Jewish Cuisine in Hungary

This labor of love is also a work of erudition that demonstrates the importance of food as an area of serious study. While cookbooks abound, there is no other study of Jewish food that can compare with this book. Even as a work of scholarship, this volume whets the appetite. What we have here is not only comprehensive in its historical and regional scope, but also in attending to all aspects of Hungarian Jewish food culture. Indeed, as a social history of Hungarian food culture, this book examines the changing circumstances of Hungarian Jewish life and the many ways of being Hungarian and Jewish. The result is the most complete account of a Jewish food culture to date. As the author richly demonstrates, food is more than cuisine. The social and cultural practices, the meanings and feelings associated with food define it as much as the ingredients and their preparation. This is revealed in the minutely detailed descriptions of food and social life in memoirs, autobiographies, travel accounts, literature, and ethnographies, which are but a few of the many sources the author mines. - Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Professor Emerita of Performance Studies at New York University and Chief Curator of the Core Exhibition at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw


András Koerner's Jew ish Cuisine in Hungary paints a vivid portrait of prewar Jewish Hungary through its food, its bakers, its home-makers, and more. The focus on Jewish households and local businesses shifts the scholarly gaze from typical historical subjects to the realm of working people and women—fertile ground for meaningful inquiry. The book quotes extensively from memoirs, cookbooks, and periodicals of the time with each rich passage reveling in the minutiae of daily life. Koerner masterfully weaves together photos, objects, and eighty-three recipes plucked from rare historical cookbooks to transport the reader to Budapest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to Hungarian Jewish holiday tables and rural goose farms. Ultimately, Koerner sheds new light on prewar Hungarian Jewish life by exploring the role food plays in its culture in such innovative ways, and so too does he help us understand the Hungarian Jewish place in broader Jewish food culture. Jewish Cuisine in Hungary will no doubt serve as an essential historical reference for years to come, while also modeling what's possible in the field of food scholarship. - Remarks by the judging panel of experts for the National Jewish Book Award, Food Writing and Cookbooks category.