Winner of the Association of Jewish Libraries' 2022 Judaica Bibliography Award.

The seven essays in this volume focus such previously unexplored subjects as the world’s first cookbook printed in Hebrew letters, published in 1854, and a wonderful 19th-century Jewish cookbook, which in addition to its Hungarian edition was also published in Dutch in Rotterdam. The author entertainingly reconstructs the history of bólesz, a legendary yeast pastry that was the specialty of a famous, but long defunct Jewish coffeehouse in Pest, and includes the modernized recipe of this distant relative of cinnamon rolls. Koerner also tells the history of the first Jewish bookstore in Hungary (founded as early as in 1765!) and examines the influence of Jewish cuisine on non-Jewish food.

In this volume András Koerner explores key issues of Hungarian Jewish culinary culture in greater detail and more scholarly manner than what space restrictions permitted in his previous work Jewish Cuisine in Hungary: A Cultural History, also published by CEU Press, which received the prestigious National Jewish Book Award in 2020. The current essays confirm the extent to which Hungarian Jewry was part of the Jewish life and culture of the Central European region before their almost total language shift by the turn of the 20th century.

Winner of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Food Writing & Cookbooks.

The author refuses to accept that the world of pre-Shoah Hungarian Jewry and its cuisine should disappear almost without a trace and feels compelled to reconstruct its culinary culture. His book―with a preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett―presents eating habits not as isolated acts, divorced from their social and religious contexts, but as an organic part of a way of life.

According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: “While cookbooks abound, there is no other study that can compare with this book. It is simply the most comprehensive account of a Jewish food culture to date.” Indeed, no comparable study exists about the Jewish cuisine of any country, or―for that matter―about Hungarian cuisine. It describes the extraordinary diversity that characterized the world of Hungarian Jews, in which what could or could not be eaten was determined not only by absolute rules, but also by dietary traditions of particular religious movements or particular communities. 

Ten chapters cover the culinary culture and eating habits of Hungarian Jewry up to the 1940s, ranging from kashrut (the system of keeping the kitchen kosher) through the history of cookbooks, the food traditions of weekdays and holidays, the diversity of households, and descriptions of food and hospitality industries to the history of some typical dishes. Although this book is primarily a cultural history and not a cookbook, it includes 83 recipes, as well as nearly 200 fascinating pictures of daily life and documents.i