osterkugel) It is for six servings. Remove all veins from ¼ pound beef fat [suet], chop it and beat it in cold water, as you would do with butter. Then mix it well, and add to it another big kitchen spoonful of solid fat. When it has become foamy, add 9 beaten egg yolks and 10 Loths sugar to it, and stir this for quarter of an hour. Then mix a little salt into it, cinnamon to fit on the tip of a knife, the juice of ¼ lemon, matzo to equal the volume of 2 big bread rolls and soaked in a mixture of wine and water, a handful of [matzo] crumbs or -flour, 4 apples cut into small dice, and some almonds. Mix this for quarter of an hour, then add the whipped whites of [9] eggs. Pour this into a well-greased kugel pot.

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25. Teréz Berger’s matzo bag, shaped to correspond to the handmade round matzo sheets. My great-grandmother made this bag in c. 1876, and it is today in the collection of the Jewish Museum in New York. The charmingly naïve embroidered depiction of the Seder table followed a preprinted pattern. There is a small mistake in the Aramaic text (“This is the bread of affliction”) on the bag.

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Matzo balls or bread roll dumplings (Osterknedel. Auch Semmelknödel) Mix well 1 spoonful solid fat with some cold water, add a little salt, ginger, and 3 egg yolks, then add soaked matzo to equal the volume of ½ bread roll and the rest of the matzo coarsely broken until you get a dough of the appropriate consistency. Then add the whipped egg whites to this. Cook one dumpling in boiling water as a test to see whether it is satisfactory. You can make bread roll dumplings the same way, but entirely with bread crumbs.

Matzo fritters (Überzogene Mazes) Make a batter from 3 whole eggs, a little water and wine, 2 Loths sugar, a little salt, and matzo flour, then dip the [broken] pieces of 1 matzo into it. When the poultry fat starts boiling, fry the matzo pieces and dust them well with sugar and cinnamon.

Liver spread (Leberpastete) [According to kashrut rules liver, before it could be used for making a dish, must be broiled or grilled on both sides and then rinsed. Riza must have followed this rule, and this was why it was sufficient for her to merely slice the liver before grinding it, without cooking it again.] Very finely grate a medium onion, and sautée it over moderate fire until it absorbs the fat but does not brown. Let it cool. Cut ½ kilo calf’s or beef liver to very thin slices. Now transfer this with 2 hard cooked eggs and a little salt into a meat grinder and grind it. Add to this, according to taste, 1 spoon mustard, and with help of a spoon work it into the mixture. Make an oval heap [of the liver spread], and with a knife scratch lines into its surface.

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Pickled herring (Angemachte Häringe) Soak 6 herrings for a day, then clean them, remove their milt, and rinse well their insides. Place the milt in a bowl, mix a few Loths of pounded sugar to it, as well as cooking oil and vinegar, and blend all this well. Now add 2 sliced onions, the juice of 1 lemon and its seeded and peeled slices, capers for 4 Kreuzers [small change], some thyme and whole black pepper, bayleaves for 1 Kreuzer, and cloves also for 1 Kreuzer. Place all this nicely into a glass jar, so that the vinegar covers the herrings, and let it marinate for 10–12 days.

Cheese delkel, kneaded (Topfendelkel geknetet) [In many Jewish families farmer cheese delkel or delkli or delkelekh, a pastry similar to cheese Danish, was frequently part of Saturday breakfasts, and it was also eaten during Shavuot and during the Nine Days of Av―sometimes also called Dairy Days―leading up to Tisha B’av. Hungarian Christians prepared it too, but since most nineteenthand early twentieth-century sources mention it as a Jewish specialty, it is possible that they adopted it from them. While these cheese pockets used to be called delkli in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy,14 today their name is túrós táska or túrós batyu in Hungary and Topfenkolatschen or Topfengolatschen in Austria. Those modern and not at all Jewish versions are typically made with the yeast-butter dough of Danish pastries. Riza’s c. 1875 delkel, however, uses a kneaded dough containing butter but no yeast. Her collection also includes a recipe for similar pastries in which puff paste dough is filled with either farmer cheese or ground almonds. Riza’s delkel recipe needs some fine-tuning. The dough should also include milk and a little

14 Nearly all the Hungarian and English recipes for delkli in cookbooks and on the internet consider it as a Hungarian or Hungarian Jewish specialty. I found only one German version of it (www.historisch-kochen.de/topfen-delkel-kleine-kasekuchen), which describes it as an Austro-Hungarian recipe from about 1915.

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butter. The remaining, slightly softened butter should be generously spread on the first two layers of rolled-out dough, leaving an approximately ½-inch border all around. After the first two layers have been covered with a third one, they should be rolled to approximately 3/16 -inch thickness, cut into about 4 inch squares, filled in the middle, and the corners of the squares folded into envelope-like packages. The seams have to be pinched together so they do not open during baking.] Take 1 Halbe flour, sift it onto the pastry board and knead it with 2 whole eggs, ⅛ pound butter, 3 Loths sugar, a small pinch of salt into a somewhat softer dough than the one used for noodles. Let it rest until you prepare the filling. Take 1 pound of farmer cheese, 6 Loths big raisins, 6 Loths sugar, some vanilla sugar, 2 egg yolks, and a whole egg. Also some cinnamon. Make little loaves [of dough], and let them rest. Then roll them out to a thickness a little more than noodles for a soup, sprinkle each with some sugar and cinnamon, spread them well with butter, lay three of them onto each other, fill it, cut it into squares, and fold them up diagonally. Brush their top with butter and bake them at moderate heat. Sprinkle them well with vanilla sugar.

Potato-flour torte (Erdäpfelmehl Torte) Mix 4 egg yolks, ¼ pound pounded sugar, as well as the juice and peel of ½ lemon for a quarter of an hour. Add 4 Loths potato flour and the whipped whites of the eggs to this. Pour this mixture into a torte baking form and let it bake until it turns light yellow.

White almond macaroons (Weisse Mageron) ½ pound sugar, the whipped whites of 2 eggs, the peel of ½ lemon, and mix this for a good half hour. Mix to this 1 spoonful vanilla sugar,

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¼ pound ground almonds, ¼ pound slivered almonds, and 2 spoons of flour. Place baking wafers on the baking sheets, [make little heaps of dough on them], press 1 sour cherry onto each little heap, and bake them at moderate heat. After baking they have to cool on the grate.

SOME FURTHER RECIPES FROM HER COLLECTION

Meat sausage for appetizer (Fleischwurst zu Assiet) [The word Assiette means “plate” in French, but in Austria it is also used for small dishes or appetizers.] Finely chop ½ pound beef and ½ pound veal, and remove all veins, sinews and fat. Add salt, finely crushed black pepper, and the juice and peel of ½ lemon. When they are sufficiently finely blended, stir into this 1 or 2 pickled cucumbers cut into small dice, 1 [similarly diced] carrot, and 1 bread roll with its rind removed, soaked, and squeezed out. Knead this with ½ spoon of solid poultry fat, shape it into a thick, short and round sausage, wrap it into gauze (in the original: Organtin), place it in a pot, pour water over it, cover it, and steam it. Serve it cold and slice it like a salami.

Green pea soup (Grüne Erbsen Suppe) For 3 servings start cooking 3 Seidels water at 10 o’clock. At quarter past ten add to it a whole onion, a little salt, and 1 Seidel green peas. Let this cook continuously until 10:30. Make roux from 1 spoon of fat and 2 small kitchen-spoons of flour, dilute this with the soup, and add to it ground pepper to fit on the tip of a knife, slightly less ginger, a small piece of sugar, and salt. Make a soft dough by adding some

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water to ½ Seidel flour, very little ground pepper, and salt, [make tiny dumplings of this] and cook them.

Soup biscuits made of bread rolls (Semmelfanzeln für Suppe) Beat well a kitchenspoon of poultry fat, mix 3 eggs to it, as well as 1½ soaked bread rolls, 1 Seidel flour, paprika, [dried] ginger, and salt. Stir this until foamy, then transfer it into a baking form that has been well-greased and coated with bread crumbs. Bake it until it becomes yellow and cut it into shapes according to your fancy.

Liver dumplings for soup (Leberknödel für Suppe) For 3 servings cut very thin slices from ½ Halbe liver, scrape it well, and chop it until it becomes a pulp. Then add a walnut-sized piece of fat, and stir until foamy. Add 1 whole egg, 1 soaked bread roll, some salt, black pepper, and [dried] ginger, as well as a little finely chopped parsley, and as much bread crumbs as needed. Cook one dumpling as a test.

Smoked meat pieces with eggs (Schinken-fleckeln) Cut as much smoked meat as you wish into small pieces, and sautée them in their own juice until they become quite tender. It is enough to start this an hour before the meal. Before serving it, mix beaten whole eggs with a little salt and paprika, pour this over the meat, and it is ready.

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Chicken with game sauce (Hühner wild bereitet) For 2 chickens, cook in 1 Halbe water 1 carrot, 1 parsley root, 1 celery knob, all of them cut into thin noodles, and add to this 8 cloves, 1 ginger, some bay leaves, a few whole black peppers, and some salt. Let this all cook well as if for a soup. When the onion is well steamed in poultry fat, add the chickens, quartered the usual way, and cook them under cover until they are done. Then dust this with flour and dilute it with the vegetable soup. Before serving, beat well 2 egg yolks, add to them the juice of ¾ lemon and a pinch of sugar, and, while stirring constantly, pour some of the hot sauce to this, and serve.

Braised meat (Gedünstetes Fleisch) Pound well 2 kilos of shoulder or breast meat, place it in a cooking pot, pour 1 liter water over it, and add some fat, quite a lot of coarsely cut onions, diced carrots, 10 bay leaves, whole black pepper, salt, and a few drops of vinegar. Let this braise under cover until tender. Before serving, purée the sauce and pour it over the meat.

Bohemian-style tongue (Böhmische Zunge) [Riza probably copied this recipe into her notebook in the 1880s. Although she calls it Bohemian- instead of Polish-style, it is so similar to the “Tongue in Polish sauce” in Mrs. Lederer’s 1876 Jewish cookbook and to a version with the same title in the 1840 sixth edition of the Magyar nemzeti szakácskönyv (Hungarian National Cookbook) that I suspect all three recipes relied on a common source. The next essay in this book includes Therese Lederer’s recipe.]

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Cook the tongue in salted water long enough to be able to remove its skin. Then place it in a pan together with fat, one big onion, sliced carrots, some cloves and―should you have it―some calves’ feet. Braise them until they are nicely browned, then add one spoon flour, and let this brown too. Dilute this with a mixture of vinegar or―even better―red wine and water and let this cook well. Then purée the sauce and add some big raisins as well as slivered almonds. Place the tongue into this and cook it with the sauce. Stick slivered almonds into the tongue, pour the sauce onto a platter, and place the tongue over it.

Braised kohlrabi (Kohlrüben Gemüse) You may peel and dice the kohlrabi already a day earlier and place the diced pieces, as well as the very young leaves, in cold water to keep them fresh. For three persons 10 pieces of kohlrabi is sufficient. At 9:30 heat 4 Loths fat, and when it starts to foam add one very finely chopped large onion. Let it steam well under cover, then add the diced kohlrabi to this. At 11 o’clock dust them with ¼ Seidel flour, and let them cook for ¼ hour. Then dilute this with soup or water, and add to it salt, [dried] ginger to fit on the tip of a knife, and black pepper. While the flour is browning, [unreadable, perhaps: heat] 4–5 Loths sugar to become also nicely yellow, and add this to it.

Baked apricot foam (Schaumkoch) Stir 3 spoons of the preserve of your choice (of which apricot is the best) for 10 minutes, then add 5 Loths sieved sugar to it, and stir it until it turns foamy. Gradually fold 3 firmly whipped egg whites into it, as well as a little lemon juice and peel. Spoon this onto a [ovenproof] platter in a wavy form so that it should resemble a pyramid, and bake it in very low heat on the grating.

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Bread roll pudding (Semmel Scheiterhaufen) Cut 5 stale bread rolls into thin slices. Stir well 6 whole eggs with 2½ large handfuls of sugar. Place 1/8 pound big rasins in a bowl, 1/8 pound sugar mixed with cinnamon in another bowl, and pour wine into a third bowl. Now knead a soft pasta dough from wine added to ½ Seidel flour, 1 egg, a pinch of sugar and salt, and a little poultry fat. Roll this out into 5 thin little sheets. Cut the first of them into strips, and line the baking form with them. Then place bread slices, which you have previously drawn through the wine and dipped into the egg mixture, in a row all around the form, including its sides. Sprinkle them generously with sugar, big raisins, and ground walnuts, cover this with a sheet of dough, which―similar to the other ones―you must generously brush with poultry fat. Fill it with preserves of your choice, then again with bread slices, and so on. You could also use poppy seeds or almonds as filling. The top layer should consist of a well-greased dough sheet. The baking form must also be well greased. Bake it at moderate heat. You can serve it with or without a sauce.

Napkin dessert dumpling (Servietten-Knedel) For 8 servings. Take a walnut-sized piece of solid fat and for ¼ of an hour beat 4 egg yolks into this. When you have well beaten this, add― while stirring for quarter of an hour―¼ pound sugar and ¼ [pound] almonds, then add, one by one, 4 soaked and well squeezed bread rolls, the peel of ½ lemon, the juice of ¼ lemon, and some vanilla sugar. Following this, add the fine crumbs of 2 bread rolls so that the dough should resemble that of a soufflé. Fold the whipped whites of 7 eggs into this. Transfer it to a big napkin or kitchen towel [fold it over the dough so that it surrounds it], and tie it tightly at its ends, a little farther than the dough would allow it. Tie the two ends of the rolledup towel to the handles of the pot of water, so that the package should be immersed in the boiling water. Stud the elongated dumpling with slivered almonds and serve it with a sauce of your choice.

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Spice strudel (Gewürtz Strudel) Take ¼ pound sugar, ¼ pound finely crushed [ground] blanched almonds, ¼ pound finely chopped big rasins, ¼ pound chopped black raisins, the juice of ½ lemon, a little [grated] lemon peel, 7 egg yolks, 5 of their whites whipped, and the remaining 2 stirred in. All this should be stirred together in a bowl. Add crushed [ground] cinnamon and cloves to it, and fill the usual strudel dough with this mixture.

Walnut torte (Nussdorte) Stir ½ pound sugar with 12 egg yolks for ¾ hour, then add diced citron for 10 Kreuzers, the juice and peel of ½ lemon, bread crumbs made of 1 bread roll, a little cinnamon and cloves, chocolate for 10 Kreuzers, ½ pound very finely crushed [ground] walnuts, and the stiffly whipped whites of the [12] eggs. The chocolate should be added last. Almond torte is made the same way, with the exception that the grated peel of one orange can be added to the dough.

Chocolate torte (Schokoladdorte) Mix well for half an hour ¼ pound finely ground raw almonds, ¼ pound finely ground blanched almonds, the juice and [grated] peel of ½ lemon, 8 whole eggs, and 5 egg yolks. Mix well into this 3½ tablets of chocolate, 2 spoons flour, vanilla sugar, a little clove, and the firmly whipped whites of 4 eggs. Grease the baking form with poultry fat or almond oil, place strips of white paper in the form in a crisscross fashion, and pour the dough over them. Bake it in the oven at moderate heat for 1 hour.

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Sour cherries in vinegar (Weichsel in Essig) For 1 pound cherries you need 1 pound sugar, 1 Seidel wine vinegar, 1 Seidel water, as well as ½ Loth cinnamon and blanched cloves. Select firm and unblemished sour cherries, cut off their stems, place them in a glass jar with the spice in between them. Let the marinating liquid cook for half an hour, while it is still hot pour it over the fruit, and tie punctured paper over the mouth of the jar. Place it to ripen in the sun. Repeat this daily for 3 days. Allow the sour cherries to stand for 8 to 14 days in the sun. You can prepare prune plums the same way.

Cornel cherries in sugar (Derndl in Zucker) To 1 pound of nice cornel cherries take 1 pound sugar. Cook the sugar with ¼ Seidel water until it gets thick, then toss in the cornel cherries and let them come to a boil 5 or 6 times so that they do not become too soft. Allow them to cool. The next day transfer them into a glass jar, and tie punctured paper over the mouth of the jar.

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26. The so-called Basilica bazaar (Bazilika bazár) and the recently completed St. Stephen’s Basilica in about 1893. The temporary structure of the bazaar was erected to accommodate stores and shops while the huge church was under construction. The printing shop of Miksa (Max) Dessauer, the publisher of Therese Lederer’s cookbook, was located in this bazaar. An 1896 photogravure by Stengel & Co., a printer in Dresden, Germany. Photographer unknown.

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4. A World-Famous Nineteenth-Century Hungarian Jewish Cookbook

H

ow is it possible that we know almost nothing about the author of the most successful and influential Jewish cookbook published in Hungary? Why is practically no one in today’s Hungary familiar with this outstanding German-language work, whose five editions between 1876 and 1884 are proof of its popularity in the nineteenth century. In those decades the book was widely used by German-speaking Jews not only in Hungary, but in other countries as well. Furthermore, a publisher in Rotterdam brought out an abridged Dutch translation of it in 1892. No other Jewish or non-Jewish cookbook published in Hungary before 1945 had a comparable foreign edition. Another sign of its success is that several nineteenth-century cookbooks in Germany and Hungary copied dozens, even hundreds of recipes from it. Its fame abroad continues to this day: in the past few years five German publishers have issued reprint editions. This makes it all the more strange that no Hungarian translation exists of this historically important and still useable work, unless we count the first Hungarian-language Jewish cookbook,1 published in 1899, in which the majority of the recipes come from this 1876 work, needless to say without giving it credit. The cookbook in question was published by Miksa (Max) Dessauer (1849–1919) in Budapest in June 1876. Dessauer mainly made his living from book printing and from the sale of different machines, including printing presses, while publishing was a relatively short lived and less important part of his business. He founded his printing shop and publishing house only a year or two before the publication of this cookbook. His shop was in the so-called Basilica bazaar (Bazilika bazár), a single-story structure adjacent

1 Koerner, Jewish Cuisine in Hungary, 84–85.

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to the huge St. Stephen’s Basilica, at the time under construction in Pest’s Lipótváros neighborhood. The plans for the bazaar, which opened in 1869 and contained 68 shops, were prepared by Miklós Ybl, the same architect who designed the Basilica. The bazaar, which from the start had been intended to be a temporary structure, was demolished in 1895. Dessauer’s printing shop was the first to use large-output American printing machines in Hungary. Initially, his firm was indeed successful, but soon other printing shops also acquired such machines, and after only two years in business Dessauer had to sell the shop since he could not keep up with the competition. Subsequently, he lived mainly from selling printing and other kinds of machines. The aforementioned cookbook was his most successful publication; it had four editions during the short existence of the company’s publishing branch. The fifth edition, however, which came out in 1884, was no longer published by Dessauer but by M. E. Löwy’s Sohn, a firm focusing mainly on selling and publishing Jewish religious books and located in Budapest’s Király Street, the commercial spine of the city’s old Jewish quarter. It happened to be the same company that thirty years before had published the Hebrew-lettered cookbook, which was the subject of the first essay in this volume. In those years, books frequently had much longer titles than today in order to assist the buyers in their decision whether to buy the work. The title of this volume, Koch-Buch für israelitische Frauen: Gründliche Anweisungen, ohne Vorkenntnisse alle Arten Speisen, vorzüglich die Originalgerichte der israelitischen Küche auf schmackhafte und wohlfeile Art nach den RitualGesetzen zu bereiten (Cookbook for Jewish women: Thorough instructions for thriftily and flavorfully preparing, without any prior knowledge, all kinds of dishes, primarily the original dishes of the Jewish cuisine, in accordance with the ritual laws) promises a lot, but, unlike the Jewish cookbooks previously published in Hungary, it actually fulfills those expectations. According to the title page, Therese Lederer, née Krauss, the author, relied on her thirty years of experience in collecting and testing the recipes for young housewives, housekeepers, and cooks (Nach 30-jährigen Erfahrungen gesammelte und geprüfte Recepte für junge Hausfrauen, Wirthschafterinnen und Köchinen, zusammengestellt von Therese Lederer geb. Krauss). And with this we reached one of the mysteries mentioned at the beginning of this essay. Who was this Therese Lederer? One would think there is lots of information available about the author of such a successful book, but this is

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27. Two advertisements of Miksa Dessauer’s shop, which sold printing and other kinds of machinery in addition to publishing some books, including Therese Lederer’s German-language Jewish cookbook in 1876. By the time of these early twentieth-century advertisements, however, Dessauer was no longer publishing books and his shop was no longer located in the Basilica bazaar, but at a different address.

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28. The title page of Therese Lederer’s Germanlanguage Jewish cookbook, published in 1876 in Budapest. Large letters in the subtitle emphasize the book’s greatest innovation: that for the first time among Hungarian Jewish cookbooks it includes original dishes of the Jewish cuisine (Originalgerichte der israelitischen Küche).

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not at all so. Unfortunately, the Hungarian Jewish and non-Jewish newspapers of the period featured not a word about the author and her book―no advertisement, no review, no interview, not even an obituary―and József Szinnyei’s multi-volume, highly detailed encyclopedia (Magyar írók élete és munkái, that is, “The lives and works of Hungarian writers”), published between 1891 and 1914, does not include her either. Although at the time of its publication, Austrian, Czech, and German papers featured advertisements of the book, aside from her name they include no information about Mrs. Lederer. Although I managed to find some information about a Budapest woman called Mrs. Mór Lederer, née Teréz (the Hungarian version of Therese) Krausz, who lived between 1824 and 1892, the similar name does not guarantee that she was the author, which can be seen from the fact that a bit earlier another Mrs. Lederer, née Teréz Krausz (1805–1888) had also resided in Pest. I found the last wills of Mrs. Mór Lederer, written in 1890 and revised in 1892, in the Archives of Capital City Budapest (Budapest Főváros Levéltára), but they do not mention anything about a cookbook she might have written. But this does not necessarily preclude the possibility of authorship, since why should a last will mention a book whose last edition appeared six or eight years earlier, and therefore could hardly earn royalties any more, even if its author was not paid in a lump sum, which was the more common practice at the time. At any rate, if this Mrs. Lederer had started to busy herself with cooking and baking at age 22, she could have possessed thirty years of experience in it by 1876, the year of the book’s publication. In those years, many Hungarian Jews could speak German as fluently as their native language,2 especially in the western and central regions of the country, including Kajászószentpéter in Fejér County, near Budapest, where this woman was born. A good example is her presumable relative, Bernát Krausz (1851–1916), who had been born in the same town and who earned his living as a journalist in Berlin. Nineteenth-century Hungarian cookbooks were frequently published under a pen name. As we know from Béla Fehér’s essays,3 the names―such as István Czifrai or Czifray, Jozefa Saint-Hilaire, Antónia Zemplényi, Zsuzsanna

2 In fact, the mother tongue of some of them was German rather than Hungarian, which generally they could also speak, though not always well. 3 Fehér, “Ügyetlen kezekkel öszvefértzelt zavarékok”; Fehér, “Saint-Hilaire Jozefa.”

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or Susanna Németh―on the covers of some of the best-known such volumes were all pseudonyms. In other instances, the person named as the author on the cover existed, but the book was not his or her work. An example of this is Mrs. Rafael Rezső Hercz, under whose name the first Hungarian-language Jewish cookbook appeared. As András Cserna-Szabó discovered,4 Mrs. Hercz almost certainly was not the real author but a person who merely lent her name for the book that had been compiled by someone else. But the name Therese Lederer, née Krausz, does not seem to be invented, and while it made some sense to make Mrs. Hercz, the wife of the owner of a popular Jewish restaurant in Budapest, appear as the author of a Jewish cookbook, this would have been illogical in the case of Mrs. Lederer, who was not known by the book-buying public before the publication of her work. So, unfortunately, the mystery remains concerning who she was. Regardless whether Mrs. Mór Lederer or someone else with a similar name put together the volume, the author was undoubtedly a Hungarian. This is evident in the text of the book not only by the slightly Germanized versions of a few Hungarian words, such as Male (málé in Hungarian, that is, polenta), Bitta (pite in Hungarian, that is, a filled pastry square), Pörkelt (pörkölt in Hungarian, that is, a kind of stew), and Gulyasch (gulyás in Hungarian, that is, goulash), but also by a sentence in the section of the book about the proper table setting for Seder, in which the author mentions a custom common “for us in Hungary.” The author wrote the book in the German dialect used in most regions of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Examples for words typical of this dialect are Karfiol (cauliflower, Blumenkohl in much of Germany), Ribisel (red currants), Paradeis or Paradeisäpfel (Tomato), Weichsel (sour cherries), Gänseljungs (goose giblets), Pagatscherl (small round biscuits), Kukurutz (corn), Beugel (pastry crescent with poppy seed or nut filling), and numerous other expressions rarely used even in Bavaria and virtually not at all elsewhere in Germany. Not only do some of the words used and the “for us in Hungary” remark demonstrate that the author was Hungarian, so do the contents of her work. Cookbooks written by foreigners sometimes include a few Hungarian-style recipes, but hardly ever as many as this work. For some recipes the title

4 Cserna-Szabó, “Budapest, 5659.”

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already refers to its Hungarian origin. Examples of this are: Hungarian scallion sauce, Hungarian tomato chicken, Hungarian chicken paprikás (a traditional stew), chicken pörkölt (another kind of traditional stew), Hungarian-style grilled breast of veal with tomato sauce, veal paprikás, Hungarian goulash meat, Hungarian mutton with string beans, Hungarianstyle carp, apple cake “à la Pest,” corn málé (polenta), and Hungarian cheese noodles. Of course, in a kosher cookbook she could not use the requisite sour cream in the paprikás-type stews, for example, in veal paprikás, so instead of it she sprinkles flour onto the stew, adds a little meat broth, and, after cooking this briefly, she enriches it with some egg yolks. It does not resemble the usual paprikás but sounds good. In addition to kosher versions of non-Jewish, Austro-Hungarian dishes, the cookbook also features a few French-, English-, Italian-, and Spanish-style courses. But the work’s numerous Jewish traditional dishes are what makes it special. Although each of the Jewish cookbooks previously published in Hungary (two volumes in German and one in Hebrew-lettered German) satisfied the requirements of keeping kosher, no matter how strange it sounds, this was the first such work to include Jewish specialties, since all the recipes in the previous works were merely dishes of the general cuisine adapted to satisfy the rules of kashrut. Mrs. Lederer was clearly aware of the importance of this innovation, and this is why she included in her work’s title that the book features “all kinds of dishes, primarily the original dishes of Jewish cuisine.” In order to emphasize this even more, the book’s publisher printed the words “original dishes of Jewish cuisine” in larger letters than the rest on the title page. Mrs. Lederer does not list tongue in Polish sauce (Zungen in der polnischen Sauce) as a traditional Jewish recipe, but this sweet-and-sour dish served in a puréed sauce of red wine, onion, and carrots, which is then mixed with raisins and slivered almonds, has long been a favorite of Jews. Julie Löv included a similar course called Polish beef tongue in her 1840 Jewish cookbook and Teréz Berger featured another version under the title Bohemian-style tongue in her nineteenth-century handwritten recipe collection. You can find both recipes in the essays about their works. A further proof of the dish’s popularity among Jews is that the 1902 cookbook of the Hungarian magazine A Hét describes it as a course frequently prepared by them. Édouard de Pomiane also considers it a Jewish dish in his 1929 book about Polish Jewish cuisine,

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where it is called Beef tongue cholent-style.5 Tongue prepared this way is typical of a large category of dishes in Jewish cuisine. These dishes are not exclusively Jewish, but they are prepared by Jews for certain holidays and to some degree have become part of the tradition of that holiday. This dish, for example, was frequently prepared for Purim and Sukkot. Dishes with traditional Jewish names in the book include various Schalets (cholent), several Kugels (kugel), Loksche (noodle kugel), Chrimsel (filled matzo chremsel), Mazze (matzo) preparations and Barches (challah) varieties. True, there are relatively few such specialties in the book; there are only 13 recipes in the first edition. The fifth edition adds one more to them: etrog (citron) preserve, cooked from an imported and therefore expensive member of the citrus family, which is one of the “four species” in the lulav, a festive bouquet used in ceremonies during Sukkot. But the Jewish cookbooks published abroad in this period contain similarly few such specialties. Although in the fifth edition of Rebekka Wolf’s highly popular cookbook, published in Berlin in 1875, there is a chapter consisting of 23 recipes for Pesach, most of them are dishes of non-Jewish cuisine adapted to the religious dietary requirements of this holiday, but they are not expressly Jewish specialties. Aside from these and two kinds of challah bread, however, Mrs. Wolf features only five Jewish specialties, fewer than the eight such courses in Mrs. Lederer’s work for periods other than Pesach. It is characteristic of the meager selection of non-Pesach traditional Jewish dishes in Rebekka Wolf’s cookbook that while one cannot find in it a single recipe for cholent, Mrs. Lederer features three varieties. On the other hand, it is also true that cholent was not as nearly a mandatory part of the Saturday midday meal in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany as in Hungary or in Poland. It is missing not only from Rebekka Wolf’s work, a volume published in more editions than any other German Jewish cookbook, but also from Mrs. Joseph Gumprich’s nearly as popular work, first published in 1896 in Trier. Unlike Rebekka Wolf’s work and several other Jewish cookbooks of the period, Mrs. Lederer does not present the Pesach dishes, whose requirements are quite unique, in a separate chapter, but mixes them among other Jewish specialties. The passages she includes about the peparations for the days

5 De Pomiane, The Jews of Poland, 147.

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of Pesach and about setting the table before the Seder dinner only partially compensate for the small choice of recipes for this holiday. For example, even matzo ball, perhaps the best-known Pesach dish, is missing from her book. The chapter about preparations (Vorbereitungen), with which the books starts, focuses not only on such demands of the kosher household as the kitchen furnishings necessary for keeping kosher, the koshering of meat at home, the preparations for Pesach, and the table setting for the Seder dinner (this is the only place in the book where a word―charoset―is printed in Hebrew characters), but it also features general suggestions for getting poultry, fish, and vegetables ready for cooking. This represents a considerable change compared to earlier Jewish cookbooks in Hungary,6 since the volumes published there in 1840 and 1869/1873 contain nothing about the demands of keeping kosher, and though the Hebrew-lettered one from 1854 includes a brief section about this, it does not say a word about the Pesach preparations and dishes. The traditional Jewish dishes were mostly served only on holidays, and such courses merely represented a small share of the foods common in religious Jewish homes throughout the year. Although Hungarian Jews tended to consume more kinds of traditional dishes than those featured in her cookbook, their relatively small number properly reflects the fact that the overwhelming majority of the dishes consumed consisted not of those specialties but of kosher versions of typical Gentile fare or of courses that could remain unchanged since they contained nothing inconsistent with kashrut rules. Most of these dishes in her work are characteristic examples of Austro-Hungarian urban middle-class cuisine. In addition to her Hungarian recipes, which I have already listed, her work features numerous ones from other regions of the Monarchy, such as Linzer cookies filled with jam (Spitzbuben, that is, street urchins), yeast doughnuts made in a pan similar to the Danish aebelskiver pan (Böhmische Dalken), apple fritters (Äpfel im Schlafrock), Reichenau biscotti, Radetzky-rice, and many others. It seeems to me that she did not copy these and other recipes of non-Jewish origin from a single source, but based them on various cookbooks and, even more importantly, on her own experience. The non-Jewish origin is especially obvious

6 Or alternatively it could mean that such knowledge was no longer as widespread as earlier.

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in the titles of two recipes in her book: a kind of mulled wine or punch called “bishop” and a champagne-based cocktail called “cardinal.” Mrs. Lederer primarily intended her German-language book for reasonably well-off housewives of the urban middle class, almost all of whom knew German. The dishes in her work are mostly characteristic of bourgeois cuisine, thus reflecting the standards and aspirations of her intended readership. Poorer families could have neither bought the book, nor paid for the ingredients required for some of the recipes, not to mention that some of those Jews who lived under very modest circumstances in the villages and small towns of the northeastern and eastern regions would not have understood the German text. Although the volume was intended for religious households, in the last quarter of the century the process of assimilation and becoming middle class had some impact even on observant families, and perhaps this is why the author felt it necessary to explain how one should furnish the kitchen and adhere to the dietary rules. While formerly, all young women had learned this at home from their mothers, by the middle of the nineteenth century this was no longer so self-evident. Rebekka Wolf wrote the following about this in her preface to her Jewish cookbook’s second edition, published in Berlin in 1856: It is not rare that young women do not have the opportunity of getting to know these customs in their parental homes, and therefore they become most embarrassed when religious men would like them to run their households. This book is especially useful for such young women, since it teaches them all the demands of a religious Jewish household.7 Mrs. Lederer’s book, as we have seen, is mostly made up of non-Jewish recipes adapted to the demands of ritual dietary rules. One of those rules forbids consuming clams and another one prohibits mixing meat or animal fat with fish within the same dish. The latter prohibition first appeared in Rabbi Joseph Karo’s (1488–1575) collection of religious rules, called

7

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“Es trifft sich nicht selten, dass Töchter im elterlichen Hause nicht Gelegenheit haben, sich mit diesen religiösen Gebräuchen bekannt zu machen und deshalb in grosse Verlegenheit gerathen, wenn religiös gesinnte Männer sie zu Hausfrauen begehren. Für diese jungen Mädchen, ist diese, in allen Anforderungen einer religiös-jüdischen Wirthschaft belehrende Buch, ganz besonders bestimmt.” Wolf, Kochbuch für israelitische Frauen, iii.

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Shulchan Aruch (Hebrew: set table), though the Torah itself contains nothing about this. Capon with small clams in her book is unacceptable because of the clams, while chicken with anchovies, capon with anchovies, and leg of veal with anchovies obviously do not satisfy the second rule. Other recipes, such as stuffed pike, coarsely chopped pike with sauerkraut, pike larded with anchovies, Hungarian-style carp, carp with sorrel sauce, and pike-perch (Schill in German, süllő in Hungarian) with parsley are non-kosher (treif) because they use goose fat in fish dishes. Had these recipes used butter or pareve vegetable fat instead of the goose fat, this would have solved the problem, since the rabbis generally permit mixing fish with dairy products, though Joseph Karo objected to that too. It is impossible to know whether absentmindedness made the author forget to adapt these recipes, or because she herself was not very strict in observing all the rules of kashrut.8 Strangely, the book has no chapters for appetizers and egg dishes, though such preparations are common in Jewish cuisine too. This is not the only thing making the book’s structure different from other cookbooks of the period; here and there the sequence of the chapters is also strange. For example, while in Mrs. Lederer’s book the chapters about meat dishes follow those of the sauces and vegetable courses, in most cookbooks they have a more logical sequence, in which the meats come before the sauces with which they are typically served. Naturally, like all kosher cookbooks, Mrs. Lederer’s does not mix dairy and meat ingredients within a recipe, but unlike several such works of her time, it does not collect the dairy recipes into a separate chapter, thereby making the use of the book slightly more cumbersome. And unlike several foreign Jewish cookbooks of the period―for example, the sixth edition of Rebekka Wolf’s work from 1875―it does not offer suggested menus for the various holidays and for the everyday meals of different seasons. But such structural oddities, the few treif recipes accidentally included, and the meager selection of Pesach dishes cannot alter the fact that Mrs. Lederer’s volume is without doubt the best of the nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewish cookbooks, and it is one of the most outstanding of the foreign ones too.

8 As mentioned in an earlier footnote, a substantial minority of Hungarian observant Jews tended to be a bit more flexible in keeping kashrut rules than their counterparts in some countries east of Hungary, for example, in Poland.

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Authors of nineteenth-century cookbooks frequently copied their recipes from other works without asking permission for it. At times, they did not even bother to slightly reword the recipes to make the theft less conspicuous. Mrs. Lederer’s book also features known dishes, which are therefore frequently similar to those in other volumes, nevertheless―as previously mentioned― it seems that with very few exceptions she did not copy them from other publications but relied on her personal experience in writing them. I noticed, however, that she almost certainly knew Julie Löv’s 1840 cookbook (or, what is less probable, its source: Rahel Aschmann’s 1835 work), since the titles of several of her soup recipes resemble those in Löv’s work. But even those only roughly follow Löv’s descriptions, which is obviously not the same thing as Löv copying word for word hundreds of recipes from Aschmann. I noticed only one soup-recipe in the Lederer book (Suppe mit Eingebundenem, soup with meat dumpling cooked in a napkin), which is nearly identical with the version in Löv, except that the old-fashioned weight units are converted to metric ones. A German-language Jewish cookbook,9 published in identical form in 1869 in Baja and in 1873 in Pécs, towns in southern Hungary, might have also been one of her sources, since three recipes in it for drinks (Punsch, Glühwein, and Bischof) are identical or nearly so with the corresponding ones in Mrs. Lederer’s work. But since several other drinks are described differently in the two books, my guess is that she did not copy those three recipes from the earlier volume, but both she and the author of that work used some of the same German non-Jewish cookbooks as sources. But aside from the recipes for the abovementioned soup and drinks, I found only two others that resemble descriptions of courses in an earlier cookbook. The recipe for polenta (Kukurutz-Male) is by and large identical with a description in Géza Kugler’s Legújabb nagy házi cukrászat (Latest Great Domestic Pastry-Making), published in six editions between 1846 and 1905. In addition, the Pester Äpfelkuchen (apple cake “à la Pest”) closely follows the Ungarischer Äpfelkuchen (Hungarian apple cake) recipe in Löv’s

9 Unknown author: Die wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin oder: neuestes geprüftes und vollständiges Kochbuch; Enthält: Eine Sammlung von mehreren hundert zuverlässigen und durch vieljährige Erfahrung bewährten Vorschriften; Ein unentbehrliches Handbuch für wirthliche Frauen und Töchter (1869). I describe this work on pages 80–81 in my book Jewish Cuisine in Hungary, therefore I do not discuss it here in greater detail.

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German-language work, published in 1840 in Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia), though it is also true that Löv took this recipe from others: either from the Jewish cookbook of Rahel Aschmann, a German author, or from István Czifray’s Hungarian cookbook, or from a not yet identified German work, which probably served as the source for all three of them. Had I compared every recipe in Mrs. Lederer’s and Löv’s books, perhaps I would have discovered other recipes common to both works, but I am confident that there are not many. And even if I found some, I doubt this would change the general impression that Mrs. Lederer’s volume is largely an original work. Even a cursory study of the recipes makes it obvious that they are not only the work of a woman highly experienced in cooking and baking, but also of someone who is able to accurately and clearly explain the way to prepare them. In addition to knowing how to cook, the author knows how to write well, sometimes even in a chatty, personal style, as at the beginning of the part about “The way to make coffee”: “Making coffee is so simple, that I do not have to add any advice, except for a few based solely on observation.”10 She tries to give her readers the feeling that she is standing next to them, ready to offer advice. For example, this is what she writes in the meat kugel recipe: “While doing this [that is, shaping the kugel], make sure that no cracks remain anywhere in the kugel, since they could make it fall apart during steaming.”11 But despite such individual touches, her manner of writing never becomes as loquacious and personal as that of some nineteenth-century English cookbook authors, such as Eliza Acton. She not only describes the requirements of a religious household at the beginning of her book, but she also includes additional information about such a lifestyle in her recipes for several Jewish specialties. We can find an example of this in the bean cholent recipe: “The covered dish of beans is placed Friday afternoon in the cholent-oven, from where it is removed only at noon on Saturday for the midday meal. Such cholent-ovens exist in larger cities, while in smaller settlements certain bakers accept cholent pots.”12 Mrs. Lederer succeeded in keeping the promise of the title of her work: her recipes are so detailed and clear that based on them even an inexperienced

10 Lederer, Koch-Buch, 205. 11 Ibid., 10. 12 Ibid., 9.

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homemaker could perfectly prepare the dishes. The following few sentences from the recipe for green peas are good examples of this: But if we wish to preserve the nice green color of the peas, we should cook them in an uncovered pot, scald them, quickly drain them, pour cold water over them, and set them aside until we prepare the sauce for the peas. For this, we heat a piece of goose fat, add a small spoon of flour, briefly cook it without letting it brown [in the original: anlaufen lassen], mix a little finely chopped parsley to it, cook this for a few seconds too, dilute it with good soup, and let it thicken. We add the peas and two spoons of pounded sugar.13 We should frequently shake the pan with all this in it, but we should not let the peas cook long, so that they do not lose their color.14 The number of recipes made with various kinds of meat in a Jewish cookbook tells us whether those types of dishes played a central or marginal role in the cuisine of religious Jews in the region where the book was published. As was common in both Jewish and Gentile households of Mrs. Lederer’s region, most of the meat dishes in her book are made with poultry meat (30 recipes) or with beef/veal (27 recipes). But the choice of fish dishes is also extensive: 16 recipes. Their large number reflects the important role of fish in religious Jewish households, where such dishes were traditionally, almost compulsorily the first course of dinners on Fridays and on the eves of other holidays. On the other hand, the reason for the meager choice of lamb and mutton dishes―merely three recipes―is that such courses were common in the cuisine of local Jews only in southern Hungary (today in Serbia/ Croatia), but not in Budapest, where Mrs. Lederer probably lived. Her work far surpasses all previous Hungarian Jewish cookbooks. Its qualities resemble those of Teréz Doleskó’s Szegedi szakácskönyv (Szeged Cookbook), also published in 1876, and named after the city in southeast Hungary where the author lived. Both books are incomparably better and

13 As mentioned before, until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, sugar was mainly sold in tall, conical loaves, from which pieces were broken off and then pounded to the desired fineness. 14 Lederer, Koch-Buch, 37.

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29. Rézi néni’s (Teréz Doleskó’s) “Szeged Cookbook,” one of the best nineteenth-century works about non-Jewish Hungarian cuisine, published in 1876 in Szeged, a city in south-eastern Hungary. The Gentile Teréz Doleskó’s and the Jewish Therese Lederer’s cookbooks were both written by women called Theresa (Teréz in Hungarian, Therese in German) and published in 1876.

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30. The 1999 facsimile edition of the abbreviated Dutch version of Therese Lederer’s Jewish cookbook, originally published in Rotterdam in 1892. The pictures show the book’s front cover, the end of the preface by its publisher, as well as its table of contents. Photograph by Young Suh.

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more original than their predecessors. Doleskó’s book is far more comprehensive than Mrs. Lederer’s; it features a much larger number of recipes. In spite of this, Mrs. Lederer could be considered almost as the Jewish equivalent to Teréz Doleskó, a Gentile; both of them are trailblazing figures of Hungarian gastronomic history. But they share more than this, as their works display a similar competence and originality.15 Furthermore, they are the first cookbooks in Hungary to use metric measures, introduced to the AustroHungarian Monarchy only in the year when their works were published. Some of Mrs. Lederer’s recipes, though, originally must have been written for the old-type weights, since at least in one place she accidentally left the old-fashioned units of Loth (1 Viennese Loth = 1.75 dekagrams) and Pfund (1 pound = 50 dekagrams, 1 Viennese pound = 56 dekagrams) in the text. The strange 12.5 dekagrams weight of some ingredients in a few recipes originally must have been a quarter of a pound. The two cookbooks are also similar in the sense that they can interest us not only as historical documents, but also as works useable today. In addition to representing great progress among domestic Jewish cookbooks, Mrs. Lederer’s volume was also in the forefront internationally. In those years, most of the Jewish cookbooks were published in Germany, Britain, and Hungary, far more than in other countries. Her 268-page book containing 545 recipes was equal in quality and comprehensiveness to the roughly contemporaneous German Jewish cookbooks, such as the sixth edition of Rebekka Wolf’s volume published in 1875 in Berlin, which features 485 recipes on its 256 pages, and the 148-page second edition of Rebekka Hertz’s work, brought out in Hamburg in 1869. Mrs. Lederer’s book was available in most countries possessing a significant population of German-speaking Jews, as we can see from advertisements appearing in 1876 in the Leitmeritzer Wochenblatt (“Leitmeritz Weekly”; the town is now called Litoměřice and is in the Czech Republic), in the journal of Austrian

15 Unlike nearly all nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewish and non-Jewish cookbooks, Therese Lederer’s and Teréz Doleskó’s volumes are largely original. It was obvious already in the nineteenth century that cookbooks should reflect local conditions. As Doleskó observed in 1876 in the preface to her work: “Although we have numerous cookbooks in Hungarian […] but in most of them we look in vain for the methods of preparation of real Hungarian cuisine. What is more, some of them are such slavish translations of foreign books that a Hungarian homemaker is unable to gain any information from them.”

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bookdealers, and in a Jewish newspaper in Breslau (Wroclaw, Poland); these three ads no doubt represent a mere fraction of the work’s foreign ads. The best proof of its international success is that―as mentioned before―uniquely among nineteenth-century Hungarian cookbooks, it was also brought out in translation by a foreign publisher. It is indicative of the scarcity of serious, scholarly Hungarian works about gastronomic history, that until now the existence of this important foreign edition has been unknown in Hungary. The abridged and renamed Dutch version of the book was published by the Rotterdam company of Gebroeders Haagen in 1892, and its reprint edition was brought out by the Amsterdam firm of De Kaan in 1999. The Dutch version, called De geheimen der Joodsche keuken. Handbock voor Israelitische vrouwen en meisjes (The secrets of Jewish cuisine. A handbook for Jewish women and girls), is based on the fifth edition of Mrs. Lederer’s work. This was only the second cookbook published in Dutch for the Jews of Holland, for centuries one of the important centers of Jewish life in Europe. It was preceded only by the 1881 Dutch translation of Rebekka Wolf’s German work, which was the most popular Jewish cookbook of the nineteenth century as we can see from its many editions in Germany and from the fact that in 1877 it was also translated into Polish. This perhaps implies that Mrs. Lederer’s volume was held in comparable esteem in Holland―which would be high praise. Interestingly, the Dutch versions of Rebekka Wolf’s and Mrs. Lederer’s works both predate the 1894 publication of the first original Jewish cookbook in Holland that was not a translation, the work of Sara or Saartje Vos.16 While the Pest edition of the work contains 545 recipes, the Dutch version has only 179. At the same time, however, this version adds a section about various details of keeping a traditional Jewish home to Mrs. Lederer’s brief descriptions of the process of koshering at home, the requirements of kitchen furnishings, and the peparations for the holiday of Pesach. Most of this additional information about the housewife’s religious duties comes from Ludwig L. Stern’s (1824–1890) Amude ha-golah (Vorschriften der Thora,

16 Sara Vos (at times referred to as Saartje Vos), Het Oorspronkelijk Israëlitisch Kookboek [Original Jewish cookbook] (Amsterdam: Abrahamson & van Straatten, 1894) Further editions: 1896, 1903, 1908, 1914, 1921, 1926.

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31. One of the five reprint editions of Therese Lederer’s 1876 Jewish cookbook that came out in the early twentyfirst century in Germany. The traditional Jewish special dishes on the pages where the book is open: Pea cholent, Meat kugels, Polish kugels, Bread roll kugel, and Noodle kugel. Photograph by Young Suh.

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Rules of the Torah) an 1882 work published in Germany about the Halakha, the Jewish religious laws. As a result of the smaller number of recipes and the expansion of general information about religious life in the abridged 96-page Dutch edition, the introductory chapters represent a much larger share of the book than in Mrs. Lederer’s original version. This is the way the preface of the Dutch edition describes the work’s goals: In the following pages we wish to provide reliable guidance to our female coreligionists not only about how dishes and drinks can be prepared in accordance with religious rules, but also how they could fulfill those duties that are the tasks of a Jewish homemaker. [...] This is a brief but complete, easy to use but scholarly, cookbook, which meets all the demands of the high art of cooking. Its first two chapters closely follow some famous works popular in Germany and Austria: the Imre le-bet Jakob and the Amude ha-golah written by Ludwig Stern. At the same time, this little volume naturally also pays attention to Dutch cuisine, as well as to Therese Lederer’s widely known work, Koch-Buch für israelitische Frauen [Cookbook for Jewish women], 5th edition, 1884, Buda-Pest. We are convinced that we performed useful work by publishing the present small book, which we can emphatically recommend to the broader readership.17 The foreign success of Mrs. Lederer’s work was not limited to the nineteenth century, but has continued almost to this day. As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, in recent years reprint editions of her 1876 work have appeared at five German publishers: at the Salzwasser Verlag in 2010, at the Unikum Verlag in 2011, at the Kochbuch Verlag in 2013, at the Vero Verlag in 2014, and at the Fachbuchverlag-Dresen in 2015. One measure of a work’s success is whether it is plagiarized by other authors. Mrs. Lederer’s work did not lack such a dubious honor either: authors of several nineteenth-century Jewish cookbooks stole not merely a few recipes from her, but substantial parts of her volume. Sarah Cohn, who lived in Frankfurt am Main, was one of them. She first published her

17 Lederer, De geheimen, 3–4.

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German Jewish cookbook in about 1888 in Regensburg and later, in c. 1900, also in Pozsony.18 She copied not merely a few passages of the introductory chapters about the requirements of a kosher household and about the correct preparation of certain kinds of ingredients (meats, vegetables, etc.) before cooking, but also virtually the entire chapter about traditional Jewish dishes (Originalgerichte der israelitischen Küche, that is: Original dishes of the Jewish cuisine). Of the 15 recipes in this chapter only two do not follow slavishly Mrs. Lederer’s originals. Sarah Cohn probably copied recipes from non-Jewish cookbooks too, and this is how her book includes dishes with such treif ingredients as rabbit in the chapter about roasts and eel in the section of fish dishes.19 As if this were not bad enough, she commits the hilarious mistake of featuring a diagram, clearly taken from a non-Jewish cookbook, that shows how a rabbit, a not kosher animal, should be carved. All this is pretty surprising in a book, which according to its title offers „the preparation of all kinds of dishes according to the ritual laws” (Zubereitung aller Arten Speisen nach den Ritualgesetzen). But while Sarah Cohn stole “only” one chapter from Mrs. Lederer, the author of the first Hungarian-language Jewish cookbook, published in 1899, translated nearly the whole book (523 recipes out of 551) from her German original, needless to say without mentioning the source.20 Unfortunately, we cannot be certain who this author was. Although according to the book’s 18 Cohn, Israelitisches Kochbuch. The work was orignally published by the Stahl Verlag in 1888 in Regensburg, although the author herself according to her preface lived in Frankfurt am Main. Budapest’s Széchényi Library has a copy of a later, but similarly German-language edition of her work, published in Pozsony, Hungary (today: Bratislava, Slovakia) by the company of Gebrüder Schwarz. The date of publication is missing from the book, but the catalog of the library claims it to be about 1880, which is almost certainly not correct. First of all, it is completely unlikely that the Pozsony edition predates the one in Regensburg, which is obviously the original edition of this work. Furthermore, according to the internet, the Pozsony edition was published in 1900. Another thing also makes this date probable: all the other books I found that had been published by the firm of Gebrüder Schwarz are from 1901 and 1902. 19 The rabbit recipe, called Kaninchen, Lapin, is on page 96, and the one for eel, called Gebratener Aal, is on page 104 in the Pozsony edition of Sarah Cohn’s work. 20 András Cserna-Szabó was the first researcher to notice that the majority of the recipes in this cookbook are not original, but translations from Mrs. Lederer’s work. See Cserna-Szabó, “Budapest, 5659.”

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cover Mrs. Rafael Rezső Hercz “collected” the recipes in it, Ignácz Schwarz, the publisher of this book, does not even mention her in his preface, but describes it as his own work. Regardless whether Schwarz himself translated the recipes from Mrs. Lederer’s earlier work or he asked Mrs. Hercz or someone else to do this for him, it is highly likely that the idea of this unashamed plagiarism was his. Knowing this, one cannot be surprised that the translated versions of those recipes by Mrs. Lederer, which combine meat with little clams or with anchovies, remained treif, that is, not kosher, but at least the translator substituted butter for the religiously objectionable goose fat in the fish dishes. Of course, this is inconsistent, since had the translator/ editor noticed that there were other treif recipes in the book, he or she could have corrected them too. If this essay achieves nothing more than to prove how much Mrs. Lederer’s wonderful cookbook would deserve to be published in Hungarian, I would be pleased. András Cserna-Szabó wrote a terrific essay about some late nineteenth-century Hungarian cookbooks, all published in the southeastern city of Szeged and all written by women who by coincidence had the same first name: Teréz.21 According to his tongue-in-cheek suggestion, Teréz Doleskó (1821–1883), the first and most important author in this strange sequence, “would deserve a public statue in Szeged. Who should be thus memorialized if not her? Not with a small statue, but with a big one. Not in a suburb, but in the very center of the city. Because she is one of brightest stars in the history of Hungarian gastronomy.” Joining Cserna-Szabó in this, I also would like to make a half-serious “modest proposal,” à la Jonathan Swift. Mrs. Lederer, Teréz Doleskó’s contemporary and namesake, was a similarly bright star in the country’s gastronomic history. For centuries, Jewish cuisine has been an organic part of the multi-hued Hungarian cuisine, shaped by several different ethnic influences. I suggest erecting bronze statues of both the Gentile and the Jewish Teréz, but like those of Goethe and Schiller in their famous joint memorial in Weimar, they should stand next to each other on a stone pedestal, hand in hand, symbolizing the close connection between the culinary cultures they represented.

21 Cserna-Szabó, “Rézi nénik.”

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RECIPES FROM THERESE LEDERER’S 1876 JEWISH COOKBOOK Various original dishes of the Jewish cuisine (Verschiedene Originalgerichte der israelitischen Küche) [I include the entire chapter here.]

Bean cholent (Schalet von Bohnen) Remove the damaged beans and foreign material from 1 liter beans, and wash the remaining ones. Place a broad marrow bone on the bottom of an elongated, narrow pot, transfer the beans to the pot, and add ½ kilo fatty breast meat [brisket] to them, Fill the pot to its rim with cold water, add to this sufficient salt, 12½ dekagrams of raw fat, cut into small dice, one medium onion, and paprika or ground pepper to fit on the tip of a knife. The covered dish of beans is placed Friday afternoon in the cholent-oven, from where it is removed only at noon on Saturday for the midday meal. Such cholent-ovens exist in larger cities, while in smaller settlements certain bakers accept cholent pots.

Rice cholent with goose giblets (Reis-Schalet mit Ganseljungs) We place a broad bone in the cholent pot to keep the cholent from burning. We pepare ½ kilo rice according to the instruction in recipe no. 7. (The instruction: We soak the rice in cold water for a short time, we scald it with boiling water, spread it on a sieve to dry, and rinse it with cold water.) We place the rice with the well-cleaned goose giblets or with a fat hen in the pot. Then we add salt, water, and onion to it, but in all other details we proceed as in the recipe for bean cholent.

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Dried pea cholent (Erbsen-Schalet) It is prepared similar to bean cholent, but we use pearl barley instead of some of the peas. Cholent made with a coarser kind of pearl barley is also very tasty. Obviously, we may choose the kind of fat or meat of our preference for the various cholents. One can mix pearl barley [Gerstel], coarsely ground barley [Graupen], buckwheat, rice etc. into any of the previously described cholents, and prepare them similarly to the bean cholent, except that those varieties naturally need more fat.

Kugels and lokshens (Kugeln und Lockschen) [Lokshen means noodles in Yiddish, but here it stands for noodle kugel.]

Meat kugel (Fleischkugeln) Buy chopped meat at the butcher, but if it is not available, use a piece of meat but remove all the bones, veins, and sinews from it before finely chopping it. For each 1 pound of meat use 12½ dekagrams raw fat, which you chop and thoroughly mix with the chopped meat. Add to this 2 beaten eggs, a generous quantity of chopped onions, as well as black pepper, salt, and 2 soaked bread rolls. Knead this until it sticks together, and shape it into a ball. Then dip your hands into cold water and use them to smooth the surface of the ball. Pay attention that no cracks remain in the kugel, since they could make it fall apart during steaming.

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Polish kugel (Polnische Kugeln) Mix 1 liter good flour with 8 eggs, pounded black pepper, salt, ½ kilo fat cut into small dice, finely chopped onion, ground spice, and as much water as is necessary to make the mixture stick together. Then transfer this into a well-greased kugel pot, and bake it in the oven. Grease the pot in which you will steam the kugel with goose- or other kind of fat, and―after you placed the kugel mixture in it―sprinkle it with a few spoonfuls of clear water. While the kugel is steaming, baste it frequently with its own juice, until it gets brown.

Bread roll kugel (Semmel-Kugel) Mix 6 soaked and 3 grated bread rolls with 10 beaten eggs, 25 dekagrams raisins, sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, and crushed [gestossen] almonds―including some bitter ones―as well as with ¼ kilo melted fat and some salt. Knead all this together. Transfer it into a very well-greased kugel pot, and bake it in the oven.

Noodle kugel (Blätter- oder Nudellockshen) Make a soft noodle dough from 1 liter flour, 4 eggs, some salt, and enough water to fill two eggshells. Roll this out into thin sheets and let them dry. Cut the dough sheets into finger-wide strips, cook them in the water that you had previously brought to boil, and stir them several times so that they do not stick together. Pour the noodles into a strainer, allow the hot cooking water to run off them, and cool them with cold water. Beat 10–12 eggs in a broad bowl, add the noodles, turn them over, spread some of them in the bottom of the greased kugel form to create

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a layer. Then generously scatter sugar, pounded [gestossen] almonds, grated lemon peel, and raisins over this layer, and sprinkle it with liquid beef- or poultry fat. Spread another layer of noodles over this, and so on, until you have transferred all the noodles to the pot. You need 25 dekagrams fat altogether. The kugel (lokshen) must bake for 2 hours in the oven.

Matzo kugel (Eine Mazze-Kugel) Soak 3 matzoth, squeeze them out well, and dry them in fat in a skillet. Then mix them with ¼ kilo matzo crumbs, goose fat that has been stirred until it has turned foamy, 10-12 eggs, and some sugar. Add 3 Loths sweet and 1 Loth bitter almonds broken into small pieces [gestossen], 4 grated big cooking apples, grated lemon peel, and lemon juice. Transfer this thoroughly mixed dough into a well-greased kugel form, and sprinkle its top with ¾ pound hot fat. This is how the kugel goes into the oven.

Chremsel (Chrimsel) It is customary to eat this on the last day of the Pesach week. Knead a few handfuls of broken matzo with 4 matzoth that have been soaked and dried in fat, 4 eggs, 12½ dekagrams sugar, 12 broken bitter almonds, and hot fat. Form 6 elongated round patties from this dough, fill them and fold them so that the filling is completely enclosed. Fry each chremsel in a skillet in poultry or beef fat, diligently basting it until it turns yellowish brown. The filling: chop or cut to small pieces 4-5 big, not too sweet apples, and mix this with lot of chopped almonds, 12½ dekagrams big raisins, some pounded cinnamon, 12½ dekagrams sugar, chopped

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orange and lemon peel, and a little fat. Toss this into a skillet for a few minutes, then take it out, and use it after it has cooled. Many homemakers use the filling without previously cooking it.

Fried matzo (Ueberschlagene Mazze) [The original title means covered or coated matzo.] The matzo is dipped into beaten eggs and turned over, fried to golden brown on both sides in a skillet, and, while it is still hot, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. One can repeat this procedure several times with the same piece of matzo.

Golden vegetable dish (Das goldene Gemüse) [The dish here described is usually called a meat tzimmes.] This needs very fatty beef, which is set to cook with spices and a little salt in water. Wash a lot of peeled, small onions in hot water, and add this as well as dried prune plums, big raisins, lemon peel, and whole cinnamon to the beef. When all this is well braised, sweeten it with [sugar]syrup, and―if some liquid still remains around it―let it evaporate a little. Rock the pot frequently during cooking, but the food in it should not be stirred.

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Challah (Barches)

Dairy challah (Butterbarches) Mix 2 liters fine wheat flour with yeast for 5 Kreuzers and as much lukewarm milk as is necessary for a soft dough. Knead into this some salt, 12½ dekagrams sugar, 12½ dekagrams butter, and as many big raisins as you wish. Should you wish to make the challah especially tasty, knead into it some eggs, grated lemon peel, and broken almonds. When the dough becomes smooth, set it to a warm place to rise until it becomes twice as high. Now divide the dough into two halves, and each half again into 3 parts. Knead each of these 6 parts of the dough thoroughly and shape them into 6 long, round ropes, so that three of them should be much longer than the others. Twist the 3 longer ropes into a braid and do the same with the shorter ones. Place the short braid on top of the long one and press their ends together. Sprinkle the challah with poppy seeds, and let it be baked at the baker.

Challah for meat dishes (Barches zu Fleischspeisen) Prepare it the same way but stir the yeast into lukewarm water instead of milk before mixing this into the flour, and leave out the butter too. You may include or omit any of the tasty ingredients as you wish. The pastry board, the bowl, and the pots used for making the challah should not be used for any other purpose. Friday night, as well as on the eve of holidays, the housewife says a blessing over two lit candles placed on the set table. Then she puts two challahs in front of her husband’s plate.

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Some other dishes from Mrs. Lederer's book

Bread soup (Brodsuppe) Use good homemade bread for this, which you cut into very thin slices. Place some fat in a pot, let it get hot, add some finely chopped onions to it, let them soften without browning, then add the bread slices, allow them to cook too, pour good beef soup over them, add some ground pepper and a little nutmeg. Let the soup simmer well, but pay attention that the bread does not fall apart. Before serving the soup, break one egg per person into the simmering soup, but do not allow them to get hard. Garnish the soup with sausages cut into small pieces and with finely cut root vegetables. Sprinkle it with finely chopped chives.

Soup with napkin dumpling (Suppe mit Eingebundenem) Take a piece of roast veal, capon, or turkey breast, and cut it into small pieces. Soak a bread roll in water, press it out, scramble 3 eggs, and finely chop some green parsley. Then beat 1/8 kilo fat until foamy, add the the previous things, three eggs one by one, salt, black pepper, some breadcrumbs, two yolks, and mix them well. Generously grease a napkin, pour the mixture onto it, tie it into an long bundle, put it into boiling water, and cook it for half an hour. Carefully remove the dumpling, place it in a soup tureen, and pour brown soup over it.

Soup with meat-filled French toasts (Suppe mit Fleischpofesen) Steam ¼ kilo veal, but pay attention that it should remain as white as possible. Then, together with some parsley and onion, cut it into

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small, hazelnut-sized pieces. Heat a small piece of fat, add a teaspoon flour to it, and let it cook without browning. Then add the small pieces of meat, parsley and onion, allow them to steam a little, pour half a ladle of meat broth over them, and let it thicken. When this is done, stir in two egg yolks, and remove the pot from the fire. Then cut knifeback-thick slices from thin crescent-shaped rolls, spread the mixture on them, stick pairs of them together, dampen them with water, dip them into beaten eggs and fine bread crumbs, fry them in poultry fat until they turn nicely brown like the color of a bread roll, and pour good meat broth over them.

Summer squash prepared like asparagus (Kürbis auf Spargel-Art) Peel a long white summer squash (vegetable marrow), cut it into sticks resembling thick asparagus, cook them in salted water, and when they have become tender, remove and place them on a sieve to let the water drip off. Following this, brush a flat platter with good heavy cream, nicely lay the squash pieces onto it in rows, pour good heavy cream over them again, and sprinkle them with some sugar and finely grated bread crumbs. Then scatter small pieces of butter over this, and place it in the oven to bake for a quarter of an hour.

Hungarian paprika-pullets (Ungarisches Paprikahendel) Clean some young pullets, remove their innards, wash them clean, cut them into even-sized pieces, and salt them lightly. Chop an onion finely and cook it with fat in a pot until the onion turns yellowish. Add the pullet pieces and a half soupspoon of paprika, cover the pot, and, while frequently shaking the pieces, steam them until tender. Then dust them with flour, add some meat broth, cook them slowly

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while carefully skimming off the foam that rises to the surface, then serve them in a bowl.

Veal paprikás with tiny dumplings (Paprika-Kälbernes mit Nockerln) Cut the veal into cubes, sweat some chopped parsley and onions in a little fat, salt this, and add the cubes of veal. Steam them, dust with some flour, pour some meat broth over them, let it cook down, and add some paprika as well as 2 or 3 egg yolks. Serve the veal paprikás with tiny dumplings [Nockerln in German, galuska in Hungarian].

Tongue in Polish sauce (Zungen in der polnischen Sauce) [This recipe is nearly identical with a version in the 1840 sixth edition of Magyar nemzeti szakácskönyv (Hungarian National Cookbook). While it is possible that Mrs. Lederer adopted the recipe from that earlier cookbook, I find it more likely that both versions of the recipe are based on the same non-Jewish German source. This is all the more probable, since much of the Hungarian work is almost certainly a translation from an unidentified German cookbook. The Polish beef tongue recipe (Polnische Ochsenzunge) in Rahel Aschmann’s 1835 German Jewish cookbook also describes a similar dish, and so does Julie Löv’s version from 1840, which is not surprising since she lifted it from Aschmann.] The tongue will be cooked in salted water until it is tender, and then, after its skin was removed, it is placed in a pot that has a lid. Now some fat is added as well as one big onion, one sliced carrot, some whole allspice, and a few veal bones. This will all be braised until it is nicely browned. Then dust this with one spoonful of flour, and let it

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brown. Pour a mixture of half red wine and half broth over this, and let it cook well. Press the sauce through a sieve into another pot. Add 7 dekagrams big raisins, equal quantity of small raisins, and also 6 dekagrams blanched and slivered almonds. Then transfer the tongue into this, and allow it to cook well. Before serving, the tongue will be stuck all over with slivered almonds, the sauce poured onto a platter, and the tongue placed in the middle.

Onion strudel (Zwiebel-Strudel) Cut 6–8 onions into very thin slices, place them in a skillet with 15 dekagrams fat, and while stirring let them cook until they become nicely yellow. Transfer them from the skillet onto a platter and let them cool. Stretch the strudel dough very thin, spread the onions over it, sprinkle with salt and pepper, and roll it up. Cut finger-long pieces from this roll, tightly press their ends together, place them on a sieve, and let them dry slightly. Then cook them in salted water, arrange them on a platter, and pour bread crumbs browned in poultry fat over them.

Semolina dumplings in milk (Griesnockerln in der Milch) Add 12 dekagrams sugar, a small piece of cinnamon, and a little salt to 2/3 liter good milk, bring it to a simmer, and let ¾ kilo coarse semolina run into it, while steadily stirring it. Keep stirring over the fire until it becomes quite thick and is cooked. Transfer it into a bowl and mix it well with 8 dekagrams butter, 4 whole eggs and 8 egg yolks. Following this, in a skillet or low, broad pot cook 2/3 liter milk with 12 dekagrams sugar and 12 dekagrams butter. With the help of a tablespoon, place the dumplings next to each other into this. Set the skillet or pot over the fire, cover it tightly, place some glowing embers on the lid, and bake the dumplings until they become light brown. At

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serving time, transfer the dumplings to a shallow bowl, the kind used for noodles, pour vanilla-milk or cinnamon sauce over them, and take them to the table while they are still warm.

Hungarian noodle pieces with farmer cheese (Ungarische Topfenhaluschka) Prepare noodle dough, roll it out to the thickness of a knife’s back, tear it into relatively big pieces, cook them in salted water, and drain them in a colander. Put butter and a few spoonfuls of heavy cream into a pot, cook them together, then mix in the noodle pieces. In a serving bowl, spread a layer of the noodles, then a layer of grated farmer cheese, then again noodles, and so on.

Anise biscotti as in Reichenau (Reichenauer Zwieback) [Reichenau an der Rax is a summer resort in the mountains of Lower Austria.] Place 1/8 kilo finely pounded sugar and four whole eggs in a pan and beat them with a cooking spoon for ¾ hour, then stir in 1/8 kilo fine flour and some pure anise. Brush the baking form with wax, pour in the dough, and bake slowly [at moderate heat].

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32. The front cover of a Hungarian-language kosher cookbook, published by the Transylvanian branch of WIZO (Women’s International Zionist Organization) in 1938.

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5. The Last WIZO Cookbook Before the Holocaust

W

hen, in 2016, I was gathering material for my book about the cultural history of Hungarian Jewish cuisine before 1945,1 I examined not only Hungarian sources, but also various works concerning the history of Jewish cuisine in other countries, among them the entries on the history of Jewish cookbooks, dishes, and drinks in the Encyclopaedia Judaica and the YIVO Encyclopedia. In one of those entries in the YIVO (Yiddisher Visnshaftlekher Institut) encyclopedia, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, the author of the essay, briefly describes the cookbooks the WIZO organization (Women’s International Zionist Organization) published in the 1930s and in the following decades, with which they sought to popularize the practice of modern Jewish cuisine in various countries and to reconcile it with the circumstances in Palestine. Though her essay is not about Hungarian Jewish cuisine, it mentions that the last WIZO cookbook before the Holocaust was in Hungarian, though published in Romania in 1938. This brief mention piqued my curiosity, since, in spite of extensive research into the history of pre-1945 Hungarian Jewish cookbooks, I was unfamiliar with this publication. Budapest’s Széchényi Library, the national library of Hungary, was the obvious place to start my search for it, since it has copies of nearly all the books published in Hungary, as well as most of the Hungarian-language ones from other countries. But unfortunately, they did not have a copy. From the scant information available on the internet, I got the impression that the book had hardly been distributed in Hungary. Probably, this is the reason why it is missing from this otherwise very comprehensive library and why the

1 Körner, A magyar zsidó konyha.

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Hungarian Jewish press did not write about it when it was published. Even in Transylvania, only Új Kelet (New East), a Zionist newspaper in Cluj, Romania (before 1920: Kolozsvár in Hungary), featured two articles about it.2 It seems that even in Transylvania the book―probably printed in very few copies―was not sold in bookstores, since instead of suggesting buying it in such shops, the article advises the readers to order it at the WIZO office, presumably in Cluj, where the newspaper was published. The next step in my search was to inquire at the Hungarian branch of WIZO. Although they did not have a copy of it either and had not even been aware of its existence, they kindly promised to inquire with their Transylvanian colleagues whether they could help. At last, this was successful, since the Transylvanian WIZO representatives could locate a copy in the Central University Library in Cluj, and so were able to send a digital copy to their partners in Budapest, who in turn forwarded it to me. Unfortunately, all this took months, and I had to complete my manuscript before the discovery of the copy in Cluj. But this did not pose an insurmountable obstacle, since―based on a contemporaneous bibliography and the articles in the aforementioned Zionist paper―I could not only describe the WIZO cookbook in my work, but, due to the three recipes reprinted from the book in one of the write-ups, I could even quote from it. Although the scans would have allowed me to write in greater detail about the WIZO cookbook in the English edition of my book, which came out two years later, I decided to add only a few sentences to my original description of it. The reasons for this were twofold: I did not want to make the part about it disproportionatly longer than the descriptions of other old cookbooks, and I did not wish to significantly add to the length of the already voluminous, 420-page English edition. Luckily, this essay gives me a chance to make up for this omission. In addition to receiving the scans, my decision to contact the Hungarian WIZO branch and to ask their help had another fortunate result: in 2018 they reissued the 1938 publication in a reprint edition. But after this somewhat lengthy account of how I managed to find the book, it is high time to write about the work itself, including its contents and the circumstances of its publication.

2 Lajos Bató, “A történelem és a szakácsművészet” [History and culinary art], Új Kelet, February 19, 1939, 7; “Konyhaművészet” [Culinary art], Új Kelet, February 11, 1940, 8.

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The WIZO was founded in 1920 in London in response to the 1917 Balfourdeclaration, according to which the British government “views with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”3 In the atmosphere of the years following the Balfour-declaration, WIZO’s goal was to support the social and political awakening of Jewish women and to prepare their immigration to Palestine. To achieve this, they established offices in various countries and in Palestine. Educating the women about household duties and homemaking was one of the most important goals of those branches, including special emphasis on the rural, agricultural lifestyle so important in the new homeland. The publication of cookbooks represented a part of this effort. To further this goal, in 1936 the WIZO Federation in Palestine published a trilingual (Hebrew, English, and German) cookbook by Dr. Erna Meyer, an expert on home economics, who immigrated in 1933 from Germany to Palestine.4 In her work, called How to Cook in Palestine, Meyer tried to encourage recently immigrated women to use the typical vegetables, fruits, and other edibles of their new homeland, for example, eggplant, squash, olive oil, and Near Eastern spices. She was not proposing to neglect European traditions, but advocating a kind of synthesis between old and new: We housewives must make an attempt to free our kitchens from European customs, which are not applicable to Palestine. We should wholeheartedly stand in favour of healthy Palestine cooking. [...] Once we learn how to take advantage of the natural products of Palestine and in addition utilize our knowledge of European cooking, we will bring about great changes in our method of cooking and will be able to vary our dishes.5

3 The declaration, however, also stated that in pursuing this goal “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” 4 Dr. Erna Meyer (1890, Berlin–1975, Haifa). She received her doctorate in economics at the University of Berlin in 1913. Her dissertation was regarded as a pioneering study on home economics and lifestyle. In 1927, she participated in the design of a series of rational model kitchens for the Stuttgart Werkbund-exhibition, “Die Wohnung” (The apartment). 5 Meyer, How to Cook in Palestine, 7–8.

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Meyer was ahead of her time when she emphasized the use of fresh local produce in cooking and the importance of eating more vegetables than meat, ideas that only later would become basic tenets of modern, healthy nutrition. It is possible that the WIZO branches also published cookbooks in other countries before World War II, but aside from the Palestinian and Transylvanian volumes I found no trace of such publications. In addition to the WIZO, however, the League of Jewish Women (Jüdischer Frauenbund) in Germany also published a few cookbooks in the second half of the 1930s to prepare women for the life in Palestine. In his essay about the Transylvanian Jewish institutions between the two world wars, Attila Gidó gives a brief account of the founding of the local WIZO federation: As a result of Zionism’s spread after World War I, secular organizations of Jewish women were established to complement those that functioned within the Jewish religious communities. The new secular associations were part of the so-called WIZO organization. This worldwide movement of Zionist women established its Transylvanian organization in 1927. Its center was in Kolozsvár [Cluj],6 and by 1939 it had branch offices in 55 Transylvanian towns. WIZO had a completely different aim from the women’s associations, since its main task was to spread the idea of a Jewish nation and to serve Zionism.7 This is how the book “Zionist ABC: Questions and Answers”, published in Cluj in 1931, describes the goals of WIZO: Women of the galut8 support the institutions of Palestinian women. The world-organization, called WIZO, unites those women who participate in the development of Palestine. WIZO’s other very important task is to spread the Jewish culture in the galut, and within the framework of parental homes raise a confident, upright, strong, new Jewish generation

6 Szabó, Erdély zsidói, 174. 7

Gidó, “Erdélyi zsidó intézmények.”

8 The Hebrew word means “exile.” It refers to existence outside the Land of Israel in the time period since the destruction of the Second Temple at Jerusalem.

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33. The cover of a trilingual (Hebrew, English, and German) cookbook published by the Palestine Federation of WIZO in c.1936. Dr. Erna Meyer, the author of the cookbook, was a German immigrant to Palestine. In the book, the English and German versions started from one end and the Hebrew one from the opposite end.

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for the renewal of Palestine and the Jewish nation. A great role is awaiting the WIZO members: to make the revived Hebrew language again the mother tongue of the Hebrew nation.9 In addition to commissioning the Jewish-born József Sidon to print this cookbook in his shop in Lugoj, Romania (before 1920: Lugos in Hungary), the Transylvanian WIZO organization also used him to print other works for them: for example, in 1940, a publication called Federaţiunea Transilvaniei. Centrala Timişoara (Transylvanian Federation, Temesvár Central).10 Judging from the year of publication included in works put out by Sidon’s printing company, it seems that his shop was already in business in 1919 and was still functioning in 1940, but I was unable to ascertain the exact dates of its founding and closing. In about 1928, the Neológ (modestly reformist) Jewish community of Lugoj had 1,700 members, 9 percent of the town’s population,11 thereby significantly exceeding the average percentage of Jews in Romania or Hungary. Some of the Jews in the town espoused Zionism, and between the two world wars the town even had a Zionist publishing company, called Kirjat Széfer.12 Although both Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, and Max Nordau, one of its important early leaders, were born in Budapest, Zionism never had as large a following in Hungary as in Poland or Russia, because of strong resistance from both the assimilated Jews and the Orthodox. One of the reasons for this was the strong patriotic feelings of most Hungarian Jews. Another reason was that the anti-Semitic movements and propaganda in Hungary during the second half of the nineteenth century were shorter lived and enjoyed less popular support than similar movements in Austria and Germany. This relative weakness of anti-Semitic pressure in the period before World War I offered little motivation for people to become Zionists. The influence of Zionism in Hungary, however, grew in the increasingly anti-Semitic

9 Cionista ABC: Kérdések és feleletek [Zionist alphabet: Questions and answers] (Cluj-Napoca, 5691–1931), 19–20. Quoted in Gidó, “Erdélyi zsidó intézmények.” 10 István Monoki, Magyar könyvtermelés Romániában. This work is list no. 1735 at letter F in the bibliography. 11 Ujvári, Magyar Zsidó Lexikon, 546. 12 Kiryat Sefer: a town mentioned several times in the Bible, lit.: Town of the Book.

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climate between the two World Wars, but even then it was weaker than in other Eastern European countries. Even in the interwar period, several Hungarian cities with a fairly large Jewish population had no Zionist organizations, but where they existed, they generally found an enthusiastic response. One such group was, for example, the Ohel Shem (Hebrew: Shem’s camp or tent), a student association in the north-central Hungarian city of Eger, founded by Dr. Emil Róth, the chief rabbi of the local Jewish community, which followed the principles of the conservative Status Quo Ante movement in Hungarian Judaism. Zionist activity was especially lively in Transylvania, which of course at the time was no longer part of Hungary. Attila Gidó writes the following about the spread of Zionism in Transylvania: The founding of the Transylvanian Jewish National Association in 1918 was the first significant political step of Transylvanian Jewry. This organization, established under the leadership of the Kolozsvár attorneys Tivadar Fischer and Chaim Weiszburg, made the representation of national Jewry its main goal. In the following years, the organization not only represented the interests of the Transylvanian Jews, but also became the chief supporter of Zionism and the Palestine-movement. As the acknowledged leader of the Transylvanian Zionist movement, the Association united and controlled all the Zionist activities in the region, and they also coordinated all the other associations and institutions organized on that principle.13 At times, printing shops also published books, and it is possible that in 1938 there was a WIZO branch office in the Transylvanian town of Lugoj, where the cookbook was printed, although I found no mention of it in contemporary documents. All this notwithstanding, I doubt that the book was published by the local WIZO office or by Sidon’s printing shop, as András Szántó presumes in his brief introductory essay in the reprint edition. I find it far more probable that the central office of the organization in Cluj was the publisher. An article about the cookbook printed in 1940 in Új Kelet, the previously mentioned Cluj newspaper, seems to support this theory by saying

13 Gidó, “Erdélyi zsidó intézmények.”

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that the cookbook can be ordered at the leadership of the organization, which is clearly referring to the Cluj central office of the Transylvanian WIZO. Had Sidon’s printing shop or the branch office in Lugoj been the publisher, the book most likely should have been ordered from them. In addition, the book’s preface was signed by “the leadership of WIZO,” which probably meant the central leadership in Cluj, since had it been referring to the local office in Lugos, they obviously would have mentioned it. The majority of Transylvanian Jews were Hungarian-speaking. As Attila Gidó writes: The Transylvanian Jewish institutions, due to the Hungarian culture and language of the local Jewish population, kept their independence all along. (Between the two world wars Hungarian was the mother tongue of 70-80 percent of the Transylvanian Jews.) This is the reason why even after lengthy attempts by the UER (Association of Romanian Jews), it only succeeded in establishing its Transylvanian branch in September 1925.14 Clearly this is why the leaders of the Transylvanian WIZO decided to print only the volume’s brief preface in both Hungarian and Romanian versions, but the rest of the book solely in Hungarian. The bilingual preface must have been included as an expression of loyalty to the Romanian authorities, since, as far as I know, there was no rule or law forcing the publisher to do so. In the opinion of Mihály Szilágyi-Gál, a friend of mine born in Cluj, the Romanian version of the preface must have been written by someone who was not a native speaker, since there are slight mistakes in it. The majority of Transylvanian Jews were Hungarian-speaking and had Hungarian identities, and although they felt the need to learn Romanian after 1920 in order to get around in everyday life, many of them did not know the language well. According to Szilágyi-Gál, conflicting identities at times created tensions between the Nagyvárad (Oradea, a city in Transylvania) Jews, who considered themselves Hungarian, and those in Bucharest, whose identity was Romanian. The WIZO leaders in Cluj clearly were not aware of their unidiomatic use of the language, otherwise they would have asked an aquaintance whose mother tongue was Romanian to correct their text.

14 Ibid.

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Here and there pages of advertisements interrupt the text of the cookbook, altogether nine such pages. The advertisement on the first of those pages reminds the readers to drop one leu (the Romanian currency, plural: lei) every day into the blue-white money-box of the KKL (Keen Kayemet LeYisrael, that is, the Jewish National Fund). The KKL was founded in 1901 to raise money among the Jews all over the world for the purpose of buying and developing land in Palestine. The advertisements of Transylvanian Jewish companies on the other pages are mostly in Hungarian and only rarely in German or Romanian. Most of the 24 companies who advertised were from Timisoara (until 1920: Temesvár), but there were also some from Brasov (Brassó), as well as one from Oradea (Nagyvárad) and another one from Lugoj (Lugos). Obviously, these companies paid for the ads, thus partially covering the costs of publishing the book. The name of the author is missing from the book, and the preface is also silent about the sources of the recipes and about the way they were collected, organized, and edited. The Új Kelet’s 1940 article not only mentions the WIZO cookbook and reprints three of its recipes, but it also announces the editor’s wish to start a regular column of recipes in the paper. The article asks the readers to send their recipes intended for this new column to the WIZO “leadership.” In the 1930s, there was close collaboration between this Zionist paper and the WIZO officials, something one can also see from the fact that the official journal of the Transylvanian WIZO, called A zsidó asszony (The Jewish Woman), was not a separate publication but merely a regular section in the paper. Earlier announcements in Új Kelet might have also helped the editors of the WIZO cookbook when they were gathering recipes for it. But even if some recipes in the volume came from local Jews, most of them had a different source. Cookbooks frequently do not include the author’s or editor’s name when the volume is an unauthorized translation of a foreign work or when the book’s editor copies most of the recipes from another publication without permission. This was the case here too, though the editor of the volume also had another motivation: he or she wished to give the impression that it was solely the work of WIZO members. András Szántó mentions in his introduction to the reprint edition that some parts of the volume, for example, the preface, the description of methods for keeping the Sabbath dishes warm, as well as several suggestions for cooking and housekeeping came from Mrs. Márton Rosenfeld’s Hungarian Jewish cookbook, published in 1927 in the Yugoslavian (today

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34. One of the advertising pages included in the 1938 Transylvanian WIZO cookbook. Unlike the text pages in the volume, the advertisements were printed in color. This blue-colored advertisement calls for supporting the KKL, the Jewish National Fund, so that they can acquire and develop land in Palestine.

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Serbian) city of Subotica (until 1920 Szabadka in Hungary).15 Indeed, if we compare the recipes in the two books, it becomes obvious that a significant share of them―by my estimate roughly one half―are identical in both publications. For example, in the chapter about soups, 3 recipes out of 9 can be also found in the earlier work, while for appetizers it is 8 out of 11, for “Beef prepared various ways,” “only” 2 out of 8, and for veal dishes, 3 out of 5. In the subsequent chapters, the copied recipes dominate again: in the chapter about goose dishes 10 out of 11 come from the Subotica book, in the part about smoked meats it is each and every recipe, and in the “Vegetables with meats” chapter it is all of them as well. At this point, it seemed to me a waste of time to continue the comparison, since the situation was likely to be more or less similar in the remaining chapters. But just to be sure, I checked the section about tortes. What I found was the same: the first 12 recipes in the chapter were identical with those in the work from Subotica. It is perhaps needless to say that the Transylvanian volume contains not a word about that source. It is possible that the WIZO volume’s editor received the recipes that cannot be traced to the Subotica cookbook from members of the organization, but knowing the editor’s propensity for plagiarism, I would not be surprised if he or she had similarly copied those from some work unknown to me. Although nineteenth-century cookbooks frequently included some recipes copied without permission from other publications, a theft of such magnitude was rare even in that era. Among nineteenth-century Hungarian Jewish cookbooks, only two works equal it in this respect: Julie Löv’s 1840 work, which―as mentioned before―copied nearly all its recipes from a work published in Germany, and the first Jewish cookbook in Hungarian, published in 1899, most of which is merely a translation of Therese Lederer’s 1876 German volume, of course, without disclosing this source.16 But in the twentieth century, it was becoming increasingly unacceptable to simply copy a large part of a book from an other publication, and the WIZO volume is the sole example of this among the Jewish cookbooks published in Hungary between 1900 and 1945. The book is significantly shorter than the older volume from Subotica: while that work features nearly a thousand recipes, the WIZO cookbook has

15 Rosenfeld: A zsidó nő szakácskönyve. 16 Cserna-Szabó, “Budapest, 5659.”

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less than a third of that. The trouble is not with the lesser bulk of the book, but with its editor’s choice to combine recipes from various parts of the older book into one chapter without giving it a new title that would properly describe its contents. Therefore, for example, in the WIZO volume the chapter on “Dishes made with goose meat” include not only goose dishes but also courses made with ducks, turkeys, and various kinds of smoked meat. The editor’s work was careless elsewhere too: for example, he or she copied the suggested menus for autumn and winter days, but failed to reprint those for spring and summer. Even if it is impossible to squeeze everything into a much shorter work, the editor should have either included the menus for all four seasons or left them out altogether. The uniquely Jewish dishes did not fare any better. For example, the WIZO volume failed to reprint from the earlier work one of the most important such recipes, the one for the braided challah (barches), an indispensable part of the rituals during Sabbath and other holidays. This was all the more strange, since most people followed the advice of the Shulchan Aruch to bake the challah at home instead of buying it at the baker. Although all the book’s recipes conform to kashrut rules, aside from a relatively wide selection of Pesach dishes (16 recipes) the volume features surprisingly few characteristically Jewish courses: only floden (more frequently called flódni, a pastry made with four different fillings between five layers of dough), kindli (a pastry with either walnut or poppy seed filling), ricset (a casserole of pearl barley, bean, and meat), and two kinds of cholent. That is all. Such important Jewish dishes are missing from it as chopped eggs, chopped liver, pickled herring, inarsz (goose “bacon”), p’tcha (calf’s foot), ganef (cholent dumpling), the various types of kugel, halsli (stuffed goose neck), tzimmes (sweet vegetable stew that occasionally also includes fruit and/or meat), fish in walnut sauce, kreplach (triangular filled pasta), and many other specialties. The volume not only includes no recipe for gefilte fish dumplings, but it features merely seven fish dishes, far fewer than the cookbook from Subotica, which has 26 such courses. It contains disproportionately fewer recipes for fish than for meat dishes, in spite of the fact that such courses generally played a more important role in Jewish meals than in Christian ones. As the editor of the book must have known, due to the symbolic meaning of fish in Jewish traditions, a fish dish was nearly always the first course of the dinners on Fridays and on the eves of other holidays. In this respect, the two other Hungarian Jewish cookbooks published in Romania before 1945 present

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a dissimilar picture. While Jenny Ullmann’s 1933 volume, published in Oradea (before 1920 Nagyvárad), features similarly few such dishes (merely 8 fish recipes versus 42 made with meat), this is not at all the case in Mrs. Ábrahám Ganz’s work, published in 1928 in Dej (before 1920 Dés), which contains almost as many fish dishes (12) as meat courses (13). It is difficult to explain the scarcity of Jewish specialties and fish dishes in the WIZO cookbook, and I can only guess its reasons. Although the book was meant for kosher households, it could be that strictly religious Orthodox and Hassidic women, who probably had the strongest emotional attachment to the traditional Jewish specialties, represented a minority in the Transylvanian WIZO, since it was not a religious organization but a secular Zionist one. It is equally possible, however, that there was a simpler reason: the person whom the leaders of the Transylvanian WIZO entrusted with the editing work found it easier to somewhat randomly copy recipes from the earlier work instead of considering the relative importance of dishes in Jewish traditions. Like in non-Jewish Hungarian cuisine, the meat dishes in the book are dominated by roasts and various kinds of pörkölts (traditional Hungarian meat stews), while the number of boiled and braised meat courses, more common in Jewish than in non-Jewish meals, is surprisingly low. The WIZO cookbook offers a rich choice of goose dishes (9 recipes), which reflects the popularity of them among Jews. Jews typically used goose in their cooking not only for its meat, but even more for its fat. In addition, goose-breeding has been for long one of the traditional sources of income in many rural Jewish families. It is, on the other hand, highly unusual that the book contains only five chicken dishes, disproportionately fewer than those made with goose meat. This is completely different in the earlier work published in Subotica: there the number of chicken dishes (19) is almost the same as those made with geese (20). Chicken dishes represent a similarly large share of the recipes in other Hungarian Jewish cookbooks. As in the cookbook from Subotica, the majority of the recipes in the WIZO volume are kosher versions of dishes typical of Hungarian non-Jewish middle-class cuisine. Not only the character of the recipes makes it clear that the cookbook was intended for reasonably well-to-do middle-class people, but also the text of the chapter about hospitality. This chapter offers detailed suggestions for fancy table settings, and the text also assumes that domestic help would assist in serving the courses. Although most of the dishes seem to be intended for the urban middle class, the smoking of meat at home―for

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which both books offer detailed suggestions―was generally only possible in small-town and rural households. Before 1945 in Hungary and in the regions that had been part of it until 1920, eggplant was only eaten in Transylvania and in the southernmost regions, while it was hardly known in other parts of the country. The popularity of eggplant in the Jewish cuisine of Transylvania was due to the influence of Romanian culinary culture, while in southern Hungary to that of the Serbian and Croatian. The editor of the Transylvanian WIZO volume perhaps included eggplant dishes in his work since they were popular in that region, but I suspect the main reason was that she (WIZO was a women’s organization, therefore the editor likely was a woman) happened to copy them and most of the other recipes from the cookbook published in Subotica, a town located in a southern region where eggplant was also popular. But aside from the eggplant dishes, the book features no characteristically Transylvanian specialties, which is not surprising since most of its recipes do not come from there, but from the southernmost regions of pre-1920 Hungary. One can find not only more local specialties in the two other Hungarian Jewish cookbooks published in Romania between the world wars, but they sometimes use words of the local dialect for the ingredients in the recipes. For example, they call eggplant by its Romanian name vineta, instead of padlizsán, the Hungarian word for it. Such local dialect words, only used in Transylvania but not elsewhere, are mostly missing from the WIZO cookbook, the probable reason for which is the same as for the lack of local dishes: most of the recipes in the volume come from a work published in another region. Canning was an important, even indispensable activity in the households before 1945, far more than nowadays when most people use conserves or frozen vegetables and fruits when fresh is not available, and if they spend time with canning, they do it mostly as a hobby and less as a practical necessity. The WIZO cookbook for some reason copies strikingly many recipes describing this household task from the Subotica work, disproportionately more than from other chapters of that work, thereby giving unusual emphasis to this part in the book. In most contemporaneous cookbooks, the section about baked desserts (pastries, cookies, tortes, cakes, etc.) is the longest, but here the chapters about canning take up more pages. We can find in them general information about canning, recipes for the usual preserves as well as for those put up in sugar syrup, fruit butters, jams, fruit jellies, fruit syrups, various pickles, and canned vegetables.

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In some cookboks the recipes at times contain endearingly personal kinds of instructions. The best example of this in the WIZO volume is in the presumably original recipe of a cake made in a so-called saddle-of-venison baking form. One of the instructions in this recipe suggests to use a calling- or business card for smoothing the top surface of the dough in the baking form before placing it in the oven. Strangely, the book does not mention that WIZO is a Zionist organization, for which preparing for the emigration to Palestine has been an important goal. Only one of the advertisements in the book refers to this goal by encouraging the readers to contribute money for the purchase of land in Palestine. Of course, the book is called “The WIZO Cookbook,” and since it was not sold in bookstores but could only be ordered from the management of the organization, people who obtained it were almost certainly familiar with WIZO and its goals. It is nevertheless strange that the organization did not use the book for promoting emigration and preparing for it. The preface merely says the following about the goals of the book: In publishing this book, the WIZO was guided by the thought that the modern Jewish woman needs some information and advice if she wishes to maintain a kitchen in the spirit of the Jewish religion and traditional customs. This is all very nice, but the relatively few Jewish specialties in the volume permit adherence to Jewish culinary traditions only to a limited degree. In addition, perhaps it would have made sense to say something in the preface about the other goal of Zionism: the emigration, the aliyah to Palestine. But it is possible that they intentionally failed to mention this, since they thought that the buyers of this book would know it without any explanation. In summary, one can say that the main importance of this 1938 WIZO publication has to do with its value as a document of a period: in the things it tells us about the activities of the Transylvanian Zionist movement and in the fact that it was the last Eastern European cookbook published by the organization before the Holocaust.

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RECIPES FROM THE 1938 TRANSYLVANIAN WIZO COOKBOOK

Fermented wheat bran soup (Cibereleves)* [The editor of the WIZO cookbook copied the recipes marked with an asterisk from Mrs. Márton Rosenfeld’s Hungarian Jewish cookbook, published in 1927 in Subotica, Yugoslavia, a town that until 1920 was part of Hungary.] Ingredients: 1⅓ liters wheat bran, 20 dekas starter dough, salt and pepper to fit the point of a knife, 2 dekas flour, 3 deciliters sour cream, 3 egg yolks, 1 clove garlic. We scald the wheat bran with boiling water, transfer it to a bigger pot, and when it starts to cool we fill three quarters of the pot with lukewarm water. We crumble 20 dekas starter dough or a piece of toasted bread over this, add a little salt, and place the pot in a lukewarm place. In two-three days it will ferment, then we strain as much of it as we need for cooking. We start to cook this strained liquid, season it with salt and pepper, and those who like garlic can add that too. We let it boil for a while, then set it aside. Meanwhile, we stir 3 egg yolks and the flour into 3 deciliters sour cream and mix this into the boiling wheat bran soup.

Whipped egg white dumplings (Habgaluska) Ingredients: 2 eggs, 3 dekas flour, salt to fit the point of a knife, 2 spoons water. We whip 2 egg whites until firm and gently mix 2 egg yolks into it. We add 3 dekas of flour, 2 teaspoons of water, and a little salt. We make small dumplings from this and cook them in the strained, boiling soup.

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Pockets of veal lungs for soup garnish (Tüdős táska) Ingredients: 15 dekas veal lungs, 3 dekas fat, ½ onion, 1 egg, 2—3 stalks parsley, pinch of ground black pepper and salt. For the dough: 1 egg, 20 dekas flour, 2—3 soupspoons water. Cook veal lungs until nicely tender and grind them very finely. In a pot, lightly brown finely chopped parsley and onions in a little fat, add the ground lungs, salt, ground black pepper, and one egg. Let it cool. Prepare a noodle dough, and roll it out to two equal-sized, very thin sheets. Place small heaps of the filling on one of the dough sheets and cover it with the other one. Cut the sheets with a ravioli cutter between the heaps and cook them in boiling soup.

Stuffed lamb (Töltött bárány) Ingredients: 1 kilo lamb shoulder, 3 dekas fat. Filling: 2 bread rolls, 3 eggs, ¼ of an onion, ½ bunch of parsley, pepper to fit the point of a knife, 15 dekas fat. We stuff the shoulder of tender lamb with the kind of filling used for stuffing chicken, only that we also add a chopped hard-cooked egg to it. (The filling: we soak bread rolls, squeeze them out, roll them in fat, remove them from it, break 2 whole eggs over them, and add a little grated onion, parsley, salt, pepper, and a little fat. We mix all this well.) We sew up the lamb, braise it in the oven, while basting it frequently until it is tender, and then roast it until it turns brown.

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Jellied goose (Libakocsonya)* We start cooking the cut-up giblets in plenty of cold water. When it comes to a boil, we add a few whole black peppers, a little salt, one or two heads of onions, two or three cloves of garlic, and, should we wish, a small piece of seeded hot pepper. We cook all this until nicely tender. When the meat is sufficiently tender and the cooking liquid has boiled down and it is appropriately sticky, like an aspic, then we mash two or three garlic cloves with a little salt and paprika, dilute it with a little cold water, and pour it over the cooked meat and its liquid. We bring this once or twice to a boil. We pour off the liquid from the meat and transfer the pieces to plates. We strain the liquid and let it rest until it settles. We skim off the fat. We pour the transparent and clean liquid over the meat. We keep this in a cold place. We can sprinkle it with red paprika to make it even more beautiful. If there is still too much liquid left when the meat is already tender, we remove the meat and continue cooking the liquid. We add the garlic only before the last one or two times of bringing the liquid to a boil. Should we like carrot and parsley root in this dish, we can also add small pieces of them.

Cholent with pearl barley (Sólet gerslivel)* We slowly sweat one finely chopped onion and one or two cloves of garlic in fat, without paprika. We need significantly more fat for this than for the bean cholent. We place the pelvis of a goose or a fat piece of brisket, perhaps both, into the pot. We pour two and a half deciliters pearl barley and one deciliter white beans over the meat, and add enough water to this so that by the time everything in the pot gets tender sufficient liquid is left for browning. The pearl barley cholent will get tasty only if we placed a flour-filled goose neck in it. This should be prepared the following way: We rub the necessary amount of flour into melted fat so that it gets nicely moist, add salt, ground pepper, a little paprika, and as much water as needed for it to

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come together. We blend it with a spoon and fill it into the removed and washed skin of a goose neck. We sew the ends closed, place it in a shallow bowl, scald it with hot water, remove any remaining feathers from it, rinse it in lukewarm water until clean, and bury it in the pearl barley at the time when we add the meat to the cholent.

Stuffed eggplant (Törökparadicsom töltve)* [Eggplant was little or not at all known in much of Hungary before 1945, that is why the author of the recipe found it necessary to tell when it is in season and to describe how it looks.] One finds eggplants at the markets around autumn; it is a purpleskinned, pear-shaped fruit. We wash it, wipe it, and cut it lengthwise into halves. We score its flesh with a knife, place it with cut side down in an oiled or greased baking pan, and briefly bake it in a hot oven. After taking them out, we spoon out their inner flesh, chop it, sweat finely chopped onion in oil or fat until yellow, mix it with finely chopped parsley, add ground pepper, salt, mix 5–6 dekas finely chopped roasted chicken breast or veal with it, and sautée this mixture. We fill the hollowed eggplants with this, place them in a well-greased baking pan, sprinkle toasted bread crumbs on top, pour some fat or juice of a roast over them, and bake them in the oven. We can serve them with tomato sauce on the side.

Walnut- or poppy seed-filled pastry packages (Kindli)* Rub 36 dekas fat into 1 kilo flour. Add 8 dekas confectioners’ sugar, ½ deka salt, ½ deka fresh yeast moistened with a little water, 1 spoon rum or wine, and 2 deciliters water or wine. Knead this quickly and let it rest for a few hours in a cold place. Divide it into eight parts,

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make little loaves of them, and, while flouring the dough as little as possible, roll out the loaves with a rolling pin to slightly greater thickness than a matchstick. Spread the filling over it, roll it up into an elongated package, and with your fingers pinch the top to create a series of notches. Brush the tops with egg white, and initially bake them in a hot oven until their tops start to color, and then continue baking in moderate heat for at least ¾ hour. Walnut filling: We chop 65 dekas shelled walnuts with a knife, and pour a syrup over it, which we cooked from 28-30 dekas sugar and 1½ deciliters water. We add grated lemon peel, a little clove, and ground cinnamon. We let it cook, and if it is too hard, pour a little water to it. We brush the rolled-out dough with melted fat and sprinkle it with honey, scatter 12½ dekas raisins over them, 10 dekas finely chopped orange peel, and 12½ dekas black grapes. Here and there we can also add a little fruit butter to it. Poppy seed filling: We cook 25 dekas sugar and ½ deciliter water into a syrup, scald 35 dekas ground poppy seed with this, and mix into this lemon peel, a little ground cloves, and 12½ dekas raisins. When it is cold, we spread it over the dough, sprinkle it with a little melted honey and fat, and roll it up.

Pastry with four layers of filling (Floden) [This is a version of flódni, a Hungarian Jewish pastry, originally from the late nineteenth century and mostly prepared for Purim.] Make it from half of the kindli dough [see the previous recipe]. After letting the dough rest, divide it into five equal parts, and roll each one out. Place a dough sheet in the baking pan, cover it with the walnut filling, place another dough sheet on top, and spread poppy seed filling over it. Over the next dough layer, spread thick jam, then apple slices cooked with a little sugar. Cover this again with a dough sheet, and brush it with eggwhite. Bake it first in a hot oven and then at moderate heat.

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Dishes for Pesach

Fermented beet soup (Céklaleves)* [This is the kind of fermented beet soup―called rosl or rosl burik in many Eastern European regions―that is usually made for Pesach.] We clean a few beets, about 1–1½ kilos, and cut them into smaller pieces. We add a handful of salt and pour 8–10 liters water to it. We cover it with a cloth, so that nothing should touch it, and let it ferment in a warm place. We do this two weeks before Pesach. Naturally, we make it with a clean cloth, at a separate place, and in a special Pesach dish. At the time when we wish to use it, we strain the necessary amount of liquid, bring it to a boil, and season it with salt and pepper. In a soup bowl, we beat a few whole eggs until they turn foamy, add a little cold water to it, and, while constantly stirring the eggs with a wire whisk, we pour in the soup, carefully, so that the eggs do not curdle. To prevent this, we pour it back from the bowl into the pot, and we repeat this a few times until the soup becomes nicely smooth. The soup should be light pink, properly eggy, and―most importantly―hot. We serve it with cooked and drained potatoes on the side.

Potato torte with almonds (Mandulás burgonyatorta)* We stir 8 egg yolks with 8 dekas sugar until foamy. Meanwhile, we stir 8 dekas of cold fat until it too becomes foamy. We mix 24 dekas cooked and mashed potatoes into this, and stir it until smooth. We add the grated zest of one lemon to the egg yolks, the well-stirred, almost foamy potatoes, 12 dekas ground almonds, 1 spoon fine matzo flour, and 8 egg whites whipped with 8 dekas sugar. After it is baked, we coat it with a chocolate glaze.

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35. Bowls of matzo ball soup in one of the non-Jewish restaurants in today’s Budapest. Photograph by Tas Tóbiás.

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PART TWO

Culinary Culture

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36. The beginning of Budapest’s Király Street from the direction of today’s Deák Ferenc Square in about 1900. The Café Herzl, founded in c. 1835, was on the left side of Király Street, not far from the corner. Unfortunately, no photograph survives of the café, but it was behind the awnings of the corner building. Photograph by Antal Weinwurm (1845–1918).

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6. Bólesz, a Forgotten Jewish Pastry of Nineteenth-Century Pest

I

n 1815, Kristóf Gyertyánffy (1766–1843), a member of a family of Armenian origin that had been ennobled in the last years of the eighteenth century, decided to build an enormous building on Ország Road (Landstrasse, today: Károly Boulevard), on the left corner where Király Street branches off the Boulevard, since he hoped that many Jewish merchants from the nearby Jewish market (Zsidópiac), as well as from Király Street and its side streets, would rent apartments in his new building. His hopes were fulfilled, and soon most of the tenants in Gyertyánffy House―the way the building was known― were Jews, and even some Jewish institutions rented space there. In 1864, a new floor was added, making it Pest’s first five-story residential building. At about this time, the Hungarian branch of the Viennese Anker Life- and Annuity-Insurance Company moved into the building, and renamed it to Anker Court. The structure was demolished in 1907, since the leaders of the Anker Insurance Company decided to replace it with their new headquarters on the property, which by then they owned. On the opposite corner of Károly Boulevard and Király Street stood the so-called Orczy House, an even older and bigger building than the Gyertyánffy House. Originally, it was built as two large adjacent buildings in the eighteenth century and was completely rebuilt into one structure by Count József Orczy around the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The huge building complex thus created soon became the bustling center of Jewish life in Pest and stayed that way almost until its demolition in 1936. The vast Orczy House, built around two very large courtyards, was originally a two-level structure, and only in 1829 was it enlarged into the three-story building we know from old photographs. The Café Herzl, one of Pest’s most popular and oldest coffeehouses, was located on the Király Street side of the Gyertyánffy House. As we know from

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a 1908 newspaper advertisement of the café in Pesti Hírlap (Pest Journal), it had been there since about 1838. Although it was mostly visited by Jews, its first lessee must have been a Christian, since before 1864 the coffee sellers’ guild did not permit Jews to own or lease coffee shops. People in Pest gave it the affectionate nickname “Hercli” and mostly spoke of it as a “Jewish coffeehouse,” though it was officially merely a coffee shop, since it lacked pool tables, one of the requirements for a café that wanted to call itself a coffeehouse. When the Anker Court was demolished in 1907, the Café Herzl moved to a nearby location on the same side of Király Street, but it seems that it did not do as well there as at its original address. We learn about the demise of the more than three quarters-of-a-century-old café from the May 9, 1915 issue of Friss újság (approx.: Current News): “Pool table, the rim of a coffeehouse range, copper pots, nickel silver dishes for sale at any price due to business liquidation. Herzl Coffeehouse, 10 Király St.” Around 1908, the firm S. Schwarcz and Co. (Sámuel and Ignácz Schwarcz) became the owners of the coffeehouse, though they handed over its daily management to Zsófia Herzl, a descendant of the family that had originally rented and named the café. It is possible that earlier Adolf Herzl, Zsófia’s relative (father?, brother?, husband?) had been the lessee, though all we can learn from the surviving documents is that he too was a coffee seller and for a while shared an address with Zsófia. According to an even earlier news report,1 in 1895 David Herzl was the owner of the Herzl coffeehouse at 2 Király Street. In 1920, the Transylvanian physician and writer Kálmán Osvát (1880– 1953) published a sequence of fictitious conversations, called “Headwaiter,” in the literary magazine, Zord Idő (Grim times), a biweekly he had founded and helped to edit. The first piece in the series is set in the former Herzl Coffeehouse, which Osvát first visited when he was a schoolboy in 1895 and where―as he recalls―the headwaiter politely greeted him and his young friends with “Good evening, Gentlemen!” when, coming from Hebrew class, they entered on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Osvát mentions that looking out the window of the Herzl he saw two cheese stores in the building (the Orczy House) across the street. We know the names of the stores’ owners from city records: Mayer Rosenberg and David Drucker. We even have a photograph of

1

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Fővárosi Közlöny 97–98 (December 10, 1895), 8.

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37. The Anker Court (left) and the Orczy House (right) in about 1897. The ornate pavillion in the foreground of the photo served as an entrance to the continent’s first subway, which opened in 1896. The pavillion also provided space for the flower shop of the Reinisch brothers. Contemporary postcard.

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38. David Drucker’s cheese store at 3 Király Street in the late nineteenth century. The signboard left of the entrance is in Yiddish. A few years earlier, the same store had been located next door in the Orczy House, a building on the right side of this photo. Drucker’s store was one of the two cheese stores the teenager Kálmán Osvát saw in 1895 from across the street, from the window of the Café Herzl. This chapter includes an excerpt from a story he wrote about it. Photograph by Antal Weinwurm.

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B ólesz

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Drucker’s store from the very last years of the nineteenth century, by which time it was no longer located in the Orczy House, but in 3 Király Street, the adjacent building. In the photograph, the signboard left of the store’s entrance is in Yiddish, which by the 1890s was quite a rarity even in the city’s old Jewish quarter, where the shop was located, since by that time most Budapest Jews preferred to speak Hungarian or German. I have been coming here for twenty-five years, headwaiter.2 Do not look at me so sceptically! In ninety-five (you were not even born yet), the Herzl coffeehouse already existed on the corner of Király Street, and before leaving the place one had to pay there too. […] Today I know that useless, idle old men and widowed women (from forty-five to fifty) used to frequent the Herzl coffeehouse, but then my stupid little head felt intoxicated when I heard the clattering of the dominos and the rustle of the fans. I was somebody: at the waving of my hand the headwaiter, like the captain of an oceanliner, issued commands and a tail-coated waiter forwarded it: “Double portion cream!” From the belly of the ship a muffled voice echoed it: “Double portion cream!” With the tiniest delay the machinery came into motion, the spoon, the serving tray, the small plate of sugar cubes rattled and the narrow coffee cup with soft-stiff whipped cream on its top, with white brioche and a stiffly ironed napkin on its side flew to my table… I became captivated then, headwaiter, and I remained captivated for twenty-five years. Király Street is a narrow alley there, it widens only further down. Through the window of the Herzl I watched the evening life on the opposite side. Two cheese stores and a grocery were lurking there beneath three stories. On the left, perhaps in a single-story building, a pale-faced,

2 Since this is a fictitious conversation, some of its details might be invented. For example, if Osvát’s initial visit to the Herzl had happened in 1895, he could not have chatted with its waiter 25 years later, since the Herzl had ceased to exist in 1915. Notwithstanding, Osvát clearly relied on his own recollections in describing the Herzl―and this is more important for us.

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39. This caricature of a typical Jewish petit bourgeois sitting in front of the Café Herzl was part of a regular column that appeared in 1895 in the humorous magazine called Kakas Márton (Martin Rooster). The title of the column was “Móni (Manny, Emánuel) Feigenblatt in front of the Herzl coffeehouse” (Feigenblatt Móni a Herzl-kávéház előtt). In the column, the caricature was always accompanied by Móni’s witty remarks, such as “If I weren’t Móni Feigenblatt, I would like to be Számi (Sammy) Goldstein.” Caricature by Lajos Linek (1859–1941).

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blondly peoted,3 thin little Jew was selling Hebrew books.4 […] No one ever opened the door of the bookstore; its owner sat hunched over a book, black-striped prayer shawls lined the wooden frame of the shopwindow, and the boy languishing in the Herzl got a taste of the Orient…5 My favorite Hungarian food writer, Elek Magyar (1875–1947), who used the pen name of Ínyesmester (Master Gourmet), wrote the following about the by then long defunct coffeehouse in his weekly food column in 1928: “Seekers of a special experience also visited the Herzl coffeehouse at the beginning of Király Street, close to Freund [a famous kosher pastry shop]. In the shop windows of this well-known gathering and deal-making place of matchmakers towers of farmer cheese delklis [similar to cheese Danishes] and walnut bólesz [a yeast dough pastry] lured the passers-by into the store.”6 Vilmos Balla (1862–1934) in a series of newspaper articles, which he wrote in 1925 and 1926 for the Pesti Hírlap about the coffeehouses of old Budapest and which he published again in book form in 1927, also fondly recalls the Herzl, as well as the coffee and bólesz sold there: The fame of its exquisite coffee and pastries was transmitted from one generation to the next, a quality that was exactly the same in the dark period of absolutism in the nineteenth century and in the first happy years of this century. […] One could get the tastiest snack there, including coffee made from beans freshly roasted every day on the premises

3 Peot (Hebrew for corners, edges, or ends): long locks of hair hanging from the temples of Orthodox and Hassidic Jewish boys and men. 4 In 1895, when Osvát first visited the Herzl, no four-story or single-story house stood opposite the coffeehouse, only the three-story Orczy House, the long façade of which occupied the other side of Király Street. It is possible that the bookstore Osvát describes belonged to the M. E. Löwy’s Sohn firm, a shop that more than forty years earlier had published the world’s first cookbook in Hebrew letters, the subject of the first study in the present volume. This bookstore still existed in 1895. 5 Kálmán Osvát, “Szempontok” [Considerations], Zord idő, December 1, 1920, 967–68. 6 Ínyesmester (Elek Magyar), “Fejezetek az ínyesmesterség köréből: A dunaparti Brauntól a vácikörúti Herz Rafael Rezsőig” [Chapters from the sphere of gastronomy: From the Braun restaurant near the Danube to the one owned by Rafael Rezső Herz on Váci Boulevard], Pesti Napló (Pest Diary), March 4, 1928.

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and mixed with rich milk coming from the estate of the Royal Palace in Gödöllő. It was served in very large glasses, topped with whipped cream of the thickness of two fingers and accompanied by five sugar cubes. [...] The spectacular coffee always came with a special pastry: the classic bólesz. This yeast pastry, made with raisins and cinnamon, was virtually a legend, and its enthusiastic public was not only from this area [By this he must have meant, that not only the lower middle-class Jews of the neighborhood frequented the place]. Such a complete serving cost 16 krajcárs. There were also lots of customers who came mornings and afternoons to take home some of the fine coffee and the soft, fluffy spirals of the yeast pastry. [...] In addition to the incomparable beverages and pastries, this place had yet another distinguishing feature: the professional matchmakers,7 be they male or female, came there.8 As is obvious from the above, people went to the Herzl not only since the matchmakers met their clients there, but even more for the cheese delkli and bólesz of the coffeehouse. Cheese delkli or cheese Danish is, of course, a well known and popular pastry to this day, but what was the by now completely forgotten bólesz, which Elek Magyar and Vilmos Balla, journalists who knew the hospitality industry of early twentieth-century Budapest well, praised so exuberantly even decades after the demise of the coffeehouse? Briefly described: they are yeast dough spirals or snails, filled with a mixture of cinnamon, sugar, raisins and chopped walnuts. The bólesz is distantly related to the Austro-Hungarian wasp’s nest and walnut snail pastries, as well as to the Danish snails, cinnamon snails and cinnamon rolls of some American cookbooks. Herzl’s bólesz must have been especially delicious, but we have to assume that Jewish homemakers also prepared it for their families, otherwise contemporary newspapers would not have considered it a characteristically Jewish specialty. Though, as some articles in nineteenth-century newspapers

7

Shadkhan in Hebrew, shadchen in Yiddish, plural: shadchonim.

8 Balla, A kávéforrás, 61–62.

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40. This caricature with the title “From Terézváros” appeared in the February 14, 1869 issue of Borsszem Jankó (Johnny Peppercorn), a humorous magazine. Terézváros was a Pest district with a large Jewish minority: 36% in 1870. The caption of the caricature is: “Jókai succeeded in persuading some undecided voters to join the camp of the opposition.” Mór Jókai, the most popular Hungarian novelist of the nineteenth century, was elected to serve as MP for this district in 1869. He is in the middle, the man left of him in Hungarian-style costume represents the district’s Christian voters, the men to the right of the writer and behind him represent the Jewish population. The sign pointing in the direction where they are heading says “opposition.” Caricature by Karel Klič.

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tell us, the bólesz was also known in a few other parts of Hungary,9 it seems to have been most common and popular in the capital. The fact that it is missing from all nineteenth-century Jewish cookbooks published in Hungary, as well as from those printed in Germany and Prague that I am familiar with, also seems to indicate that by and large it was a local specialty. Though other nineteenth-century Hungarian authors also mention bólesz, it most frequently appears in the works of Adolf Ágai and in the humorous magazine called Borsszem Jankó (Johnny Peppercorn). Ágai (1836–1916) was a Jewish writer, humorist and journalist, who was a highly popular author of his time. Borsszem Jankó, which he founded in 1868 and edited until 1905, was the most successful humorous magazine in Hungary. Its main subjects were politics and social criticism, and most of its readers came from the middle class, primarily the Jews of Pest. A good example of the writings where bólesz is mentioned is a humorous scene featured in Borsszem Jankó in 1869, when at long last Jews could vote and be elected in parliamentary elections.10 Mór Jókai (1825–1904), a famous novelist who was popular not only in Hungary but also in Victorian England, decided to campaign to get elected as the MP from Terézváros, a district of Pest. More Jews lived in this district than in any other of the city: 27% of the people in Terézváros were Jewish in 1850, which represented nearly three quarters of Pest’s total Jewish population.11 The Christian (Calvinist) writer was highly popular among the Jews, not only for his novels, but also for always showing great sympathy for them in his adult life.12 The following excerpt from this humorous scene,13 called “Who should be cheered? Election

9 For example, according to an article in the December 1, 1891 issue of Szegedi Hírlap (Szeged Journal), the pastry was much liked in the vicinity of Szeged, a city in southeastern Hungary, and from a feuilleton-novel in the May 24, 1893 issue of Pesti Hírlap (Pest Journal) we learn that it was also popular in Keresztfalu, a probably fictitious village near Arad, a city also in southeastern Hungary. 10 The law permitting this was enacted in 1867. 11 Sebők, “Zsidók Budapesten.” 12 Although as an adult Jókai was almost a philo-Semite, in his recollections “Me and the Jews,” (“Én és a zsidók”), which is part of his volume entitled “From my Life” (Életemből) (Budapest: Mór Ráth Publisher, 1886) he freely admits that in his childhood he was an anti-Semite. 13 Borsszem Jankó, March 31, 1869, 48–49.

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efforts in the capital” (Ki a vivát? Választási rugaszkodások a fővárosban), shows well that at least in Pest people considered bólesz a typical Jewish food, comparable in that respect with cholent. The scene takes place in an unnamed café of Terézváros, perhaps the Herzl. Much buzzing of people. Czvórach,14 the coffee seller looks delighted as he greets the guests. Jolly shouts can be heard from outside, echoed noisily from inside. […] Czvórach, the owner: Uncle Gedaljeh,15 what would you like to order? Tea with rum, two pieces of delicious bólesz! Hurry, one after the other!― Ach, young Mr. Gänsewitz,16 greetings! When will the president come? (Voices from outside: Long live the president!) Lébele,17 electioneering agent (jumps into the room while holding a flag): […] Jewish people can vote at last! Cholent makes delicious repast, But the bólesz is better still, For a Jew to vote is a thrill.

14 Probably from the Polish zworach, jumpers. According to a 1939 article in a Transylvanian Zionist paper (“Telavivi figurák: A jeke.” Új Kelet, July 9, 1939, 7), the word cvorach was once commonly used in Hungarian Yiddish. Unfortunately, the article merely lists such once common words, but does not explain them. Perhaps it means a busybody person, but this is only a guess. 15 He is named after Gedaliah, the righteous governor of Judah, mentioned in the Bible. The Fast of Gedalia, a minor Jewish fast day, observed usually in September, mourns his assassination. 16 “Son of geese.” This humorous name is a reference to the meat and fat of geese (in German: Gans, plural Gänse), which used to play important roles in Jewish cuisine, and also to the many Jewish goose breeders and goose merchants. In addition, it is also a reference to the many Jewish family names ending with “-witz,” “-vitz,” and their variants (Abramovitz, Berkovits, Boskovitz, Jakobovics etc.). These endings are variations of such Slavic suffixes as the Russian and Ukrainian “-vich,” “-vic,” “-witz,” and the Polish “-wicz,” all of which mean the “son of,” “child of,” or “family of.” Originally mostly Christian families had such names, but later many Jewish families chose them too. 17 The diminutive form of the Yiddish personal name Leib or Leyb, which means lion. It is the Yiddish version of the Hebrew name Yehuda (Judah), with reference to the Bible’s description of Judah az “a lion’s whelp” (Genesis, 49:9).

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[…] Jókai is a milchig18 guy, Whose milk can is never dry. If he has much butter also, Terézváros19 will have no woe. Hungarian patriot Jews Will not let Mór Jókai lose. Good sweet butter and cottage cheese! Shout: “Long live Mór Jókai!” Please! Heigh-ho! Ki le’olam hasdo!20 In my 2017 book about the cultural history of Hungarian Jewish cuisine, I wrote the following about this once very popular pastry: They were one of the few Sephardic specialties adopted by Hungary’s Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. Their name is also of Sephardic origin: it comes from the Ladino21 word for “ball.” They were made of yeast dough, which initially had been fried in oil, but a baked version containing raisins, chopped walnuts, and perhaps also diced, candied fruit had already been more common for a long time. The pastry was introduced to Western Europe by Jews who had been forced to leave Spain and Portugal at the end of the fifteenth century. It became especially popular in Holland― where many Portuguese Jews had settled―and presumably it was there where the version evolved […] that was sold at the Herzl.22

18 Yiddish for dairy foods. 19 Budapest district with a large Jewish population. 20 Hebrew (from the Book of Psalms, 136): His mercy endures for ever. 21 Judeo-Spanish language used by many Sephardic Jews. Ball means bala in Ladino, and bola in Spanish and Portuguese. 22 Körner, A magyar zsidó konyha, 261.

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This account of the history of the pastry, which I largely based on what Gil Marks wrote about it in his excellent Encyclopedia of Jewish Food,23 in spite of a few minor inaccuracies, is essentially correct, but it errs in assuming that the bólesz sold at the Herzl was roughly the same as its presumed Dutch ancestor. The reason for my error is that at the time I knew only two or three sketchy and incomplete descriptions of Herzl’s bólesz, and I drew the wrong conclusion from them. Since then, however, I managed to find its recipe in a newspaper article Elek Magyar had written in 1935 for the Pesti Napló (Pest Diary),24 which clearly shows that the Hungarian bólesz shared only its name and basic idea with the Dutch bolus. In addition to finding this recipe since the publication of my book, today I know more about the pastry’s history and its various Dutch versions. My earlier description was correct insofar as Portuguese Jews who settled in Holland developed the Dutch versions of bola by varying the idea of a traditional Sephardi yeast dough pastry of Spanish and Portuguese origin. The version that is best-known to this day comes from Zeeland, a province in southwestern Netherlands. Jewish refugees from Spain and Portugal, some of them marranos, forced converts to Christianity, had been living in Middelburg, the capital of Zeeland, since the early seventeenth century. In 1654, this population was augumented by Portuguese Jews arriving from Brazil, though they did not remain in the city for long but moved to Amsterdam. The last few Sephardi Jews remaining in Middelburg joined the local Ashkenazi community in 1725. The ancestor of the Zeeland bolus (zeeuwse bolus) was created by Sephardic Jewish bakers in Zeeland, perhaps in Middelburg, in the first half of the seventeenth century, and it was later further developed by local non-Jewish bakers. It is prepared by shaping yeast dough into 8 inch-long strands of about ¾” diameter, rolling them first in a mixture of cinnamon and brown sugar, then twisting them into a spiral shape, letting this rise again, and finally baking it. The soft, cinnamon-scented pastry, sticky from melted sugar, is best eaten fresh, when it is still warm, possibly with a lump of butter on top. These days only about forty Jews live in Middelburg, but the Gentile population also likes this local specialty. Since 1998, every year during “bolus week,”

23 Marks, Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, 39. 24 I wish to thank Noémi Saly, who helped me in my search.

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the Zeeland bolus-baking championship is held, and the winner, selected by expert judges, receives the Bolus Trophy and can call him- or herself the “Best bolus baker” for a year. Both the gemberbolus, a version of the pastry made with candied ginger, and the orgeadebolus, which is filled with almond paste, became popular primarily in Amsterdam. Supposedly, these varieties were also first created by Jews of Portuguese origin in the seventeenth century. For these bolus types, a pastry board is sprinkled with a mixture of sugar and cinnamon, and then the dough is rolled out on it into ¼ inch-thick strips of about 7 inch × 2 inch. Now a filling of chopped candied ginger or almond paste is spooned along the middle of those strips, the strips are rolled into sausages, which are then twisted into spirals, sprinkled with ginger or almond syrup, and baked. Unlike the dough of the Zeeland bolus, that of the ginger bolus contains a little cinnamon, so it is not only the sugar-cinnamon mixture sticking to the surface of the dough-sausages that flavors the pastry. The fruit bolus is made similarly to the ginger and the almond paste ones, only that chopped apple or pear is spooned onto the dough strips instead of candied ginger or almond paste. Jews in some other countries, for example, in England, also used to make similarly named desserts, but those did not resemble the Zeeland and Amsterdam varieties at all. Already the first English Jewish cookbook from 1846, The Jewish Manual, or, Practical Information in Jewish and Modern Cookery: With a Collection of Valuable Recipes & Hints Relating to the Toilette, edited “by a Lady,” whom later research identified as Judith, Lady Montefiore (1784–1862), included a few desserts called bola. Her cookbook includes both Ashkenazi and Sephardi recipes. Judith Montefiore was familiar with both of these cultures, since she had been born into an Ashkenazi family of Dutch origin, but her husband came from a distinguished Sephardi one, and after her marriage she herself joined the Sephardi congregation. At the time, lots of Sephardim lived in Britain, most of them of Spanish or Portuguese origin, others of Italian, like Sir Moses Montefiore, her husband. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett writes the following about the bolas in Lady Montefiore’s cookbook: The recipes in The Jewish Manual are, indeed, “rare and exquisite,” as Lady Montefiore promised, including as they do delicacies from the Western and Eastern Sephardic repertoires. The Bola d’Amor is a spectacular confection in the shape of a cone, consisting of alternating

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41. The Zeeland bolus (zeeuwse bolus), a yeast pastry of Sephardic Jewish origin, which first became popular in the Zeeland region of the Netherlands, and later in the whole country. It probably served as the inspiration for a Hungarian Jewish pastry, called bólesz, a specialty of the Café Herzl in Pest’s old Jewish quarter.

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layers of marzipan, sugary egg threads, and citron, and garnished with gold and silver leaf and myrtle. Other cakes and sweets, such as the Bola Toliedo (Toledo cake), Bola d’Hispaniola (Spanish cake), Prenesas, Sopa d’oro (soup of gold), Doce25 (sweet), Macrotes, and Chejados, make ample use of sugar syrup, rose and orange waters, almonds, coconut, and egg yolks.26 But while the bolas of England and other European countries have mostly disappeared by now27 and are only mentioned in historical works, the Dutch boluses retain their popularity in Holland. The Hungarian bólesz was probably inspired by Dutch versions, at least their nearly identical names and the fact that both are snail-type pastries make this likely. Presumably, a Hungarian who visited Holland in the first half of the nineteenth century was so enchanted by the pastry that upon returning home tried to bake something similar. But perhaps he or she could not recall exactly how the Dutch pastry was made, since the Hungarian version resembles far more the popular local pastries of walnut snail (diós csiga) and wasp’s nest (darázsfészek) than any of the Dutch bolus varieties. We can thank the food writer and journalist Elek Magyar, whose inspired essays about food have real literary value, that the recipe of the pastry’s Hungarian version has survived. In 1928, he used the pen name of Ínyesmester (Master Gourmet) to start a weekly food column, called “Chapters from the Sphere of Gastronomy” (Fejezetek az ínyesmesterség köréből), in which he occasionally wrote about Jewish dishes and restaurants. Magyar was not Jewish, but―typical of his curiosity and openness―he showed genuine interest in local Jewish traditions and cuisine. Another reason for the paper’s occasional articles about Jewish cuisine could have been that Jews made up

25 The Portuguese doce, the Spanish dulce, and the Italian dolce all come from the Latin dulcis. 26 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Kosher Gourmet,” 58. 27 An exception to this is a sweet yeast bread, called il bollo that Italian Jews traditionally prepare for Sukkot and for breaking the fast after Yom Kippur. Its recipe was probably brought to Italy by Spanish Sephardic refugees in the fifteenth century. The word bolo can also be found in the names of many Portuguese cakes, since it is the generic name for cake in Portuguese. Similarly, in today’s Spain bollo is a generic term for breakfast pastry, found in bakeries and cafeterias.

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a substantial part of the newspaper’s readership, as well of those who sent questions and recipe-requests to him. Magyar not only wrote about this kind of food in his weekly column, but he also included a few Jewish specialties in his cookbooks,28 clearly since he considered them to be organic parts of Hungarian cuisine. Although he left the bólesz out of his books, luckily in 1935 he published its recipe in his column. Magyar himself was not a practicing cook, but ever since his childhood he had been interested in how it was done.29 We know from his writings that he frequently visited the Herzl, which he had plenty of opportunities to do, since he was already forty years old, and had been a journalist for decades, when the coffeehouse finally closed in 1915. By 1935, the bólesz was almost completely forgotten in Hungary, therefore it is unlikely that Magyar got the recipe then. It is far more probable that he learned how the bólesz was made from the Herzl’s lessee or from the person who baked the cakes there, since as far as I know no other café or pastry shop sold this pastry and it is not featured in any cookbook. We make a sponge with 10 dekagrams flour, 3 dekagrams yeast, and lukewarm milk. After it has risen, we combine it with 2–3 egg yolks, 10 dekagrams pounded sugar, 10 dekagrams butter, a little salt, and as much lukewarm milk as is necessary for a dough similar to a bread dough. We knead it well by hand and let it stand covered for a quarter of an hour. We roll it out to the thickness of a little finger and about 20 centimeter wide, brush it with a little melted butter, sprinkle it with

28 Magyar’s cookbooks published by Athenaeum during his life: Az ínyesmester szakácskönyve: 2200 recept [The Master Gourmet’s cookbook, 2,200 recipes], 1932; Az ínyesmester szakácskönyve, 2500 recept [The Master Gourmet’s cookbook: 2,500 recipes], 1935; Az ínyesmester 1000 új receptje [1,000 new recipes by the Master Gourmet], 1935; Az ínyesmester szakácskönyve: 2500 recept [The Master Gourmet’s cookbook: 2,500 recipes], 1937; Az ínyesmester szakácskönyve: Új, lényegesen bővített kiadás [The Master Gourmet’s cookbook: New, substantially expanded edition], 1939, 1941; Az ínyesmester szakácskönyve: Új, bővített kiadás [The Master Gourmet’s cookbook: New and expanded edition], 1946. 29 As Pál Magyar, his son, recalled in a preface to a much later edition of his father’s cookbook: “He had two sisters, but it was he who already as a child showed a lively interest in the ways food was prepared at home, and through this he became familiar with the cooking methods.” In The Master Gourmet’s Cookbook (Budapest: Akkord, 2000).

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42. The bólesz at the Café Herzl must have been similar to this version of it, prepared according to Elek Magyar’s recipe. Photograph by Young Suh.

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some walnuts, rasins, and cinnamon, roll it up to resemble a jelly roll, and slice it into about 8-centimeter thick slices. We lay these slices, about a finger thickness away from each other, onto a baking pan that has a high rim, we brush their sides with a little butter, let them rise, and bake them. Naturally, the baking pan must also be buttered. (When they are half baked, we can drizzle them with a mixture of milk and sugar.)30 Hopefully, I managed to pique the readers’ curiosity for this wonderfully cinnamon-scented, soft-textured, easy-to-tear-apart pastry. I would be delighted if some of my more adventurous readers decided to prepare this once so popular dessert, in order to complement the experience of reading about it. To make their work easier, I include here my version of the recipe, which is more detailed and more similar to those in modern cookbooks than the one above. It would also please me greatly if some of the cafés and restaurants in Budapest’s old Jewish quarter decided to make this traditional Sephardic pastry available again in the same neighborhood where it once made the Café Herzl so famous.

BÓLESZ

Yield: 8 pastries Total time: about 3 hours 10 minutes Comments: It is customary to add a little sugar to the sponge, since it helps to activate the yeast, so I included it in the recipe. In addition, I let the kneaded dough rise longer, since a quarter of an hour is not sufficient for this.

30 Elek Magyar, “Fejezetek az ínyesmesterség köréből” [Chapters from the sphere of gastronomy]. Pesti Napló (Pest Diary), July 28, 1935.

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It is easy and quick to make chopped nuts in a food processor. Repeatedly pulse for 1–2 seconds and always check in between until the nuts are chopped to about 1/8-inch size. Equipment: two medium sized (13 inch × 9 inch × 2 inch deep) baking pans or one large baking or roasting pan (about 15 inch × 11 inch × 2 inch deep) Ingredients: • For the baking pan: 1.5 dekagrams (about ½ oz.) soft unsalted butter • For the sponge: 1 deciliter lukewarm milk, 1 teaspoon sugar, 3 dekagrams compressed fresh yeast or 1¼ standard packages active dry yeast (scant 3 teaspoons), 10 dekagrams unbleached all-purpose flour • For the dough: 10 dekagrams sugar, 10 dekagrams soft unsalted butter, ½ teaspoon salt, 3 large egg yolks, 40 dekagrams unbleached all-purpose flour, 1¼–1½ deciliters lukewarm milk • For the filling: 3 dekagrams melted and cooled unsalted butter, 3 tablespoons sugar, 1½ teaspoons ground cinnamon, 10 dekagrams partly ground, partly chopped walnuts (see comment about making this in a food processor), 10 dekagrams golden raisins • For brushing: 3 dekagrams melted and cooled unsalted butter • For drizzling: ½ deciliter heavy cream, 1 tablespoon sugar, 1 package vanilla sugar • For the top: 3 tablespoons coarsely chopped (about ¼ inch) walnuts Preparation: 1. To make the sponge: Heat the milk to lukewarm, about 110 degrees F., and pour it into a bowl. Dissolve 1 teaspoon sugar in it, crumble the fresh yeast into it and mix it until smooth, or stir the active dry yeast into the milk. Let it stand until foamy, about 5 minutes. Stir in nearly all the flour (reserving only 1 tablespoon) until the mixture is smooth, sprinkle the remaining 1 tablespoon flour in a thin layer on top, and cover the bowl with plastic wrap. Allow the

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43. In the reconstructed recipe of the bólesz, the pastry is baked this way in a large, deep baking or roasting pan. Photograph by Young Suh.

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2.

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

sponge to rise at room temperature for 30 minutes, until it has more than doubled in bulk. To make the dough: Beat the butter and the sugar with a wooden spoon by hand or with the paddle attachment of a mixer until soft, light, and almost foamy. Beat in the salt and the yolks one at a time, beating it smooth after each addition. Beat in the sponge, about half of the 40 dekagrams of flour, 1¼ deciliters of the lukewarm milk, then the remaining flour, beating after each addition until smooth. The dough should be fairly soft and slightly sticky. If it is not soft enough, add a little more milk. Transfer the dough to a lightly floured work surface, and knead it by hand for 5 minutes, until it becomes smooth and springy. Alternately, one can also knead it in a heavy-duty mixer with a dough hook. Transfer to a lightly oiled bowl, cover the bowl with plastic wrap, and let the dough rise at room temperature for about 1 hour, until it has doubled in bulk Butter the baking pan(s). In a small saucepan, cover the raisins with water, bring to a boil, then pour off the water and let them cool. Deflate the dough in the bowl by pressing down on its middle with your fist, then repeatedly folding its edges to the middle and pressing them together. Shape the dough into a ball, turn it out to the lightly floured work surface, and dust its surface with flour. Let it stand for 10 minutes, then roll it out with a rolling pin into a strip about ¼ inch to ½ inch thick, 8-inch wide and 26-inch long. To fill the dough: In a small bowl combine the sugar and the cinnamon. Brush the strip of dough with melted butter, sprinkle it evenly with the sugar-cinnamon mixture, the walnuts, and the rasins. Starting from the long side, roll it up jelly roll style, and cut it with a sharp knife into about 3¼ inch-wide slices. Place the slices, cut side down, in the well-buttered baking pan, leaving at least a ½-inch space between them. Brush their sides with melted butter. Cover the baking pan and let the pastries rise for about 30 minutes.

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8. Preheat the oven to 365 °F. Dissolve the sugar and the vanilla sugar in lukewarm heavy cream. 9. Transfer the baking pan into the preheated oven and bake the pastries for 20 minutes. Spoon the sugary cream onto the half-baked pastries, and scatter chopped walnuts on top. Return the baking pan into the oven and continue baking the pastries for an additional 15 minutes until golden brown. During baking, the pastries will grow to 3–4-inch in diameter, and, in spite of the space between them, they will press against each other, but if their sides are well buttered, it will be easy to separate them later on. Transfer the baking pan(s), with the pastries in them, to a cooling rack, and let it (them) rest for 10 minutes. Separate the pastries from each other only if you wish to serve them immediately. 10. Serve lukewarm or at room temperature. While still warm, they can be sprinkled with vanilla sugar, but in my opinion this is superfluous. The pastries are best when freshly baked. If you wish to serve them several hours later, it is advisable to leave them in the baking pan until then and to separate them only before serving time. If you have to keep them until next day, store them in the baking pan, covered with plastic wrap. For longer storage it is best to freeze them. In this case, cover the fully cooled pastries tightly with plastic wrap, and that with aluminium foil, so that it completely encloses them. You can keep them in the freezer for up to a two weeks. Defrost them at room temperature in their plastic wrap and aluminium foil packaging (about 2 hours). Before serving time, preheat the oven to 300 °F. Remove the plastic wrap from the pastries, cover them again with aluminium foil, and place them for 10 minutes in the preheated oven.

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44. Flódni, an elaborate, four-level (poppy seeds, ground walnuts, chopped apples, and plum butter) version of the medieval German single-layer fladen. Flódni, a Jewish pastry specialty, probably evolved in nineteenthcentury Budapest, more or less at the same time as its close Viennese relative, the threeor four-layer Fächertorte. Today it is available year round in many non-Jewish pastry shops in Budapest. Photograph by Tas Tóbiás.

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7. The Influence of Hungarian Jewish Cuisine on the Non-Jewish

I

n this essay, I wish to examine the Jewish specialties included in non-Jewish Hungarian cookbooks, since they show―better than anything else―the influence of Hungarian Jewish cuisine on local Gentile cooking, including the extent of this influence and how it has changed over time. But first, I would like to briefly describe the influence of Jewish dishes on the national cuisine of other countries in order to show how the situation in Hungary was different. In some countries where the evolution of a middle class had started earlier than in Hungary, Gentile cookbooks occasionally featured a small number of Jewish recipes already well before the twentieth century, perhaps since people in those regions considered Jewish culture more a part of the national one than in Hungary. For example, in Great Britain Hannah Glasse’s cookbook―the most popular reference work for home cooks in much of the English-speaking world in the second half of the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries―included six recipes prepared “the Jews way” in its revised and expanded seventh edition, published in 1760. She describes one of them as “The Jews way to pickle beef, which will go good to the West-Indies, and keep a year good in the pickle, and with care, will go to the East-Indies” and another one as “The Jews way of preserving salmon and all sorts of fish.”1 This latter recipe calls for coating the fish with flour, dipping them into egg yolks, frying them in plenty of oil, placing them when cooled in a “pan or vessel,” adding a pickling liquid of vinegar, garlic, shallots, and spices, and finally pouring oil on top. According to the recipe, fish prepared this way “will keep good a twelve month and are to be eat cold with oil and vinegar.” Indeed, Jews

1 Glasse, The Art of Cookery, 366, 378.

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typically served fried fish cold, usually on Shabbat. Alexis Soyer, a celebrated French chef and cookbook author, who settled in England in 1830, also describes batter-coated and deep fried fish as a Jewish specialty (“Fried fish, Jewish fashion”) in his 1854 work, A Shilling Cookery for the People. Soyer, too, mentions in his recipe that Jewish families generally eat this course cold.2 The British probably learned the method of deep frying fish from Sephardic Jewish immigrants and descendants of Marrranos, Sephardic Jews who converted to Christianity and settled in England in the sixteenth century. It is likely, that their batter-coated and deep fried fish was the ancestor of one of Britain’s most important culinary specialties: fish and chips. Perhaps it is no coincidence that according to some opinions Joseph Malin, a Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, opened the first fish and chip shop in the Bow neighborhood of London’s East End in about 1860.3 But only the idea of deep frying fish connects fish and chips to its presumed Jewish ancestor; in all other respects they are very different. Perhaps the most important difference is that―unlike Jewish fried fish―fish and chips are always served hot. While there are only six Jewish dishes in Glasse’s volume, Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery, in All its Branches, published in 1845, which was the best-known English cookbook of the nineteenth century, features a whole chapter about “Foreign and Jewish Cookery,” including the following recipe for Jewish almond pudding. As we can see from this recipe, some of Eliza Acton’s friends were not only Jewish but at times also shared their food with her. We have not thought it necessary to test this receipt ourselves, as we have tasted the puddings made by it more than once, and have received the exact directions for them from the Jewish lady at whose house they were made. They are extremely delicate and excellent. The almonds for them were procured ready ground from a Jew confectioner, but when they cannot be thus obtained they must be pounded in the usual manner. With half a pound of sweet, mingle six or seven bitter almonds, half a pound of sifted sugar, a little fine orange-flower water, with the yolks of ten and the whites of seven well whisked eggs, and when the whole of the

2 Soyer, A Shilling Cookery. 3 Roden, The Book of Jewish Food, 113.

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45. The title page and one of the recipe pages in the 1765 ninth edition of Hannah Glasse’s 1747 work. The Appendix of the book includes six “Jewish-style” recipes, among them “The Jews way of preserving salmon, and all sorts of fish,” which can be seen on the page reproduced here.

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46. A page from the table of contents and a recipe page from the 1860 edition of Eliza Acton’s work, the most popular British cookbook of the nineteenth century. Editions of the book after 1855 featured a chapter about “Foreign and Jewish cookery,” including her general “Remarks on Jewish cookery” and the “Jewish smoked beef” recipe on the page reproduced here.

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ingredients are intimately blended, bake the pudding in a rather quick oven for half an hour, or longer should it not be then sufficiently firm to turn out of the dish. Sift sugar thickly over, or pour round it a rich syrup flavoured with orange-flower water, noyaux [lit.: pits; almond extract] or maraschino.4 Some early American cookbooks also featured a few Jewish recipes. But in addition to such overtly Jewish recipes, we can also see the the influence of Jewish culinary culture from a remark in Mary Randolph’s The Virginia House-Wife; Or, Methodical Cook, the first regional American cookbook, published in 1824: “Few persons are aware of the injury they sustain by eating the flesh of diseased animals. None but the Jewish butchers, who are paid exclusively for it, attend to this important circumstance.”5 Early examples of Jewish recipes in non-Jewish American cookbooks include the descriptions for “stewed fish, Hebrew fashion” (p. 101) and “fried salmon in the Hebrew fashion” (p. 84) in Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book: a Practical System for Private Families in Town and Country, an 1857 work by Sarah Josepha Hale (1788–1879). Her “fried salmon in the Hebrew fashion” is essentially the same as the English “fried fish, Jewish fashion,” while her “stewed fish, Hebrew fashion”―a combination of poached fish and fish dumplings, resembling gefilte fish―is identical with the similarly named recipe in Mrs. Elizabeth F. Ellet’s 1857 work, The Practical Housekeeper: Take three or four parsley-roots, cut them into long thin slices, and two or three onions also sliced, boil them together in a quart of water until quite tender; then flavor it with ground white pepper, nutmeg, mace, and a little saffron, the juice of two lemons, and a spoonful of vinegar. Put in the fish, and let it stew for twenty, or thirty minutes; then take it out, strain the gravy, thicken it with a little flour and butter, have balls made of chopped fish, bread crumbs, spices, and the yolk of one or two eggs mixed up together, and drop them into the liquor. Let them boil, then put in the fish, and serve it up with the balls and parsley-roots.6

4 “Jewish almond pudding,” in Acton, Modern Cookery, 607–608. 5 Randolph, The Virginia House-Wife, 17. 6 Ellet, The Practical Housekeeper, 214.

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In the last decades of the nineteenth century, American cookbooks increasingly featured Jewish recipes. The National Cookery Book, the first truly national American cookbook, published in 1876 for the hundredth birthday of the United States, already includes fourteen traditional Jewish specialties, among them “Haman’s ears for Purim night” and “crimslech for Passover,” a sweet matzo fritter. Another recipe in it, a probably Sephardicorigin almond custard, called “marmalada, a substitute for custard in Passover,” is a version of the “marmalade of eggs the Jews way” in Hannah Glasse’s eighteenth-century English cookbook, and it is also related to the “Jewish almond pudding” in Eliza Acton’s nineteenth-century work, though this latter dish is not a custard but a pudding. It says a lot about the interest in Jewish cuisine in several western countries that―as mentioned earlier―it was Joseph Stolz, a German of the Catholic faith and the Grand Duke’s personal chef in the independent German state of Baden, who wrote the world’s first Jewish cookbook in 1815. While a Christian as the author of a Jewish cookbook would have been unimaginable in Hungary, not only in Germany was there an example of this but also in nineteenth-century Australia and early twentieth-century France. The first Australian cookbook, called The English and Australian Cookery Book: Cookery for the Many, as well as the Upper Ten Thousand, published in 1864 by an “Australian Aristologist,”7 the pseudonym of Edward Abbot (1801– 1869), includes under the title “Hebrew Refection” an eighty-page chapter about Jewish cuisine. Although its recipes fairly closely follow those in The Jewish Manual, the first Jewish cookbook in English, published in 1846, it is remarkable that Abbot devotes a whole chapter to them, since fewer than 6,000 Jews lived in the 1860s in Australia. A year later, Abbot even published a little book in Melbourne and London with the title Hebrew Cookery, featuring 63 Jewish recipes from his bigger work. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett pointed out in her essay about those two books, interestingly, the Christian Abbot adopted mainly the uniquely Jewish dishes and those that are associated with Jews from the cosmopolitan repertoire of The Jewish Manual.8 Dr. Édouard de Pomiane (1875–1964), was another non-Jewish author who wrote a Jewish cookbook. He was a Catholic, the author of a dozen

7

Aristology is the art or science of cooking and dining.

8 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: “Hebrew Cookery,” 15–18.

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excellent French cookbooks (some of my favorites) and the host of the world’s earliest weekly radio program about cooking in 1923. De Pomiane was of Polish origin, who, based on his visits to Poland, decided to publish a book in 1929 about the life and cuisine of Polish Jews. Its title is Cuisine Juive: Ghettos Modernes (Jewish cuisine: modern ghettos), and in addition to the dishes of Polish Jews it includes courses by their French, Algerian, Romanian, and Hungarian brethren too. Also in France, the famous chef, restaurateur, and culinary writer Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) included five Jewish dishes in Le Guide Culinaire, his 1903 chef-d’oeuvre: four kinds of Carpe à la Juive 9 (sliced carp poached and served cold in its own aspic) and an apple dessert, called Schâleth à la Juive. In Alsace and Southern Germany, Ashkenazim called their Sabbath stew schalet, in Germany and Austria, tscholent or scholent, while in Eastern Europe, Jews refered to it as tsholnt, tsholent, tshulnt, czulent, cholnt, šoulet, or sólet, the Hungarian version of the word. In Alsace and Germany, however, the same word was sometimes also used for kugels, baked puddings that were usually served at the Sabbath meal, frequently as a side dish to cholent. The Matzah Schalent (matzo kugel), Weck Schalent (bread kugel), and Vermicelles Schalent (noodle kugel) in some early seventeenth-century German manuscripts are examples of this latter meaning.10 According to John Cooper, “in southern Germany [apple] Schalet or Apfelbuwele (little apple boy), utilized for dessert at the Sabbath, was dough filled with apples, raisins, and cinnamon and rolled to form a number of layers, after which the pastry was twisted into the shape of a circle, and baked in a pot.”11 Escoffier’s Schâleth à la Juive is a variation of this last kind of dessert. Line a greased iron saucepan, or a large mould for “Pommes Anna,” with a thin layer of ordinary noodle paste, and fill it up with the following

9 Their serial number in Escoffier’s work: no. 1624 Carpe à la Juive; no. 1625 Carpe à la Juive au Persil; no. 1626 Carpe à la Juive Orientale; no. 1627 Carpe à la Juive aux Raisins. 10 Cooper, Eat and be Satisfied, 187–88. 11 Ibid., 188. Teréz Berger’s handwritten recipe collection―the subject of the third essay in the present volume―also includes a dessert made of apple-filled noodle dough twisted into a circle, though she does not call it apple Schalet but Apfelräder, apple “wheels.” Her recipe is included in Koerner, A Taste of the Past, 163.

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preparation: For a utensil large enough to hold one and a half quarts: one and three quarter lbs. of thickly stewed russet apples, one and a quarter lbs. in all of seeded Malaga raisins, currants, and sultana raisins (plumped in tepid water) in equal quantities; the finely grated zests of half an orange and a half lemon; a bit of grated nutmeg; four oz. powdered sugar; four whole eggs and the yolks of six; and a quarter of a pint of Malaga wine. Mix all these ingredients well together. Cover with a layer of the noodle paste; seal the latter well round the edges; brush with egg, and make a slit in the top for the escape of steam. Bake it in a moderate oven for fifty minutes, and let it rest ten minutes before turning it out.12 Late nineteenth-century Italian cookbooks also feature some traditional local Jewish dishes that had become popular among the non-Jewish population, for example, Polpette alla Giudia (meatballs the Jewish way) and Carciofi alla Giudia (artichoke the Jewish way). In addition, it was the influence of Jewish cuisine that made the artichokes popular in Italy around the end of the sixteenth century―before that time Italian Gentiles had not eaten them and derisively called them a “Jewish vegetable.” For centuries in Italy, eggplant was also hardly eaten by anybody but the Jews and the poorest people. According to Massimo Montanari: In 1631 the treatise on carving by Antonio Frugoli conjoins Jews with plebeians, maintaining that the eggplant “should not be eaten other than by people of the lower class or by Jews.” The same attribution is repeated a decade later by the agronomist Vincenzo Tanara, who defines the eggplant as “food for rural areas ... commonly consumed by domestics and by Jews.” This singular label can still be found at the end of the nineteenth century, in Science in the Kitchen by [Pellegrino] Artusi, who by then had reversed the meaning, remarking that i petonciani (as he called eggplants) “were held in contempt as a food of Jews,” which only proves that “in this as in other things of greater importance, [they] always had a better nose than Christians.”13

12 Escoffier, Le Guide Culinaire, 790. 13 Montanari, Let the Meatballs Rest, 24–25.

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Pellegrino Artusi (1820–1911) also tells in the abovementioned famous cookbook he published in 1891 that until the middle of the nineteenth century aside from the Jews hardly anyone in Northern Italy ate fennel, which, just like eggplant, later became one of most characteristic vegetables in Italian cuisine.14 Dutch cuisine also adopted some Jewish specialties: for example, in the seventeenth century, bolus, a yeast-dough pastry, which was the subject of the previous essay in this book, and in the nineteenth century, Jodenkoek (Dutch: Jewish cookie), a round, flat cookie made of short dough. One of the early Austrian cookbooks, Marianna Catharina Lindau’s 1801 work about the cuisine of Styria, a region in southeast Austria, also includes a “Jewish-style” dish: Karpfen auf jüdische Art zu kochen (Carp cooked the Jewish way). This is her recipe: The carp will be, as is common, cleaned, opened, and cut into 3 parts, placed in a bowl and splashed with vinegar. Some pepper and cloves will be added, but more of the latter than the former. Following this, one pours 1½ to 2 Seidels (2 x 0.35 liter) of brown beer into a pan, adds some butter to it, heats this up, adds the carp together with the above-described marinade, cooks it for half an hour until the broth slightly thickens and reduces, but, even before this, one adds little raisins and lemon slices to the broth.15 But while Lindau’s work focuses on the cuisine of Styria, Anna Dorn’s16 and Katharina Prato’s17 volumes, the two most popular nineteenth-century Austrian cookbooks, sought to present recipes from all parts of the country. They also include some foreign dishes and courses prepared “in the manner

14 “Forty years ago one could hardly see eggplant and fennel on the Florentine market; they were considered vile foods of the Jews.” Pellegrino Artusi quoted by Machlin in Classic Italian Jewish Cooking, 2. 15 Lindau, Die steyermärkische Köchin, 210. But she was not the first to feature this “Jewish-style” carp recipe: it had already appeared in 1785 in the chapter about carp in Johann Georg Krünitz’s work, called Oeconomishe Encyklopädie, published in Berlin. 16 Dorn, Neuestes Universal- oder: Grosses Wiener Kochbuch. Some of her other works include Anna Dorn’s grosses Muster-Kochbuch and Anna Dorn’s illustrirtes Muster-Kochbuch. 17 Prato, Die Süddeutsche Küche.

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47. Anna Dorn and Katharina Prato, two highly popular nineteenth-century Austrian cookbook authors. Both of them included a recipe called Judenbraten (Jewish roast) in their cookbooks, but, in spite of its title, it was not a Jewish dish.

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of” other cuisines, but not a single “Jewish-style” recipe, let alone any real, authentic Jewish specialty. Although both of them feature a recipe called Judenbraten (Jewish roast), it is―notwithstanding its name―unlikely to have anything to do with Jews. It is usually made of chopped veal, though Prato’s cookbook also features a version made with chopped carp. In both versions, the recipe asks for mixing the chopped meat or fish with pieces of bread rolls soaked in milk, sautéed onion, and egg yolks, then shaping this into a long, narrow loaf, baking it in butter, and pouring meat broth, wine, or sour cream over it during baking. Unfortunately, I have not been able to find out how this course―which could not even have been eaten by Jews due to its mixture of meat and dairy ingredients―got its misleading name. Perhaps the reason for its name is that Jews sometimes ate a version of it made without dairy products as a substitute for rabbit, which is forbidden by kashrut rules. This might be the reason why some nineteenth-century sources use the name falscher Hase (mock rabbit) for this type of meatloaf, and why according to Anna Dorn it should be shaped to resemble a saddle of rabbit. But this is merely a guess of the name’s origin, not a fact. The Judenbraten name, however, is no longer used in twentieth-century sources, since in the 1880s this dish was renamed Stephaniebraten to honor Princess Stéphanie, Crown Prince Rudolf’s Belgian-born wife, and to this day this is the way it is known in Austria. The only difference between the old Judenbraten and today’s Stephaniebraten is that they usually bury hard-cooked eggs and small pickles in the center of the modern version's elongated loaf. Unlike the abovementioned examples from Britain, the United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and Austria, Jewish dishes can hardly or not at all be found in nineteenth-century Hungarian cookbooks. Although there is a recipe called Jewish roast (Zsidó pecsenye) in the 1840 edition of Magyar Nemzeti Szakácskönyv (Hungarian National Cookbook), incorrectly credited to István Czifray (his real name was István Czövek), and revised by Gyula Vasváry (another pseudonym), and the same recipe is also included in János Máté’s 1865 Debreczeni Szakácskönyv (Debrecen Cookbook), named after a city in north-eastern Hungary, they are nearly identical with the Judenbraten featured in nineteenth-century Austrian cookbooks. As a matter of fact, Vasváry’s recipe for the Jewish roast in the 1840 edition of Czövek’s work is a translation of the Judenbraten in Anna Dorn’s 1827 Neuestes Universal- oder: Grosses Wiener Kochbuch. But what matters most for us: all these versions of the dish are unrelated to Jewish cuisine.

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The 1897 sixth edition of Teréz Doleskó’s Szegedi szakácskönyv (Szeged Cookbook, named after a city in south-eastern Hungary) is the first cookbook in Hungary to include a recipe most Hungarians associate with Jews, though it is not really a Jewish specialty: ricset with goose drumstick (ritser libaczombbal). This stew of pearl barley, beans, and usually also some kind of smoked meat has been popular in Bavaria, Austria, and Slovenia for centuries. It is first mentioned in a collection of recipes written in 1534 in a cloister at Tegernsee, in southern Bavaria. Austrians call it Ritscher or Ritschert, and clearly this is the origin of the word ricset, its Hungarian name. Hungarians probably borrowed not only its name from the Austrians, but also the way one should prepare the dish. But even more than in Austria, in Hungary the dish has become associated with Jews, who frequently prepared a kosher version of it for Saturday lunch as an alternative to cholent. It indeed resembles cholent, but while pearl barley has at best a subservient role in bean-cholent, ricset is made with at least equal amounts of pearl barley and beans, and sometimes the barley actually dominates. Although in Hungary it is usually made with meat, a meatless variety was also known, and some families even prepared a soup version of it, which―according to Mrs. Márton Rosenfeld’s Hungarian Jewish cookbook, published in 1927 in Subotica, Yugoslavia (today, Serbia)―was served for the midday meal on Saturdays. This probably also follows Austrian non-Jewish examples, such as the Ritscher soup in an 1899 Viennese handwritten recipe-collection. The ricset recipe in the 1897 edition, however, was not part of Doleskó’s book when it was first published in 1876. She was the best, most reliable Hungarian cookbook-author of the nineteenth century, but she died in 1883, a year after the third edition of her work had come out, and the subsequent editions were prepared by unknown editors who substantially expanded them with recipes copied verbatim from other cookbooks. The proper Hungarian name of this dish is ricset, but instead of this the Hungarian editor called it ritser, which is the same as Ritscher, its German name, provided that one spells it according to the Hungarian pronounciation of the word, that is, by substituting “s” for “sch.” Already this made me suspect an Austrian source, and this inkling proved to be correct―much of the recipe is merely a translation of the version appearing in the later editions of Katharina Prato’s highly popular Austrian cookbook, Die süddeutsche Küche, a work mentioned earlier in this essay. The Ritscher in Prato’s first edition of 1858 is made with rice,

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48. The title page and the Judenbraten recipe from Anna Dorn’s 1827 Austrian cookbook, as well as the title page and the Jewish roast (Zsidó pecsenye) recipe from the 1840 sixth edition of the “Hungarian National Cookbook.” The recipe in the Hungarian cookbook is merely a translation of Dorn’s German version. But what is more important: neither of them has anything to do with Jewish cuisine.

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49. The front cover of the 1897 sixth edition of the non-Jewish “Szeged Cookbook.” It was one of the first Hungarian cookbooks to include a dish― a stew of pearl barley, beans, and meat (ricset)― that could be considered Jewish. Although it was originally a Christian dish, some Jews served it at their Saturday midday meal instead of cholent.

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and only in one of the later editions does she switch to the version containing pearl barley. While the first half of the Hungarian version in the 1897 edition of the “Szeged Cookbook” closely follows Prato’s example, the second half of the recipe differs from it in one respect. This difference is that the Hungarian version serves the dish with cooked goose drumstick or giblets instead of small pieces of sausage or smoked meat.18 The editor of the 1897 edition not only stole Prato’s recipe, but also mistranslated it, since he did not know what the German expression anlaufen lassen (to briefly cook something in fat without browning it) means in Hungarian when it is used in the context of cooking. He thought it meant “to let it swell,” which the expression could indeed mean in another context. Here, however, it is nonsense, since why would the flour and the chopped onions and parsley swell in the hot fat? The editor of the 1897 edition also erred when he completely illogically stuck the ricset recipe into a chapter about noodle dishes, dumplings, and omelets. These errors were by no means his only ones, since, for example, the same editor―as we have seen in the essay about the first Jewish cookbook in Hungary―placed the “apple pie from Pest” (Pesti almás lepény) in a chapter about yeast-dough desserts, although it is not made with yeast. Had poor Teréz Doleskó known what posthumous editors did with her work, she would have been spinning in her grave. While there is only one dish that could be considered Jewish in the “Szeged Cookbook,” József C. Dobos, the inventor of the famous Dobos torte, includes a whole chapter of real Jewish specialties in his thick, nearly thousand-page Magyar-Francia Szakácskönyv (Hungarian-French Cookbook), published

18 In Hungary, ricset is generally made with goose meat or with a mixture of that and smoked brisket, and this is how it appears, for example, in 1932 in Az Ínyesmester szakácskönyve (The Master Gourmet’s cookbook). In Austria, however, the dish is usually made with smoked pork, and they consider the less usual version prepared with goose a “Jewish” dish, even if it is not made by Jews and it is not kosher. This is at least what Franz Maier-Bruck seems to suggest in his Vom Essen auf dem Lande (About provincial cuisine), a comprehensive and excellent work published in Vienna in 1981. As he writes on page 376 of this work: “Das ‘Jüdische’ Ritschert ist ein ‘Ganselritschert.’” (A Jewish Ritscher means a goose-Ritscher.).

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probably in 1883.19 True, this chapter, called „About Jewish desserts” (A zsidó süteményekről), is tiny: it consists of only two recipes. One of them is a sort of candy or brittle, which the book calls naute, although in Yiddish-speaking regions it is known as Mohnlach. The title of the other recipe is cherimsel, which is an apple-jam-filled pastry square made of matzo dough. Naute was usually made for Purim, cherimsel for Pesach. No other Hungarian cookbook, Jewish or non-Jewish, includes naute. The source of the recipe was almost certainly a German publication, since―as far as I know―the name was only used in that country. Probably the same German work was the source of both the naute and cherimsel recipes, but unfortunately I was not able to identify it. Although both recipe titles can be found in Rebekka Wolf’s Jewish cookbook, first published in 1851 in Berlin, of the two only naute resembles the version in the book by Dobos, while her cherimsel is very different. There is also a naute recipe in the non-Jewish cookbook published in 1905 in Berlin by Lina Morgenstern (née Lina Bauer, 1830–1909), an assimilated Jewish German pedagogue, feminist, and pacifist writer. But her book, called Illustriertes Universal-Kochbuch für Gesunde und Kranke (Illustrated universal cookbook for the healthy and the sick), could not have served as the source for Dobos, since it came out years after his work. It is likely, however, that Dobos and Morgenstern used the same source (perhaps Rebekka Wolf’s work) for the naute recipe and this is the reason for the similarity of their versions. Not only is the naute name missing from all other Hungarian Jewish cookbooks, but even under a different title they do not include any such candy brittle, made of ground poppy seed, chopped walnuts, spices, and honey. Only the 1935 Jewish cookbook by “Auntie Giti” features two somewhat related recipes: walnut candy and poppy-seed candy for Purim. As for the cherimsel, some Hungarian Jewish cookbooks include recipes called kremzli or chremzli, but they do not resemble the version by Dobos at all. Only in the twentieth century did Jewish recipes become a little more frequent in those Hungarian cookbooks that sought to present a more or less comprehensive picture of the country’s cuisine. Although there are many

19 The title page of the book shows 1881 as the year of publication, but as Béla Fehér writes in his excellent essay about Dobos, this is incorrect, since the book most probably came out in 1883. See Fehér, “Dobos C. József.”

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50. The front cover of the “Hungarian-French Cookbook,” a work about non-Jewish cuisine, published, probably in 1883, by József C. Dobos, the inventor of the famous Dobos torte. This was the first non-Jewish cookbook in Hungary to include two authentic Jewish recipes, both of them almost certainly translations from German.

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Jewish recipes in the 1902 cookbook of the literary weekly A Hét and the 1932 Az Ínyesmester Szakácskönyve (The Master Gourmet’s Cookbook) also includes a few, those volumes were exceptions in this respect and not at all typical. Other Hungarian cookbooks continued featuring almost no Jewish specialties, though undoubtedly a little more than those of the nineteenth century. For example, even matzo balls, probably the Jewish specialty best known to the wider public, is missing from several highly popular Hungarian cookbooks of the twentieth century, such as the works of Mrs. Ferenc Móra (1922, 1928), Mariska Vizvári (1944), Ilona Horváth (1955, expanded edition: 1956), and József Venesz (1958), notwithstanding that each of them contains hundreds of recipes. But in addition to examining local cookbooks, there are other ways to measure the impact of Hungarian Jewish cuisine on the non-Jewish, and these show a slightly greater degree of influence. Some Jewish dishes became popular among Gentiles too. For example, according to a 1901 letter sent from Szilágy-Cseh (formerly in eastern Hungary, today in Romania) by the Jewish Gizella Grosz to Madam Emma, the editor of a recipe contest organized by the magazine A Hét: “I prepared the cholent-egg of Ignotus [a Jewish critic, poet, and editor], which―you should taste it―is such a fabulous dish, that, similar to the way Mari Jászai [a celebrated Gentile actress, 1850–1926] loves cholent, you, Madam Emma, [the letter writer did not know that Ignotus himself was behind this pen name] would also learn to love it, just like our family physician has done, who, in spite of being a Christian, serves it to his guests.”20 Around this time, cholent was becoming popular among Gentiles, as can be seen from an 1896 article in Egyenlőség (Equality), a Jewish weekly: “Even the cult of cholent changed denomination, and followers of the pope in Rome eat it more frequently in a restaurant on Andrássy Boulevard than we ourselves do.”21 As Mrs. Grosz mentioned in the letter quoted above, the actress Mari Jászai was one of those Gentiles who liked cholent. According to Mary Gluck: “Ágai [a famous Jewish humorist and editor] was in the habit of sending her a pot of cholent, which was the culinary specialty of his

20 “Zsidó ételek” [Jewish dishes], A Hét, September 1, 1901, 575. 21 Samu Háber, “Zsidók lúdja” [Goose of the Jews], Egyenlőség, November 15, 1896.

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wife.”22 Ágai and Jászai lived in Budapest, but some Christians in provincial towns also liked this dish. György Braun provides an example of this with his description of the general popularity of his mother’s cholent in the late thirties in Mátészalka, a small town in eastern Hungary: “We always reserved some cholent for taking it to our Gentile neighbors and acquaintances, since they liked my mother’s cooking and they were always ready to eat some cholent.”23 But perhaps canned cholent is the best demonstration for the popularity of this Jewish dish among non-Jews. The Globus canning factory in Budapest had been producing canned cholent since the end of the twenties, and after a long interruption following World War II, it started to sell this product again in the 1960s. Already before 1945, it was not only Jews who bought the Globus factory’s non-kosher canned cholent made with smoked brisket. But after World War II, Hungary’s much diminished Jewish population by itself would have been even less able to justify the marketing of this product than before the war. The reason why canned cholent was nevertheless sought-after both in Hungary and abroad had to do with its general popularity. Lately, however, the situation has started to improve, at least in Budapest, where customers can eat matzo ball soup in many non-Jewish restaurants, and flódni, a Jewish pastry specialty for Purim, is sold in many similarly non-Jewish pastry shops throughout the year. This seems to indicate that certain Jewish foods have become accepted parts of the national cuisine, in a similar way as the bagel and a few other Jewish specialties are in the US.

22 Gluck, “Jewish Humor and Popular Culture,” 1–22. 23 Farkas, “Adatok a mátészalkai zsidóság életéhez.”

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JEWISH RECIPES FROM NINETEENTH-CENTURY HUNGARIAN NON-JEWISH COOKBOOKS

Ritscher with goose drumstick (Ritser libaczombbal) [From the 6th expanded edition of Teréz Doleskó’s (a. k. a. Auntie Rézi; in Hungarian: Rézi néni) 1876 Szegedi szakácskönyv (Szeged Cookbook). The recipe first appeared in this edition, which was published in 1897, years after the author’s death. It closely follows the Ritscher recipe in Katharina Prato’s Austrian cookbook, called Die süddeutsche Küche (Southern German Cuisine). Ritscher, ritser or ricset is not a Jewish-origin dish, but its kosher version was frequently served in Jewish families as a course of the Sabbath midday meal, and for this reason most people in Hungary think of it as a Jewish specialty. This, however, is not a kosher version, as is obvious from pork bacon in the recipe. While Gentiles in Bavaria, Austria, and Slovenia usually cooked it with smoked pork, the recipe below makes it with goose drumstick or giblets.] Cook 2 deciliters pearl barley with 2 deciliters bean. Heat a little fat, add chopped onion, parsley, and 2 spoons flour, let it swell in it. In Hungarian: “hagyd benne megdagadni”; a mistranslation of the German verb anlaufen, which in cooking means to briefly cook something in hot fat without browning it]. Then add the pearl barley and the bean, pour as much meat broth or water to it as needed, and let it cook down, since this dish has to be thick. Now cook the goose drumstick or giblets with the pearl barley and a little diced bacon, place them on the platter, and serve them.

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Naute [From the 1883 Magyar-francia szakácskönyv (Hungarian-French Cookbook) by József C. Dobos.] Cook ground poppy seeds and walnuts with spices and honey, stirring them all the while. When it is still hot, pour this onto a board, roll it out when it is half cooled, and with a wet knife cut it into rectangles.

Cherimsel [From the 1883 Magyar-francia szakácskönyv (Hungarian-French Cookbook by József C. Dobos. The Hungarian text of the recipe explains matzo as a sweet bread (kalács) for Easter, but this is obviously incorrect since matzo, made of unleavened dough and baked into thin, crisp sheets, does not in the least resemble the airy, light, and soft kalács, typically made of a slightly sweet yeast dough. Perhaps the Gentile editor/author of the cookbook was unfamiliar with matzo and that was the reason for the incorrect explanation, but it is also possible that the source of the recipe was in German and the editor mistranslated it.] Soak 6 sheets of matzo (sweet bread for Easter) in water, squeeze them out, and stir them over fire in goose fat or butter until they separate from the spoon. After it has cooled, mix it with 5 eggs, sugar, cinnamon, lemon peel, and almonds [presumably chopped or ground], roll it out to finger thickness, cut it into squares, spread apple jam over them, sprinkle this with almonds and sugar, cover them with another dough square, and bake them.

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1840

1854

1869/1873

1876

1899

c. 1900

51. Title pages of the six Jewish cookbooks published in Hungary in the nineteenth century. Together with Germany and Britain, Hungary was the place where the largest number of such works appeared in the nineteenth century, far exceeding in this respect all other countries, including the Russian Empire (home of the world’s largest Jewish population at the time), the Netherlands, and the United States.

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EPILOGUE

Hungary’s Pioneering Role in Early Jewish Cookbooks

S

trangely, until now no researcher has noticed that in the nineteenth century some of the earliest and historically most important Jewish cookbooks had been published in Hungary. Not only was Hungary only the second country after Germany to publish such a work, but it was also the place where the world’s first cookbook printed in Hebrew characters came out in 1854. Furthermore, together with Germany and Britain, Hungary was the country in the nineteenth century where the largest number of Jewish cookbooks was published; far more―for example―than in the Russian Empire, the Netherlands, and the United States. Although I have spent years researching pre-Holocaust Jewish cookbooks, primarily but not exclusively those published in Hungary, it was only after more or less completing work on the present volume that I realized the extent of Hungary’s role in publishing such works in the nineteenth century. For me, it was a process of discovery. I needed to know the results of this process to recognize Hungary’s pioneering role. How much Hungary had been at the vanguard in this area is obvious from the following table:1

1

I used the best information available to prepare this table, but since research of early Jewish cookbooks has been so patchy in some countries, it is possible that I overlooked some such works, although I am confident that they are not enough to change the overall picture. I consciously left out successive editions of the same work published in the same country. Although the first Jewish cookbooks in Poland and the Netherlands were translations of Rebekka Wolf’s work, first published in 1851 in Berlin, I included them since they are in a different language. The number of works in Hungary includes Sarah Cohn’s German-language Jewish cookbook, which was republished in Pozsony in c. 1900, although it had originally come out in 1888 in Regensburg. The reason why other countries (for example: France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Serbia, Turkey, Egypt, and so on) are missing from the table is that their first Jewish cookbooks came out only after 1900.

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Country

The date of the first

THE DATE OF THE FIRST Jewish cookbook JEWISH COOKBOOK

COUNTRY

Germany

1815

1815 1840

Germany Hungary

The number of such THE NUMBER OF SUCH works before 1900 WORKS BEFORE 1900

7

7

6

Hungary

1840

6

Britain

1846

9

Australia

1867

1

USA

33

Russian Empire/ Russian Empire/ Poland/Lithuania Poland/Lithuania

1871 1877

2

Netherlands Netherlands

1881 1881

33

Bohemia and Bohemia andMoravia Moravia

1886 1886

33

Britain

1846

Australia USA

1867 1871

1877

9 1

2

Hungary was much more at the international forefront of publishing Jewish cookbooks than non-Jewish ones. While the first Jewish cookbook in Hungary was―as mentioned before―only the third one in the world, the first non-Jewish printed cookbook was published there only in 1695, centuries after such works in several other countries.2 The relatively late appearance of the first non-Jewish cookbook in Hungary was mostly due to the Ottoman occupation of much of the country in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the above table shows, Hungary was also among the leaders in the number of nineteenth-century Jewish cookbooks. Furthermore, while in the nineteenth century no non-Jewish Hungarian cookbook was translated into a foreign language and published abroad, in 1892 a publisher in Rotterdam brought out a Dutch version of Therese Lederer’s excellent 1876 Jewish cookbook. The reasons why some of the earliest Jewish cookbooks appeared in Hungary are manifold. Perhaps the most important reason was that in the latter half of the nineteenth century the Jewish population of Hungary was second only to that of the Russian Empire, which included the Polish territories, the Baltic States, Ukraine, and some other regions.3 The readership

2 Printed cookbooks existed in many European countries long before 1695: for example, in Italy, France, England, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, and Bohemia. 3 But there was a huge difference in the size of their Jewish populations: in 1897 5,189,401 Jews lived in the Russian Empire, while in 1900 831,168 in Hungary.

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of Jewish cookbooks almost completely consisted of middle-class Jews, who constituted a comparatively large share of Hungarian Jewry and an even larger one in Budapest.4 Although there are no comprehensive statistics of this, it is possible that by the end of the nineteenth century their number in Hungary was not far from that of the similarly modernized Jews in the Russian Empire, perhaps even exceeded it. Only in Germany was the number of middle-class people within the Jewish population greater than in Hungary,5 but their concentration in big cities never reached the level that existed in Budapest, the second largest Jewish city in Europe after Warsaw. As to Warsaw, its Jewish population was 125,000 in 1880 and 219,000 in 1900 while Budapest’s was “only” 70,227 and 166,198 in those years,6 but the number of middle-class Jews in the Hungarian capital almost certainly exceeded those in the Polish city. All the Jewish cookbooks published in nineteenth-century Hungary were in German with the exception of the penultimate one in 1899, which was already in Hungarian. As a result of the widespread knowledge of German among middle-class Hungarian Jews in this period, many of the books and newspapers published for them were in that language. It shows how common this knowledge was that 62 percent of the Orthodox rabbis preached exclusively in German in 1900 and another 34 percent in that and another language― which are very high percentages even if some of the “German” sermons were actually in Yiddish.7 Although the share of Neológ (moderately reformist) rabbis who preached in German was lower, since by then the majority of them gave sermons in Hungarian, all this nevertheless shows the important role the German language played in Hungarian Jewish life of the period. By around 1880, Hungarian Jewry was probably the largest Germanspeaking Jewish community in Europe. […] Only about one-third (223,450)

4 To give some idea of the size of the Jewish middle class in Budapest: while Jews represented 23 percent of city’s population in 1910, 32% of the independent craftsmen, 66% of the independent merchants, 61% of attorneys, and 58% of physicians in the city were Jewish. See Silber, “Budapest.” 5 “By 1871, 60% of [German] Jews were already middle-class and upper-middle-class.” Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class, 37. 6 Ujvári, Magyar zsidó lexikon, 158. 7

Silber, “The Historical Experience,” 153.

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of Hungarian Jewry in 1880 declared German to be their mother tongue. […] Nonetheless, German was prevalent as a second language.8 In Hungary, due to trade restrictions, few books were imported from Germany in the nineteenth century,9 therefore the demand for Jewish cookbooks had to be satisfied by local publishers. Another reason for the considerable number of such works published in German in Hungary was that―as mentioned in a previous chapter―they could be also sold in foreign countries, since the knowledge of German was widespread among Jews in many European countries. For this reason, the 1840 Jewish cookbook by Julie Löv and the 1876 one by Therese Lederer were advertised as much abroad as locally. Considering the significant German-speaking Jewish population in Bohemia and Moravia, it is puzzling why the first Jewish cookbook―naturally also in German―appeared there only in 1886, more than forty-five years after the first one in Hungary.10 The main reason for this must have been the far smaller Jewish population there,11 but perhaps it was also the result of the wider distribution of German-published Jewish cookbooks than in Hungary.12 Even more puzzling is that apparently no Jewish cookbook was published in Austria until well into the twentieth century. This is all the more strange

8 Ibid., 127. 9 “Hungarian Jewry was all but cut off from Germany: trade between the two countries was negligible and in consequence, direct communication rare. […] Bothersome restrictions on the import of foreign books further enforced the already insular character of Hungarian Jews.” Silber, “The Historical Experience,” 107. Although Michael Silber’s essay is about the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, the situation was probably not drastically different in the second half of the century. 10 Kauders, Erstes israelitisches Kochbuch. Kauders was the author of all three nineteenth-century Jewish cookbooks published in Prague. Her books were used in all countries with large German-speaking Jewish populations. It says a lot about the sorry state of serious research on Jewish gastronomic history that I could find no biography of her on the internet, not even her dates of birth and death. 11 About 133,000 Jews lived in Bohemia and Moravia in 1860 and 137,000 in 1900. Karády, Zsidóság Európában, 122. 12 Austria, Bohemia, and Moravia had much stronger commercial ties to Germany than Hungary. For example, while between 54 and 84 Jewish merchants from those lands attended the three Leipzig Fairs in 1821, there were none or only one from Hungary. Silber, “The Historical Experience,” 119.

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since, similar to Hungarian publishers, the Austrian ones also could have sold their Jewish cookbooks in foreign countries as well as locally. The 1854 Hebrew-lettered cookbook cannot be considered an Austrian publication, since it was merely printed in Vienna, but―as its title page clearly states―it was published in Pest. In any case, it is unlikely that it received wide distribution in Vienna or other parts of Austria, since no advertisement of it is known from there, while at least a small number of contemporaneous ads exist from Pest, although not in newspapers but in books put out by its publisher. Even if no Jewish cookbook was published in Austria in the nineteenth century, Jewish recipes could be found in Austrian general cookbooks of the period. For example, Bertha Heyden’s c. 1890 cookbook features an 18-page appendix of Jewish recipes13 and Elisabeth Stöckl’s c. 1900 work, put out by a Jewish publisher in Vienna, includes a four-page section about Jewish cuisine.14 Of course, the Jewish cookbooks published in Germany were also available in Austria, and this might have made issuing local ones less pressing. Another contributing factor was that relatively few Jews lived in Austria outside Vienna, provided that we exclude Galicia,15 where a large share of the Jews were too poor to buy cookbooks. All these things, however, do not quite explain why no such works appeared in Austria before the twentieth century. Perhaps the most glaring omission in the research of early Jewish cookbooks is that to this day no comprehensive study exists of all such works printed in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, the country where the first such book had appeared.

13 Heyden, Neues Kochbuch. Like Joseph Stolz, the author of the world’s first Jewish cookbook in 1815, and Lady Montefiore, who wrote the first one in English in 1846, Bertha Heyden emphasizes in her c. 1885 cookbook that Christians could also enjoy the Jewish recipes she included in her book’s appendix. She even gives suggestions for what kind of pot Christians could use if they do not have a special one for kugels. The section about Jewish cuisine in her book features fifty recipes, including five versions of cholent (Scholent), ten of kugels, and four of helzel, that is, of stuffed goose neck. Interestingly, none of her cholent variants are made with beans, the most typical ingredient of this dish in Eastern Europe. 14 Stöckl, Österreichisch-ungarisches Universal-Kochbuch. 15 Historical region of southeast Poland and the western part of Ukraine, from 1846 a province of the Austrian Empire and from 1867 of the AustroHungarian Monarchy.

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Although Henry Notaker’s bibliography of Jewish cookbooks printed between 1815 and 1945 contains a section about those published in German, regardless whether in Germany or elsewhere,16 and W. D. Grün’s work about Jewish cuisine in Germany features a more complete list of such works,17 some titles are unfortunately missing from both of those bibliographies. To cite examples from among the works published in German in Hungary, Notaker leaves out Julie Löv’s 1840 cookbook, an anonymous work that came out in c. 1869 and 1873 in the Hungarian cities of Baja and Pécs,18 and the work of the German Sarah Cohn, which some years after its original edition in Regensburg, Germany, was also published in Pozsony.19 Of these, the more thorough Grün only leaves out the 1869/1873 work. Although Notaker mentions the 1854 Hebrew-lettered cookbook, he features it not as a book in German, but as one in Yiddish. The lack of comprehensive analyses of all the Jewish cookbooks published in Germany is an even bigger shortfall of research than the works missing from the bibliographies. There are encyclopedia articles about Jewish cookbooks that offer brief overviews of those published in Germany, but by their very nature they are no substitutes for detailed, in-depth studies. Ruth Abusch-Magder’s essay about the role of cookbooks in German Jewish embourgoisement examines only one aspect of the subject, and is clearly not intended as a comprehensive study of Jewish cookbooks in Germany.20 Even less comprehensive and detailed is W. D. Grün’s fairly short discussion of German Jewish cookbooks included in the introduction to his work about Jewish cuisine in Germany before the Holocaust.21 These and other unresolved issues make it clear how much further research is needed in the field of early Jewish cookbooks. It would make me very happy if this collection of essays would inspire other researchers to focus on this still inadequately explored area of Jewish social history, thereby continuing the work started by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett in the 1980s.

16 Notaker, “Old Cookbooks.” 17 Grün, Jüdische Küche. 18 Anonymous, Die wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin. 19 Cohn, Israelitisches Kochbuch. 20 Abusch-Magder, “Kulinarische Bildung.“ 21 Grün, Jüdische Küche.

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[ 229 ] 52. A kosher salami and smoked meat shop (the second shop from the right) at 25-27 Király Street, in the heart of Budapest’s old Jewish quarter. The signboard left of the shop’s entrance is in Yiddish, which was quite a rare thing by the 1890s, when this picture was taken, since by then most local Jews preferred to speak German or Hungarian. Photograph by Antal Weinwurm.

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Glossary

Ashkenazi (pl.: Ashkenazim)―originally Jews along the river Rhine in western Germany and northern France, but later most of the Western, Central, or Eastern European Jews, as contrasted with Sephardi Jews. As an adjective it means of or relating to such Jews and their traditions, customs, and rituals. Babylonian Talmud―it consists of parts of the Mishnah, the written version of the Oral Torah, and of the Gemara, the elucidation of the Mishnah. It was compiled between the third and sixth centuries in Mesopotamia. It is longer and more comprehensive than the slightly earlier Jerusalem Talmud. If not otherwise specified, the word Talmud refers to the Babylonian one. barches―braided loaves of bread made for the Sabbath and other holidays; a term used in Austria, Germany, Hungary, and some other countries for challah. Bava Kamma―“The First Gate” (Babylonian Aramaic); the first Talmudic tractate in the order Nezikin (“Damages”) challah―Hebrew for “dough.” In ancient times it meant the tithe taken from dough before baking and given to a priest; in modern times it means a small portion of the dough separated off and burnt in the oven. In modern times it also came to mean a loaf of yeast-leavened white bread, usually made with eggs and braided, which was traditionally eaten by Jews on the Sabbath and other holidays. In some countries the challah loaf is called barches. charoset (or haroset or charoises)―Hebrew from cheres, “clay.” In its Ashkenazi version a paste made of wine, nuts, and other ingredients; it is one of the symbolic foods used at the Seder. chrimsel (or cherimsel or chremsl)―pl.: chremslach or khremzlekh. Yiddish, related to the Italian vermicelli (only the names are related, but the chrimsel fritters themselves have nothing to do with the Italian thin vermicelli pasta) and perhaps also to Old French frimzl. Small, thick, round pancakes or fritters, made of ground matzo or grated potatoes and fried in oil. They may be stuffed with ground nuts or chopped fruit. Traditional for Pesach. diaspora―a scattered population whose origin lies in a separate geographic locale, specifically the dispersion of Jews from the historic Land of Israel to other parts of the world. flódni―a multi-level filled pastry of nineteenth-century Hungarian origin. Originally it was mainly eaten during Purim. Its successive layers are filled with poppy seeds, chopped apples, ground walnuts, and plum butter. Its name comes from fluden or fladen, a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish filled flat pastry, but ultimately from the medieval Latin flado, flat cake. Galícia―Historical region of southeast Poland and the western part of Ukraine; from 1846 a province of the Austrian Empire and from 1867 of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

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ganef (also gonif, gonef, gonov)―Yiddish for “thief,” from Hebrew ganav. An Ashkenazi dumpling baked with cholent in the same pot, and as a result like a thief it “steals” its aroma. gefilte fish―Yiddish for “stuffed fish.” Ashkenazi Jewish delicacy. Haggadah (pl.: Haggadoth)―Hebrew for “narration.” The text read at the Pesach Seder. halsli (also helzel)―Yiddish for “neck.” Filled skin of goose neck, frequently baked by Ashkenazi Jews in the same pot with the cholent. Haskalah―Hebrew for “wisdom.” An intellectual movement among the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, often termed Jewish Enlightenment. havdalah―Hebrew for “differentiation” or “separation.” Prayer recited at the conclusion of Sabbaths and festivals to indicate the distinction between the sacred day and the weekday. inarsz (also inars, inneres)―Yiddish. Chilled and thinly sliced garlic-flavored and paprika-coated goose fat eaten by Ashkenazi Jews as a cold cut. kashrut―From Hebrew kosher, meaning “fit” or “proper.” The system of Jewish dietary laws. kindli―Yiddish for “small child.” A small, elongated loaf-shaped and filled Purim pastry of nineteenth-century Hungarian origin. It can be filled with either poppy seeds or ground walnuts. kosher (adjective)―Hebrew for “fit.” Foods that are permitted to be eaten according to the Jewish dietary laws. kosher (verb)―To bring something into compliance with the dietary laws, for example the koshering (salting) of meat, the broiling of liver, or the cleansing of pots with boiling water. kreplach (also kreplech; singular: krepl)―Triangular (sometimes also square) boiled dumplings made by the Ashkenazim of noodle dough and filled with chopped meat or cheese. Traditional for Yom Kippur, Hoshanah Rabbah, and Purim. Kreuzer―German (krajcár in Hungarian). From the also German Kreuz (cross). Small coins of low value used in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy until 1892. It is named this way because there was a double cross on one side of the coin. kugel―From the German-Yiddish word for “ball.” An Ashkenazi baked pudding traditionally served at the midday meal on Saturday. lokshe (pl.: lokshen)―Yiddish for “noodle.” lokshen kugel (also lukshen kugel)―Ashkenazi noodle pudding served at the midday meal on Staurday; it is usually sweet but there are also a few savory versions of it. matzo (pl. matzot or matzos)―From the Yiddish matsoh and the Hebrew matsa. Unleavened flatbread; the bread eaten by the Jews during their wandering in the wilderness after the Exodus, the departure from Egypt. During Pesach only this unleavened flatbread can be eaten, and regular bread is forbidden. Megillah―pl.: megillot. Hebrew for “scroll.” May refer to the Book of Esther (Megillat Esther), which is read on the Jewish holiday of Purim, or to the five Megillot, five relatively short biblical books grouped together in Jewish tradition. Mezuzah―pl.: mezuzot. Hebrew for “doorpost.” A decorative case containing a piece of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah and affixed to the doorpost of Jewish homes. Mishnah―Hebrew for “study by repetition.” The earliest codification of the Jewish oral law, completed in the third century. néni―Hungarian for “older woman.”

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Neológ Judaism―Hungarian Jewish movement begun in the nineteenth century, which sought to reconcile religious traditions with reforms, such as establishing modern institutions for training rabbis, using Hungarian in Jewish education, allowing weddings and organ music in the synagogues, and the like. Nine Days (nayn teg in Yiddish)―The nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av. During these days one is not allowed to eat meat and drink wine, so people eat dairy food, fish and vegetarian dishes in this period. Orthodox Judaism―Jewish traditionalists who reject all or most of the religious reforms of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. p’tcha―From the Turkish paça, “legs.” An Ashkenazi dish of cooked calves feet, usually served cold and jellied, but occasionally also warm during the Sabbath. pareve (also parev, parve, or parveh)―Yiddish for “neutral.” Food that is neither meat nor dairy according to the Jewish dietary laws, for example, fish (only kosher fish), eggs, all things that grow from the ground (vegetables, fruits, grains, etc.), flours ground from grains, honey, sugar, and salt. Pesach―Hebrew for “Passover.” An eight-day (seven in Israel) festival beginning on the 15th of the Jewish month of Nisan, in March or April. It commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. pogrom―Russian for “devastation.” A violent riot aimed at the massacre or expulsion of an ethnic or religious group, particularly one aimed at Jews. Purim―Hebrew for “lots.” Festival commemorating the delivery of Jews in Persia; celebrated on the 14th (in Jerusalem on the 15th) of the Jewish month of Adar, in February or March. rabbi―From the Hebrew rav, “great one” or “master.” A spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. Rabbis are ordained by another rabbi, following a course of study of Jewish texts. Rosh Hashanah―Hebrew for “head [of] the year.” Jewish New Year festival observed for two days starting on the 1st of the Jewish month of Tishrei, in September or October. Sabbath (or Shabbat)―From the Hebrew shabbat, “rest” or “cessation.” It is Judaism’s day of rest on the seventh day of the week, i.e. on Saturday. Seder―Hebrew for “order.” The traditional home ceremony marking the beginning of Pesach (Passover). In Israel one Seder is observed on the first night of Passover, outside Israel a second Seder is also held on the second night. Sefer Torah―pl.: Sifrei Torah. Hebrew for “Book of Torah.” A Torah scroll, which is a handwritten copy of the Torah, that is, of the five books of Moses, the first books of the Hebrew Bible. It is stored in the Torah ark in the synagogue, and it is mainly used in the ritual of Torah reading during Jewish prayers. Sephardi Jews (pl.: Sephardim)―By the narrowest definition, the Spanish and Portuguese Jews and their descendants. Loosely used it refers also to North African, southern European, and Middle Eastern Jewish communities that follow Sephardic liturgy and customs. In the broadest sense it refers to all non-Ashkenazi Jews. sefarim (or s’farim)―Plural of sefer, the Hebrew word for any kind of book or written document. The word sefarim is used for books of the Torah, the Mishnah, the Talmud or any work of the rabbinic literature. Shabbos―The Yiddish term for the Jewish Sabbath. shochet―Yiddish for “slaughterer,” from the Hebrew shechita. A trained slaughterer who must be an adult male Jew accredited by rabbinic authority to perform the ritual

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killing of animals and birds as prescribed by the Jewish dietary laws. Shofar―pl.: shofarot, from Hebrew shophar, “ram’s horn.” An ancient musical horn typically made of a ram’s horn and used for Jewish religious purposes. Status Quo Ante―(Latin for “pre-existing condition”) The name of a movement in Hungarian Judaism that rejected the structural reforms of the 1868/69 Hungarian Jewish Congress, did not wish to join the Orthodox organizations founded in 1871, and wanted to preserve the conditions that existed prior to the Congress. Sukkot (also Succoth)―Hebrew for “booths, tabernacles.” One of the three harvest festivals; it is a seven-day festival beginning on the 15th of the Jewish month of Tishri, in late September or early October. Sulchan Aruch―Hebrew for “set table.” A sixteenth-century compilation of Jewish law, authored by Joseph Karo (1488–1575) a Sephardic rabbi, and adapted to Ashkenazi customs by Moses Isserles (1520–1572), a Polish rabbi. Hungarian Jewry followed this latter version. synagogue―Greek for “a place of gathering.” A building or place of meeting for Jewish worship and religious instruction. tallit―pl.: in Hebrew tallitot, in Yiddish talleisim. Aramaic for “cover, cloak.” It is a fringed rectangular garment, worn as a prayer shawl (“tallit gadol,” big tallit) by religious Jews. The twined and knotted fringes attached to its four corners are called tzitzit. The “tallit katan” (small tallit) is worn by men and boys the whole day over or under their shirts. Talmud―Hebrew for “study.” A compendium of commentaries on the Mishnah, completed in the sixth century C. E. See also: Babylonian Talmud, Mishnah. tefillin―Hebrew for “prayer objects” or Aramaic for “ornaments.” Two black leather boxes containing four biblical passages, which are attached by leather straps to the left arm and upper forehead of adult males during the weekday morning service or their morning prayer at home. Tisha B’Av―Hebrew for “the ninth of Av,” that is, the ninth of the Jewish month of Av. It is a day of mourning in late July or early August for several disasters in Jewish history, primarily the destruction the first and second temple in Jerusalem. It is a fast day, but already the nine days leading up to Tisha B’Av are marked by partial fasting, since no meat or wine can be consumed during those days. Torah―Hebrew for “teaching.” The term may refer to a scroll or scrolls of parchment containing the Jewish teaching of the Pentateuch (the five books of Moses) and used in the synagogue during services, or to the Hebrew bible, or in its widest sense to the whole of the Jewish tradition. treif (also treyf, trayf or traif)―From Yiddish treif and Hebrew terefah, meaning “torn.” An animal not slaughtered according to the ritual laws and any food that is, not kosher. tzimmes―a traditional Ashkenazi Jewish sweet stew of carrots and dried fruits, at times combined with other root vegetables, fruits and occasionally also with pieces of meat. tzitzit―pl.: tsitsiyot. Hebrew for “fringes.” Specially knotted ritual fringes or tassels, usually attached to the four corners of the tallit gadol (prayer shawl) and the tallit katan (small tallit, worn throughout the day). yeshiva (also yeshivah; pl.: yeshivas or yeshivot)―Hebrew for “sitting.” A Jewish educational institution that focuses on the study of traditional religious texts, primarily the Talmud, the Torah, and the halacha (Jewish law). Yiddish―A Judeo-German language rooted in medieval German with many words

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borrowed from Hebrew, Aramaic, and Slavic that is written in Hebrew characters and spoken chiefly as a vernacular in Eastern European Jewish communities and emigrants from those countries. Yom Kippur―Hebrew for the “day of atonement.” The holiest and most solemn Jewish holiday, on which fasting and prayer for the atonement of sins are prescribed. It is celebrated on the tenth day of Tishri, in September or October. Zionism―an ideology and movement among Jews espousing the re-establishment of and support for a Jewish state in the historic Land of Israel.

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[ 235 ] 53. A kosher restaurant in the Óbuda district of Budapest in c. 1890. The owner was so proud of the kosher nature of his restaurant that he displayed the three-letter Hebrew word for kosher at eight places on the signboards around the entrance. Photograph by Antal Weinwurm.

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Selected Bibliography

Abusch-Magder, Ruth. “Kulinarische Bildung: Jüdische Kochbücher als Medien der Verbürgerlichung” [Culinary education: Jewish cookbooks as means of embourgeoisement]. In Deutsch-jüdische Geschichte als Geschlechtergeschichte; Studien zum 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Kirsten Heinsohn and Sefanie SchülerSpringorum, 159‒76. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2005. Acton, Eliza. Modern Cookery for Private Families. London, 1845. Corrected and expanded edition: 1855. New edition: London, Quadrill Publishing, 2011. Andachtsbuch: Deutsche Gebete [Prayerbook: German prayers]. Pest: Verlag von M. E. Löwy’s Sohn, Buchhandlung, 1833. Aron, Jean-Paul. The Art of Eating in France. Manners and Menus in the Nineteenth Century. Translated by Nina Rootes. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. ―――. Essai sur la sensibilité alimentaire à Paris au XIXe siècle. Paris: Armand Colin, 1967. ―――. Le Mangeur de XIXe siècle. Paris: Laffont, 1973. Artusi, Pellegrino. La scienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene. Florence: Author’s edition, 1891. ―――. Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Translated by Murtha Baca and Stephen Sartarelli. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.

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Aschmann, Rahel. Geprüftes Kochbuch für Israeliten: Nach vieljährigen Erfahrungen herausgegeben von Rahel Aschmann [Tested cookbook for Jews: Based on her many years of experience published by Rahel Aschmann]. Quedlinburg and Leipzig: Druck und Verlag Gottfied Basse, 1835. Balla, Vilmos. A Kávéforrás. Régi pesti kávéházak legendái [The source of coffee. Legends of old caffeehouses in Pest]. Budapest: 1927. New edition. Budapest: Szó Kiadó, 2008. Ballagi, Aladár. “A budapesti könyvkereskedés 1790-ben” [The Budapest book trade in 1790]. Figyelő. Irodalomtörténeti Közlöny 3 (1877): 39–47. Barthes, Roland. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.” In Food and Culture, edited by Counihan and Van Esterik, 20‒27. Belovari, Susanne. “The Viennese Cuisine before Hitler―‘One Cuisine in the Use of Two Nations,’” In Petites Propos Culinaires 119, 23–57. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2021. Bloshteyn, Oyzer. Kokh-bukh far yudische froyen [Cookbook for Jewish women]. Vilna: L. L. Maca, 1896. Cohn, Sarah. Israelitisches Kochbuch: Zubereitung aller Arten Speisen nach den Ritualgesetzen [Jewish cookbook. The preparation of all kinds of dishes according to ritual laws]. Bratislava: Gebrüder Schwarz, c. 1900.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cooper, John. Eat and Be Satisfied: A Social History of Jewish Food. Northvale, New Jersey– Jerusalem: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1993. Counihan, Carol and Penny Van Esterik, eds. Food and Culture: A Reader. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Cserna-Szabó, András. “Rézi nénik az éji homályban” [Rézi nénis in the darkness of night]. In Magyar Konyha, July 14, 2015, 14–16. ―――. “‘Budapest, 5659. ádar hóban.’ Gasztrokrimi az első magyar nyelvű zsidó szakácskönyvről” [Budapest, in the month of Adar, 5659. Gastronomic whodunit about the first Jewish cookbook in Hungarian]. Szombat 28, no. 6 (Summer 2016): 8–13. ―――, and Béla Fehér. Ede a levesben. Gasztrokrimik. [Ede in the soup. Gastronomic whodunits]. Budapest: Magvető. 2011. Czifray [Czövek], István. Magyar nemzeti szakácskönyv [Hungarian national cookbook]. Revised by Gyula Vasváry. Sixth, expanded edition. Pest: Trattner J. M. of Petróza and István Károlyi, 1840. Dán, Róbert. Fejezetek a nyomtatott héber könyv történetéből Magyarországon [Chapters from the history of Hebrew books in Hungary]. Budapest: Jordan-Atlani, 2010. Deáky, Zita, Zsigmond Csoma, and Éva Vörös, eds. ...és hol a vidék zsidósága? [...and where is the Jewry of the provinces?]. Budapest–Debrecen: Centrál Európa Alapítvány–KLTE, 1994. De Pomiane, Édouard. Cuisine Juive: Ghettos Modernes. Paris: Albin Michel, 1929. ―――. The Jews of Poland: Recollections and Recipes. Translated by Josephine Bacon. Garden Grove, California: Pholiola Press, Inc., 1985.

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Die wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin oder: neuestes geprüftes und vollständiges Kochbuch. Enthält: Eine Sammlung von mehreren hundert zuverlassigen und durch vieljährige Erfahrung bewährten Vorschriften. Ein unentbehrliches Handbuch für wirthliche Frauen und Töchter [The thrifty Jewish cook, or: the newest tested and complete cookbook. Includes: A collection of several hundred reliable and through many years of experience proven instructions. An indispensable handbook for hospitable women and daughters]. Baja [South-central Hungary]: Druck und Verlag von Jakob Schön, c. 1869. The book was also published a few years later in identical form: Fünfkirchen [Pécs, south-western Hungary]: Druck und Verlag von Jakob Schön, 1873. Dobos, József C. Magyar-Franczia Szakácskönyv [Hungarian-French cookbook]. Budapest: Vilmos Mehner publisher, 1881. Dorn, Anna. Neuestes Universal- oder: Grosses Wiener Kochbuch [Newest universal or big Viennese cookbook]. Vienna: Tendler and von Manstein, 1827, 1832. ―――. Grosses Muster-Kochbuch [Big model-cookbook]. 5th expanded ediition. Vienna: Verlag von Tendler & Comp., 1850. ―――. Anna Dorn’s illustrirtes Muster-Kochbuch [Anna Dorn’s illustrated model-cookbook]. Vienna: Tendler, 1852. Ecsedy, Judit V. “A Trattnerek Magyarországon―egy évforduló alkalmából” [The Trattners in Hungary―on the occasion of an anniversary]. Magyar Grafika no. 4 (2019): 62‒67. Ellet, Elizabeth F. The Practical Housekeeper: A Cyclopedia of Domestic

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Economy, Comprising Five Thousand Practical Receipts and Maxims. New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1857. Emma Asszony [Madam Emma, the penname of Hugó Ignotus]. A Hét szakácskönyve [The cookbook of the magazine A Hét]. Second edition. Budapest: A Hét, 1908. Reprint edition: Budapest: Pytheas Könyvkiadó, 2008. Escoffier, Auguste. Le Guide Culinaire: Aide-Mémoire de Cuisine Pratique. Paris: Émile Colin, 1903. ―――. Le Guide Culinaire. Anonymous translator. New York: Crown Publishers, 1989. Farkas, József. “Adatok a mátészalkai zsidóság életéhez, táplálkozási szokásaihoz” [Facts about the life and alimentary habits of the Jews in Mátészalka]. In Deáky, Zita, Zsigmond Csoma, and Éva Vörös, eds. ...és hol a vidék zsidósága? [...and where is the Jewry of the provinces?], 131–45. Fehér, Béla. “Dobos C. József.” Magyar Nemzet special edition Lugas, April 7, 18, 24, and 28, 2019. ———. “Ügyetlen kezekkel öszvefértzelt zavarékok; Czifray ‘nemzeti’ szakácskönyvéről” [Clumsily compiled mish-mash: About Czifray’s “national” cookbook] In Cserna-Szabó and Fehér, Ede a levesben: Gasztrokrimik [Ede in the soup: Gastronomic whodunits], 73–83. ———. “Saint-Hilaire Jozefa és más ködlovagok ; Nemzeti konyhánk gót betűs irodalmáról” [Jozefa Saint-Hilaire and other invented people: about the Fractur-lettered literature of our national cuisine]. In Cserna-Szabó and Fehér, Ede a levesben: Gasztrokrimik [Ede in the soup: Gastronomic whodunits], 83–94.

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Fenyves, Katalin. Képzelt asszimiláció? Négy zsidó értelmiségi nemzedék önképe [Imagined assimilation? The self-images of four generations of Jewish intellectuals]. Budapest: Corvina, 2010. ―――. “Önkép, percepció, asszimiláció” [Self-image, perception, assimilation]. In Magyar-zsidó identitásminták II. Egyéni és kollektív önmeghatározások. [Hungarian Jewish identity patterns, vol. II. Individual and collective self-definitions], edited by Iván Zoltán Dénes. 265‒91. Budapest: Ráció Kiadó, 2020. Flandrin, Jean-Louis, Massimo Montanari, et al. Food. A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Frojimovics, Kinga, Géza Komoróczy, Viktória Pusztai and Andrea Strbik. Jewish Budapest: Monuments, Rites, History. Budapest–New York: Central European University Press, 1995. Ganz, Ábrahámné. Kóser szakácskönyve [Kosher cookbook]. Dés: Lajos Medgyesi’s printing shop, 1928. Reprint edition: Budapest, Gabbiano Print, 2006. Introduction by András Szántó and János Oláh. Ganzfried, Rabbi Shlomo. Kitzur Schulchan Oruch. Translated by Rabbi Eliyahu Touger. New York / Jerusalem: Moznaim Publishing Corporation, 1991. Gazda, István. Könyvkereskedők a régi Váci utcában a pesti könyvnyomtatás első száz évében [Book dealers in the old Váci Street in the first hundred years of book printing in Pest]. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1988. Gidó, Attila. “Erdélyi zsidó intézmények a két világháború között” [Transylvanian Jewish institutions between the two World Wars]. Korunk, April 2002.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Giti néni [Auntie Giti, Mrs. Aladár Ádler, née Gitta Rand]. A zsidó háziasszony könyve. Hasznos tudnivalók. Kóser szakácskönyv [The Jewish housewife’s book: Useful instructions: Kosher cookbook]. Kecskemét: Ábrahám Márton könyvnyomdája, 1935. Reprint edition: Budapest: Stoffel és Társai, 2003. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plaine and Easy. London: Printed for the author, 1747. ―――. The Art of Cookery Made Plaine and Easy. Reprint of the 1765 expanded edition: Princeton: Townsends, 2018. Gumprich, Widow Joseph, née Meyer. Vollständiges praktisches Kochbuch für die jüdische Küche [Complete and practical cookbook of Jewish cooking]. Third expanded and corrected edition. Trier: Verlag von Kaufmann & Co, 1899. Hatvany, Lajos. A tudni-nem-érdemes dolgok tudománya [The science of things not worth knowing]. Budapest: Gondolat, 1968. Hercz, Mrs. Rafael Rezső, née Leonora Bauer. Első magyar szakácskönyv vallásos izraelita háztartások számára [First Hungarian cookbook for the households of religious Jews]. Budapest: Ignácz Schwarz, 1899. Hertz, Rebekka. Israelitisches Kochbuch [Jewish cookbook]. Hamburg: B. S. Berendsohn, 1890. Horváth, Ilona. Szakácskönyv [Cookbook]. [First edition, 1955, expanded edition, 1956]. Budapest: Kossuth, 1976. Jochnowitz, Eve. “A Younger World; Vegetarian Writing and Recipes in Yiddish as Political Strategies.” In Tastes of Faith; Jewish Eating in the United States, edited by Leah Hochman, 45‒76. West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2017.

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Kaplan, Marion A. The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. Women, Family, and Identity, in Imperial Germany. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Karády, Viktor. Zsidóság, polgárosodás, asszimiláció. Tanulmányok [Jewry, embourgeoisement, assimilation. Essays]. Budapest: Cserépfalvi, 1997. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Cookbooks.” In The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. www. yivoencyclopedia.org. ―――. “Cookbooks, Jewish.” In Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik. Second edition, Vol. 5, 200–03. New York: Thomson Gale, 2007. ―――. “The Kosher Gourmet in the Nineteenth-Century Kitchen: Three Jewish Cookbooks in Historical Perspective.” In The Journal of Gastronomy. Vol. 2. No. 4. (Winter, 1986/1987), 51‒89. ―――. “Hebrew Cookery: An Early Jewish Cookbook from the Antipodes.” In Petits Propos Culinaires 28, 11–21. London: Prospect Books Ltd., 1988. ―――. “Kitchen Judaism.” In Getting Comfortable in New York. The American Jewish Home, 1880‒1950, edited by J. W. Joselit and Susan Braunstein, 76‒105. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1991. Kisbán, Eszter. Népi kultúra, közkultúra, jelkép: A gulyás, pörkölt, paprikás [Vernacular culture, popular culture, symbol: The gulyás, pörkölt, paprikás]. Budapest: MTA Néprajzi Kutatócsoport, 1989. ―――. “Rácz Zsuzsanna könyvecskéje korabeli körképben” [Zsuzsanna Rácz’s little book in contemporaneous context]. In Néprajz – muzeológia: Tanulmányok a múzeumi tudományok köréből [Ethnography – museology: Studies from the field of museum

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scholarship], edited by Arnold Tóth, 466‒488. Miskolc: Herman Ottó Múzeum, 2012. ―――. “Női név, női hang. Szakácskönyv szerzők névvel és álnéven, 1598‒1955” [Female name, female voice: Cookbook authors with real and fictitious names, 1598‒1955], a lecture given at a conference organized by the MTA (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) Ethnographic Institute, October 26‒27, 2018. Kiss, Bettina. “Zsidó gasztronómia Magyarországon” [Jewish gastronomy in Hungary]. MA diss. manuscript, Eötvös Loránd University, BTK Department of Assyriology and Hebrew, 2012. ―――. “Egy kéziratos zsidó szakácskönyv Pestről” [A Jewish manuscript cookbook from Pest]. In A Magyar Zsidó Múzeum és Levéltár évkönyve, 2018 [Yearbook of the Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, 2018], 81‒111. Budapest: Magyar Zsidó Múzeum és Levéltár, 2018. Koerner, András. A Taste of the Past. The Daily Life and Cooking of a 19th-Century Hungarian Jewish Homemaker. With illustrations by the author. Hanover, New Hampshire, and London: University Press of New England, 2004. ―――. Jewish Cuisine in Hungary. A Cultural History with 83 Authentic Recipes. Preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Budapest: CEU Press and Corvina, 2019. Komlós, Aladár. A magyar zsidóság irodalmi tevékenysége a XIX. században [The literary activity of Hungarian Jewry in the nineteenth century]. Written in the early 1940s. Budapest: Múlt és Jövő, 1997. Komoróczy, Géza. A zsidók története Magyarországon [The history of

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Jews in Hungary]. Vols. I‒II. Pozsony, Kalligram, 2012. Komoróczy, Szonja Ráhel. “Tudatos nyelvi disszimiláció; Jiddis a magyarországi ultra-orthodox zsidó eszmerendszerben” [Conscious linguistic dissimilation; Yiddish in the Hungarian Ultra-Orthodox system of ideas]. In Asszimiláció, integráció, szegregáció [Assimilation, integration, segregation], edited by Nándor Bárdi and Ágnes Tóth, 115‒30. Budapest: Argumentum Kiadó, 2011. ―――. Yiddish Printing in Hungary. An Annotated Bibliography. Budapest: Center for Jewish Studies at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 2011. ―――. “Kárpátaljai zsidó sajtó” [Jewish newspapers in Subcarpathia]. In Zsidók Kárpátalján. Történelem és örökség a Dualizmus korától napjainkig [Jews in Subcarpathia. History and heritage from the mid-nineteenth century to the present], edited by Viktória Bányai et al, 196‒206. Budapest: Aposztróf Kiadó, 2013. ―――. “Jiddis, német vagy jüdischdeutsch? A lakompaki R. Krausz Júda könyvei” [Yiddish, German or Jüdisch-Deutsch? Books by Júda R. Krausz of Lackenbach]. In Hagyományláncolat és modernitás [Chain of traditions and modernity], edited by Norbert Glässer and András Zima, 76‒86. Szeged: MTA–SZTE Vallási Kultúrakutató Csoport, 2014. ―――. “Yiddish in the Hungarian Setting.” In Jewish Languages in Historical Perspective; Institute of Jewish Studies, Studies in Judaica, Vol. 17, edited by Lily Kahn, 92‒111. Leiden and Boston: Koninklijke Brill, 2018. Konrád, Miklós. Zsidóságon innen és túl; Zsidók vallásváltása Magyarországon a reformkortól az első világhá-

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borúig [Hither and yonder of being Jewish; Conversion of Jews in Hungary from the reform age to World War I]. Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézet, 2014. Körner, András. A magyar zsidó konyha; Kultúrtörténet 77 autentikus recepttel [Hungarian Jewish cuisine; Cultural history with 77 authentic recipes]. Budapest: Corvina, 2017. Kőrösi, József. Pest, szabad királyi város, az 1870-dik évben [Pest, Free Royal City, in the year 1870]. Pest: Ráth Mór, 1871. Kőszegi, László. “A paprika útjai Közép-Európába―a kibővült kutatási lehetőségek tükrében” [Paprika’s migration routes to Central Europe―in light of the expanded research possibilities]. Ethnographia 123 (2012), 255‒77. Kovács, Sándor Iván. Szakácsmesterségnek és utazásnak könyvecskéi [Little books of the art of cooking and travel]. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó, 1988. Kugler, Géza. A legújabb és legteljesebb nagy házi cukrászat [The newest and most complete big home-patisserie]. 6th edition. Budapest: Rozsnyai Károly, 1905. Lederer, Therese, née Krauss. Koch-Buch für israelitische Frauen. Gründliche Anweisungen, ohne Vorkenntnisse Alle Arten Speisen, vorzüglich die Originalgerichte der israelitischen Küche, auf schmackhafte und wohlfeile Art nach den Ritual-Gesetzen zu bereiten [Cookbook for Jewish women: Thorough instructions for how to prepare, without any prior knowledge, all kinds of dishes, primarily the original dishes of the Jewish cuisine thriftily and in a tasty way while observing the ritual laws]. Budapest: Max Dessauer, 1876.

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―――. Koch-Buch für israelitische Frauen. Gründliche Anweisungen, ohne Vorkenntnisse Alle Arten Speisen, vorzüglich die Originalgerichte der israelitischen Küche, auf schmackhafte und wohlfeile Art nach den Ritual-Gesetzen zu bereiten. Reprint edition. Bremen: Unikum Verlag, 2011. ―――. De geheimen der Joodsche keuken. Handboek voor Israelitische Vrouwen en Meisjes [The secrets of Jewish cuisine. A manual for Jewish women and girls]. Rotterdam: Gebrs. Haagens, 1892. Reprint edition: Amsterdam: De Kan, 1999. Lénard, Sándor. A római konyha [Roman cuisine]. Budapest: Magvető Könyvkiadó, 2004. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Culinary Triangle.” In Food and Culture, edited by Counihan and Van Esterik, 28–35. Lindau, Marianna Catharina. Die steyermärkische Köchin, oder neues bürgerliches Kochbuch für alle Stände [The Styrian cook, or new middle-class cookbook for all social groups] Graz: Christian Friedrich Trötscher, 1801. Löv, Julie. Die wirthschaftliche israelitische Köchin oder neues vollständiges Kochbuch für Israeliten. Ein unentbehrliches Handbuch für wirthliche Frauen und Töchter. Nach vieljährigen Erfahrungen herausgegeben [The thrifty Jewish cook, or a new and complete cookbook for Jews. And Indispensable handbook for hospitable women and daughters: Published by Julie Löv, based on many years of experience]. Bratislava: Philip Korn, 1840. Second edition: 1842. Lowenstein, Steven M. “The Pace of Modernisation of German Jewry in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Vol. 21 (1976), 41‒56.

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―――. “The Yiddish Written Word in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” In The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook, Vol. 24 (1979), 179‒192. ―――. The Jewish Cultural Tapestry. International Jewish Folk Traditions. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. ―――. “The Complicated Language Situation of German Jewry, 1760-1914.” In Studia Rosenthaliana, Vol. 36, Speaking Jewish―Jewish Speak: Multilingualism in Western Ashkenazic Culture (2002-2003), 3–31. Leuven/Louvain: Peeters Publishers Machlin, Edda Servi. Classic Italian Jewish Cooking. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2005. Magyar, Elek. Az Ínyesmester szakácskönyve [The Master Gourmet’s cookbook]. Budapest: Akkord, 2000. First edition: Athenaeum, 1932. Máté, János. Debreczeni szakácskönyv magyar gazdasszonyok számára, mely magábanfoglal 900 legújabb ízű ételt [Cookbook from Debrecen for Hungarian homemakers, featuring 900 dishes of the latest taste]. Edited by Júlia Somlyai. Debrecen: Telegdi K. L., 1865. Marks, Gil. Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Maier-Bruck, Franz. Vom Essen auf dem Lande [About food in the provinces]. Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1981. Meyer, Dr. Erna, assisted by Milka Saphir. How to Cook in Palestine. Wie kocht man in Eretz-Israel. Tel Aviv: Palestine Publishing Co. for WIZO, c. 1936. Monoki, István. Magyar könyvtermelés Romániában, 1919–1940 [Hungarian book production in Romania, 1919– 1940]. Cluj-Napoca: Erdélyi Múzeum Egyesület, 1997.

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Montanari, Massimo. Food is Culture. Translated by Albert Sonnenfeld. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. ―――. Let the Meatballs Rest and Other Stories About Food and Culture. Translated by Beth Archer Brombert. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Montefiore, Lady Judith Cohen. The Jewish Manual, or Practical Information in Jewish and Modern Cookery: With a Collection of Valuable Recipes & Hints Relating to the Toilette. London: T. & W. Boone, 1846. Reprint: New York: NightinGale Books, 1983. Móra, Mrs. Ferenc. Szakácskönyve [Her cookbook]. Budapest: Enciklopédia, 1928. Morgenstern, Lina. Illustriertes Universal-Kochbuch für Gesunde und Kranke [Illustrated universal cookbook for the healthy and the sick]. Berlin: Spezialverlag für Kochbücher, 1905. Nayes folshtendiges kokhbukh fir di yidishe kikhe: ayn unentbehrlikhes handbukh fir di yidishe froyen un tökhter nebst forshrift fon flaysh raynlikhkayt un kashrut [A new and complete cookbook of the Jewish cuisine: An indispensable handbook for Jewish women and daughters, with instructions for koshering meat and separating challah, as well as for general cleanliness and kashrut]. Pest: Verlag von M. E. Löwy, 1854. Notaker, Henry. Old Cookbooks and Food History: Jewish Cookbooks, 1815–1945, http://www.notaker.com/ bibliogr/jewish. ―――. A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2017.

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Pilcher, Jeffrey M., ed. The Oxford Handbook of Food History. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Prato, Katharina. Die Süddeutsche Küche [Southern German cuisine]. 12th corrected edition. Graz: Aug. Heffe’s Buchhandlung, 1878. ―――. Die Süddeutsche Küche. Reprint of the 1903 edition. London: Forgotten Books, 2017. Randolph, Mary. The Virginia HouseWife, Or, Methodical Cook. Washington: Davis and Force, 1824. Rautenberg-Alianov, Viola: “How to cook in Palestine?” Guidebooks for German-Jewish Homemakers in Palestine in the 1930s and 40s. Los Angeles: UCLA, Center for the Study of Women, 2012. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/ item/1sx2m3bc (accessed October 1, 2021) Rézi néni [Auntie Rézi, actually: Teréz Doleskó]. Szegedi szakácskönyv [Szeged cookbook]. 7th edition. Budapest: Athenaeum, 1901. Reprint edition: Budapest: Pytheas Kiadó és Nyomda, 2006. Roden, Claudia. The Book of Jewish Food. An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Rosenfeld, Mrs. Márton. A zsidó nő szakácskönyve [The Jewish woman’s cookbook]. 3rd expanded edition. Budapest: Jos. Schlesinger, 1938. New edition, Budapest: Makkabi, 1993. Rosenthal, Móricz, transl. and Móricz Bloch, ed. Tefilot Yiśrael (Gebete Israels) Jiszrael könyörgései egész évre. Pozsony: Fülöp Korn, 1841. Schams, Franz. Vollständige Beschreibung der königlichen Freystadt Pest in Ungern [Complete description of the royal free city of Pest in Hungary]. Pest: Hartlebens Verlag, 1821.

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Schiffler, Walburga. Die deutsche Hausfrau in der Küche, Speisekammer und im Keller, oder: Kochkunst und Haushaltung unserer Tage [The German homemaker in the kitchen, pantry, and cellar, or: The art of cooking and household of our days]. Prag, Leitmeritz and Teplitz: C. W. Medau’sche Buchhandlung, 1837. Schönfeld, Wolf. Amtahat matmonim [Treasure bag] and Luach [Hebrew calendar, lit.: tablet]. Pest: M. E. Löwy, 1854. Sebők, László. “Zsidók Budapesten” [Jews in Budapest]. In Mozaikok az európai zsidóság történetéből Rubicon Online www.rubicon.hu/magyar/oldalak/ zsidok_budapesten. (accessed December 1, 2019.) Shandler, Jeffrey. Yiddish: Biography of a Language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Sherman, Sandra. “The Politics of Taste in The Jewish Manual.” In Petits Propos Culinaires, no. 71. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2002, 72‒94. ―――. Invention of the Modern Cookbook. Sta. Barbara, California: Greenwood Press, 2010. Silber, Michael. “The Historical Experience of German Jewry and Its Impact on Haskalah and Reform in Hungary.” In Toward Modernity; The European Jewish Model, edited by Jacob Katz, 107‒156. London and New York: Routledge, 1987. ―――. “Ballagi, Mór,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https:// yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ Ballagi_Mor (accessed May 28, 2021). ―――. “Bratislava,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https:// yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/ Bratislava (accessed May 28, 2021). ―――. “Budapest,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https://yivo-

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encyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Budapest (accessed October 5, 2021). ―――. “Hungary: Hungary before 1918.” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. https://yivoencyclopedia. org/article.aspx/Hungary/Hungary_before_1918 (accessed May 28, 2021). Simai, Kristóf. Szakácskönyve. Némely étkek készítési módja [Kristóf Simai’s cookbook. The way to prepare some dishes]. Budapest: Alinea Kiadó, 2011. Postscript: Fehér Béla. This was originally a manuscript collection of recipes, started in 1795. Simmel, Georg. “Sociology of the Meal.” In Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings, edited by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone, 130–136. London-Thousand Oaks-New Delhi: SAGE Publications Ltd., 1998. Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery: The Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry, and Vegetables. Hartford, CT: Printed by Hudson & Goodwin for the Author, 1796. Soyer, Alexis. A Shilling Cookery for the People: Embracing an Entirely New System of Plain Cookery and Domestic Economy. London, 1855. Stern, Ludwig. Amude ha-golah, oder die Vorschriften der Thora. Ein Lehrbuch der Religion [The rules of the Torah. A textbook of religion]. Frankfurt am Main: J. Kauffmann, 1882. Stolz, Joseph. Kochbuch für Israeliten, oder praktische Anweisung wie man nach den jüdischen Religions-Grundsätzen alle Gattungen der feinsten Speisen kauscher bereitet [Cookbook for Jews, or practical instruction for preparing all kinds of the finest dishes according to the Jewish dietary rules]. Karlsruhe: Verlag der G. F. Müllerschen Buchhandlung, 1815.

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Szabó, Imre. Erdély zsidói: Talmudisták, chászidok, cionisták [Transylvania’s Jews: Talmudists, chassids, Zionists], vol. I, Cluj-Kolozsvár: Kadima, 1938. Szinnyei, József. Magyar írók élete és munkái [Lives and works of Hungarian writers]. Budapest: Hornyánszky Viktor Kiadóhivatala, 1891–1914. Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words; Reading Women’s Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Toury, Jacob. “Jüdische Buchhändler und Verleger in Deutschland vor 1860” [Jewish booksellers and publishers in Germany before 1860]. In Bulletin of the Leo Baeck Institute, no. 9, 58–69. Tel Aviv: Bitaon Ltd., 1960. Ujvári, Péter, ed. Magyar Zsidó Lexikon [Hungarian Jewish encyclopedia]. Budapest: 1929. Reprint, Budapest: Makkabi, 2000. Ullmann, Jenny. A zsidókonyha művészete: A mai kornak megfelelő takarékossággal [The art of Jewish cuisine, with a thriftiness appropriate to our age]. Oradea [Nagyvárad]: Sonnenfeld Adolf, 1933. Venesz, József. A magyaros konyha [Hungarian cuisine]. Budapest: Minerva, 1973. First edition: 1958. Vizvári, Mariska. A család szakácskönyve [The family cookbook]. Pécs: Alexandra, 2004. First edition: 1944. A WIZO szakácskönyve [The WIZO cookbook]. Lugoj: József Sidon, 1938. Reprint edition, Budapest: WIZO Hungary Egyesület, 2018. Preface: András Szántó. Wecker, Anna. Ein köstlich new Kochbuch von allerhand Speisen, an Gemüsen, Obs, Fleisch, Geflügel, Wildpret, Fischen vnd Gebachens. Nicht allein vor Gesunde, sondern auch vnd Fürnemblich vor Krancke in allerley Kranckheiten vnd Ge-

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brästen: auch Schwangere Weiber, Kindbetterinnen, vnd alte schwache Leute, künstlich und nützlich zuzurichten vnd zu gebrauchen. Dergleichen vormals nie in Truck aussgangen. Amberg: Bey Michaëln Forstern, 1598. Weinberg, Werner: Language Questions Relating to Moses Mendelssohn’s Petateuch Translation. In Hebrew Union College Annual, 1984, Vol. 55. New York: Hebrew Union College Press, 1984. Wolf, Rebekka, née Heinemann. Kochbuch für israelitische Frauen, enthaltend die verschiedensten Koch- und Backarten. Einrichtung und Führung einer religiös-jüdischen Haushaltung [Cookbook for Jewish women, comprising the most diverse sorts of cooking and baking]. Sixth corrected and expanded edition. Berlin: Adolf Cohn, 1875. [First edition: 1851] ―――. Kochbuch für israelitische Frauen, enthaltend die verschiedensten Koch- und Backarten. Einrichtung und Führung einer religiös-jüdischen Haushaltung. Reprint of the 1896 edition. London: Forgotten Books, 2018.

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Woolley, Hannah. The Cook’s Guide: or, Rare Receipts for Cookery; Published and Set Forth Particularly for Ladies and Gentlwomen; Being Very Beneficial for All Those That Desire the True Way of Dressing of All Sorts of Flesh, Fowles, and Fish; the Best Directions for All Manner of Kickshaws, and the Most Ho-good Sawces: Whereby Noble Persons and Others in Their Hospitalities May Be Gratified in Their Gusto’s. London, 1664. ———. The Queen-like Closet, or, Rich cabinet: Stored with All Manner of Rare Receipts for Preserving, Candying, and Cookery, Very Pleasant and Beneficial to All Ingenious Persons of the Female Sex. London: 1670. ―――. Frauen-Zimmers Zeit-Vertreib, Oder Reiches Gemach von außerlesenen Experimenten und Curiositäten betreffend die rechte Praeservir- und Candier-Kunst... Sampt einem Vollkommenen Koch, Zeigend die rechte Art und Weise wie man allerhand Fleisch, Fische und Geflügel künstlich zu bereiten könne. Dazu auch angehencket ist eine kleine Frauen-Zimmers Apothecke... Hamburg: Auf Gottfried Schultzens Kosten, 1674.

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54. The Messinger coffeehouse and kosher restaurant in Trencsénteplic (Trenčianska Teplice, Slovakia) in c. 1910. This region was part of Hungary until 1920. The restaurant’s German-language shop sign advertises “Viennese cuisine.” Photograph by Divald and Monostory.

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Index of Recipes

Appetizers, egg dishes Eggs, Piedmont style ..................................................................................................... 74 Eggs with herring ...........................................................................................................75 Liver spread ................................................................................................................ 108 Meat sausage for appetizer ...........................................................................................111 Pickled herring ............................................................................................................ 109 Smoked meat pieces with eggs .................................................................................... 112

Soups and soup garnishes Bread soup ...................................................................................................................147 Chocolate soup .............................................................................................................. 49 Clear meat soup (consommé), primarily for the sick ................................................... 48 Fermented beet soup ...................................................................................................173 Fermented wheat bran soup ........................................................................................168 Fish soup ....................................................................................................................... 49 French soup .................................................................................................................. 74 Green pea soup .............................................................................................................111 Kidney soup .................................................................................................................. 48 Liver dumplings for soup ............................................................................................. 112 Matzo balls or bread dumplings ................................................................................. 108 Pockets of veal lungs for soup garnish ........................................................................169 Soup biscuits made of bread rolls ................................................................................ 112 Soup made of fresh cherries ......................................................................................... 48 Soup with meat-filled French toasts ............................................................................147 Soup with napkin dumpling ........................................................................................147 Soup with rice biscuits .................................................................................................. 74 Whipped egg white dumplings ....................................................................................168

Meat dishes Bean cholent (Teréz Berger) ........................................................................................105 Bean cholent (Therese Lederer) .................................................................................. 141 Bohemian-style tongue (Teréz Berger) ....................................................................... 113

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Braised meat ................................................................................................................ 113 Chicken with game sauce ............................................................................................. 113 Cholent with pearl barley ............................................................................................170 Dried pea cholent .........................................................................................................142 Golden vegetable dish (meat tzimmes) .......................................................................145 Hungarian bits of meat ..................................................................................................75 Hungarian goulash meat ...............................................................................................51 Hungarian paprika pullets ...........................................................................................148 Jellied goose .................................................................................................................170 Meat kugel ....................................................................................................................142 Polish beef tongue (Julie Löv) .......................................................................................75 Rice cholent with goose giblets .................................................................................... 141 Ritser with goose drumstick ....................................................................................... 220 Stuffed lamb .................................................................................................................169 Tongue in Polish sauce (Therese Lederer) ..................................................................149 Veal paprikás with tiny dumplings ..............................................................................149

Fish dishes Carp cooked the Jewish way (Marianna Catharina Lindau) ..................................... 209 Chopped carp ................................................................................................................ 76 Fried carp ...................................................................................................................... 76 Spit-roasted stuffed carp............................................................................................... 76 Stewed fish, Hebrew fashion (Mrs. Elizabeth F. Ellet) .............................................. 205

Vegetable dishes, kugels, noodle dishes, and side dishes Big stuffed onions ......................................................................................................... 50 Braised kohlrabi ........................................................................................................... 114 Bread roll kugel (Teréz Berger) ...................................................................................105 Bread roll kugel another way (Teréz Berger) ............................................................. 106 Bread roll kugel (Therese Lederer) .............................................................................143 Hungarian noodle pieces with farmer cheese ............................................................. 151 Matzo kugel (Teréz Berger) ........................................................................................ 106 Matzo kugel (Therese Lederer) ...................................................................................144 Noodle kugel ................................................................................................................143 Polish kugel ..................................................................................................................143 Root vegetables in the Hungarian way ......................................................................... 50 Stuffed eggplant ............................................................................................................ 70 Summer squash prepared like asparagus ...................................................................148

Cookies White almond macaroons ............................................................................................ 110

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Yeast dough pastries Bólesz ...........................................................................................................................195

Breads, challahs, biscotti Anise biscotti as in Reichenau ..................................................................................... 151 Challah for meat dishes ...............................................................................................146 Dairy challah ................................................................................................................146

Tortes, strudels, sweet kugels, other desserts Apple kugel ................................................................................................................. 106 Baked apple dessert ...................................................................................................... 49 Baked apricot foam ...................................................................................................... 114 Bread roll pudding ....................................................................................................... 115 Cheese delkel, kneaded ............................................................................................... 109 Cherimsel (József C. Dobos) ........................................................................................221 Chocolate torte ............................................................................................................. 116 Chremsel (Therese Lederer) ........................................................................................144 Fried matzo ..................................................................................................................145 Hungarian-style applecake ............................................................................................77 Jewish almond pudding (Eliza Acton) ....................................................................... 202 Jewish apple dessert (Schâleth à la Juive, August Escoffier) .................................... 207 Matzo fritters .............................................................................................................. 108 Napkin dessert dumpling ............................................................................................ 115 Onion strudel ...............................................................................................................158 Pastry with four layers of filling (Floden) ...................................................................172 Potato-flour torte .........................................................................................................110 Potato torte ....................................................................................................................77 Potato torte with almonds ...........................................................................................173 Semolina dumplings in milk ........................................................................................150 Spice strudel ................................................................................................................. 116 Walnut- or poppy seed-filled pastry packages (Kindli) .............................................. 171 Walnut torte ................................................................................................................. 116

Sweets, candies Naute ............................................................................................................................221

Preserves, compotes Cornel cherries in sugar ............................................................................................... 117 Sour cherries in vinegar ............................................................................................... 117

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55. The front cover of the 1908 second edition of A Hét szakácskönyve (A Hét cookbook). The recipes in the book were submissions to a recipe competition organized by the literary weekly A Hét (The Week) in 1901. The competition had no Jewish character, nevertheless many of the submitted recipes were Jewish specialties, since a significant share of the magazine’s readers were of that background.

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Index of Personal Names This list excludes those names that only occur in the footnotes, glossary, bibliography, or acknowledgments. Page numbers given for mentions in footnotes are marked with the letter “n”

Abbahu, Rabbi 47 Abbot, Edward 206 Abusch-Magder, Ruth 228, 228n Acton, Eliza 44n, 131, 202, 204, 205n, 206 Ágai, Adolf 186, 218, 219 Aron, Jean-Paul 5 Aron, Raymond 5 Artusi, Pellegrino 208, 209, 209n Aschmann, Rahel 42n, 43, 43n, 44, 47, 50, 53n, 58, 64, 64n, 65–69, 71–74, 130, 131, 149 Ashkenazi, Jacob ben Isaac 38 Balla, Vilmos 183, 184, 184n Ballagi, Aladár 20, 27 Barthes, Roland 5, 5n Baruch, Katharina 88 Baruch, Teréz, See also Berger, Teréz 1, 79 Basse, Gottfried 72, 73n Berger, Teréz, See also Riza XVI, 2, 14, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 87, 88, 91, 97, 98, 103, 105, 125, 207n Braudel, Fernand 5, 5n Braun, György 219 Cohn, Sarah IX, 138, 139, 139n, 223n, 228, 228n Cserna-Szabó, András 4, 124, 124n, 140, 140n, 163n, Czéh, Sándor 57 Czifray (or Czifrai), István, See also Czövek, István 65, 67, 67n, 123, 131, 211

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Czövek, István 67, 211 De Pomiane, Dr. Édouard 126n, 206, 207 Della Torre, Adalbert 33 Dessauer, Miksa 118, 119, 120, 121 Divald and Monostory (photographers) 246 Dobos, C. József 93n, 215, 216, 216n, 217, 221 Doleskó, Teréz 67, 68, 132, 133, 135, 135n, 140, 212, 215, 220 Dorn, Anna 209, 209n, 210, 211, 212, 213 Drucker, David 178, 180, 181 Dux, Adolf 57 Ellet, Elizabeth F. 205 Escoffier, Auguste 207, 207n, 208n Fehér, Béla 4, 67, 67n, 68n, 93, 123, 123n, 216, 216n Feigenblatt, Móni 183 Fischer, Tivadar 159 Flandrin, Jean-Louis 5 Francis II 35 Franz Joseph I 31 Frugoli, Antonio 208 Füreder, Balázs 4 Ganz, Mrs. Ábrahám 165 Gidó, Attila 156, 156n, 158n, 159, 159n, 160 Giti, auntie (Mrs. Aladár Adler) 3, 216 Glasse, Hannah 70n, 201, 201n, 202, 203, 206 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 140 Goldstein, Számi 182

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Goszleth, István 16 Gumprich, Mrs. Joseph (Bertha Gumprich) 47, 47n, 126 Gyertyánffy, Kristóf 177 Hale, Sarah Josepha 205 Hatvany, Lajos 10, 10n Hercz, Mrs. Rafael Rezső 124, 140 Herzl, Adolf 178 Herzl, Dávid 178 Herzl, Theodor 158 Herzl, Zsófia 178 Heyden, Bertha 227, 227n Homberg, Herz 37 Horn, Ede 57 Horváth, Ilona 218 Hrotkó, Larissa 45, 45n Hübner, Teodóra XVI, 87, 88 Jankó, János 185 Jochnowitz, Eve 18, 18n Jókai, Mór 185, 186, 186n, 188 Karo, Joseph 128, 129 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara V, VI, XV, 6, 39, 39n, 41n, 62n, 63n, 69, 70n, 153, 190, 192n, 206, 206n, 228 Kis, Miklós Tótfalusi 4 Kisbán, Eszter 4, 70n, 93n Kiss, Bettina 18, 18n Klič, Karel 185 Klösz, György 26 Koerner, András VII, VIII, XII, XIV, XV, 1n, 79n, 119n, 207n Komoróczy, Szonja Ráhel 18, 18n, 37n, 38, 38n Korn, Philipp Anton 54, 54n, 55, 56, 56n, 57, 57n, 71 Kossuth, Lajos 57 Kovács, Sándor Iván 4, 4n Kőszegi, László 18, 68n, 93n, 99n Krausz, Bernát 123 Krausz, Juda 37, 37n, 38n Kummer, Ed. 72, 73 Lederer, Mrs. Mór 123, 124 Lederer, Therese V, VIII, 1, 2, 3, 8, 8n, 13, 66, 67, 69n, 73, 80, 113, 118, 120, 134, 135, 135n, 136–138, 138n, 139, 140, 140n, 141, 147, 149, 163, 224, 226 Léderer, Mrs., née Teréz Krausz 123 Leveleki, Dániel 31, 31n

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Lévi-Strauss, Claude 5, 5n Lindau, Marianna Catharina 209, 209n Linek, Lajos 182 Löv, Julie 13, 35, 41, 43, 43n, 44, 44n, 45–47, 50–55, 57, 59, 62, 65–68, 68n, 69–74, 80, 125, 130, 131, 149, 163, 226, 228 Lowenstein, Steven M. 37n, 45, 45n Löwy, Efraim 20, 20n, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31 Löwy, Ignác 31, 31n Löwy, Márkus 28, 28n, 33, 42 Magyar, Elek 8, 183, 183n, 184, 189, 192, 194 Malin, Joseph 202 Marks, Gil 189, 189n Máté, János 211 Mendelsson, Moses XIII, 37, 37n, 42, 42n Meyer, Dr. Erna XV, 155, 155n, 156, 157 Molnár and Brodszky (photographers) 88 Montanari, Massimo 6, 95, 95n, 208, 208n Montefiore, Lady Judith 60, 60n, 190, 227n Montefiore, Sir Moses 190 Móra, Mrs. Ferenc 218 Morgenstern, Lina 216 Németh, Zsuzsanna 123 Nordau, Max (Miksa) 158 Notaker, Henry 17, 17n, 18, 18n, 43, 43n, 47, 53, 53n, 70n, 228, 228n Orczy, Count József 20n, 26, 27, 27n, 177 Osvát, Kálmán 178, 180, 181n, 183n Pálffy, Counts 23 Paula (domestic servant) 102, 103 Perlmutter-Heilperin, Adèle 88 Prato, Katharina 66, 67, 209, 209n, 210, 211, 212, 215, 220 Randolph, Mary 205, 205n Rézi néni. See Doleskó, Teréz Riza. See also Teréz Berger 80, 82, 82n, 83, 85, 86, 89, 92–96, 99, 100, 102–104, 108, 109, 113 Rosenfeld, Mrs. Márton 9, 161, 161n, 168, 212 Rosenthal, Élias 24 Róth, Dr. Emil 159 Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria 92, 211 Saint-Hilaire, Jozefa 123, 123n

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I ndex of personal names

Saly, Noémi 4, 189n Saphir, Moritz Gottlieb 35, 35n, 71, 72n, 100, 100n Schams, Franz 27, 27n Schiffler, Walburga 51, 68 Schiller, Friedrich von 140 Schmid, Anton von 35 Schmid, Franz 33 Schreiber, Moses 24, 24n Schwarcz, Ignácz 178 Schwarcz, Sámuel 140 Schwarz, Ignácz 178 Shandler, Jeffrey IX, XIII, 41n Sidon, József 158, 159, 160 Silber, Michael K. XI, 20n, 21n, 23n, 56n, 57, 57n, 225n, 226n Simmel, Georg 5, 5n Skopáll, József 84 Skopáll, Vilma 84 Sofer, Hatam. See Moses Schreiber Sofer, Mosheh. See Moses Schreiber Soyer, Alexis 202, 202n Stengel & Co. 118 Stéphanie, Crown Princess of Austria 211 Stern, Ludwig L. 138 Stolz, Joseph XI, X, XIV, 43, 43n, 47, 53, 53n, 58, 59, 59n, 60, 60n, 61, 61n, 63, 64, 64n, 69, 206, 227n

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Stöckl, Elisabeth 227, 227n Suh, Young 78, 87, 88, 97, 134, 137, 194, 197 Swift, Jonathan 140 Szántó, András 159, 161 Szilágyi-Gál, Mihály 160 Szinnyei, József 71, 123 Tanara, Vincenzo 208 Trattner, Mátyás 24, 24n Trattner, Tamás 24n Ullmann, Jenny 165 Vasváry, Gyula 211 Venesz, József 218 Vizvárí, Mariska 218 Vos, Sara or Saartje 136, 136n Weinwurm, Antal 176, 180, 228, 235 Weiszburg, Chaim 159 Wohl, Hermann 72, 72n Wolf, Rebekka IX, X, XI, 41, 42n, 43, 43n, 44, 64, 126, 128, 128n, 129, 135, 136, 216, 223n Ybl, Miklós 120 Zemplényi, Antónia 123 zum Lamm, Marcus 101

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EARLY JEWISH COOKBOOKS

Illustration Credits

Numbers in the list refer to figure numbers

Budapest Történeti Múzeum, Kiscelli Múzeum: 6, 36, 38, 52, 53, 54 // Center for Jewish History, New York: 51c // Forster Gyula Nemzeti Örökséggazdálkodási és Szolgáltatási Központ: 5 // Fortepan: 12 // Fővárosi Szabó Ervin Könyvtár, Budapest Gyűjtemény: 3, 26 // Hathi Trust Digital Library: 46 // Horváth, Dezső: 15a, 15g, 29, 32, 34, 49, 50 // Hübner, Teodóra: 1, 56 // Koerner, András: 2, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 31, 42, 43, 45, 48c, 48d // Magyar Kereskedelmi és Vendéglátóipari Múzeum: 15f, 27, 47, 48a, 48b // Országos Széchenyi Könyvtár: 8, 13a, 15c, 15d, 28, 39, 40, 51a, 51d–f, 55 // Rómer Flóris Művészeti és Történeti Múzeum: 17 // Szántó, András: 37 // The Center for Jewish Art, Gross Family Collection: 9 // The Jewish Museum, New York: 25 // Tóbiás, Tas: 35, 44 // Universitätsbibliothek Freiburg: 14a // Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek SachsenAnhalt: 14b, 15b // Universiteitsbibliotheek Amsterdam, Bijzondere Collecties: 4, 10, 11, // Wikimedia Commons: 24, 33 // YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York: 2

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Acknowledgments

Aside from Katalin Fenyves, the editor of this book, and Noémi Saly, the editor of its original Hungarian version, I owe the greatest gratitude to Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who agreed to write a preface to my work and who provided crucial advice, especially for the first essay. The same essay also much benefited from Viktoria Bányai’s, Larissa Hrotkó’s and Ádám Nádasdy’s help. As during the work on my previous books, here too I could always turn to Victor Karady, the outstanding sociologist, for advice on some problem. Eszter Kisbán, one of the pioneers of scholarly research of Hungarian alimentary history, kindly agreed to read the Hungarian manuscript of this work and to comment on it. I am also grateful to Teodóra Hübner, the excellent book designer and photographer, for the design of this book. Last but not least, I would like to thank László Kúnos, the former director of Corvina Books, for helping me with the Hungarian version, his daughter, Linda Kúnos, former acting director, currently senior editor of CEU Press, for paving the way to publishing this English edition of it, and Emily Poznanski, the current director of CEU Press, for overseeing its publication. Finally, I am grateful to William A. Christian Jr. and Nóra Vörös for their excellent copyediting work. In addition, I wish to thank the following people who also provided important help: Susanne Belovari, Ákos Biros, Marianne Bolváry, Györgyi Borvölgyi, Gábor Dombi, Bianka Dosztály, Béla Fehér, Gidáli Júlia, Attila Gidó, György Haraszti, Dezső Horváth, Kati Koerner, Réka Koerner, Tamás Körner, Zsuzsa Körner, László Kőszegi, Katalin Köves, Tamás Lózsy, Bálint Magyar, Zita Nagy, William Oshrin, Szilvia Pálinkás, Jeffrey Shandler, Laurent Stern, Young Suh, Zsolt Szalai, András Szántó, Zoltán Székely, Mihály Szilágyi-Gál, Tas Tóbiás, Dr. Róbert Török, Louise O. Vasvári, and Klára Würtz.

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56. The recipe collection of Mrs. Sándor Indig, née Antónia Törzs (1878, Győr–1945, Budapest), into which she started copying recipes in 1895. Though she was only superficially religious and no longer obeyed kashrut rules, her collection includes a bread kugel (Zsemlye kugli), one of the traditional side dishes served with cholent at the Shabbat midday meal.

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