One Man’s Search for the First Hebrew-Lettered Cookbook
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Loading... - Malia Alter
- 14 Mar 2023
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The text is a snapshot of Hungary’s Jewish middle class in the mid-1800s.
Afew months ago, András Koerner, the foremost expert on Hungarian Jewish culinary history—finally got to see the treasure he’d chased for years. At the Hungarian Museum of Trade and Tourism, he beheld a 168-year-old book that, just a few years earlier, had been thought to have disappeared without a trace. Opened to its splotched first page, it was covered with Hebrew print and an illustration of women working over a countertop, one of them holding a pan over an open fire.
The pages ahead contained something that no Hebrew-lettered book before it ever had: recipes. This cookbook, published in 1854 in Budapest was 40 years older and of a completely different national origin than the book that historians had previously regarded as the first Hebrew-lettered cookbook.
“I don’t want to exaggerate it, but at least within scholarly circles, it was a small sensation,” says Koerner, author of this year’s Early Jewish Cookbooks.
Koerner, 81, grew up in a middle-class, Jewish neighborhood of Budapest after surviving the Nazi-occupied city’s ghetto. His quest to find the nearly 170-year-old book is part of a lifetime of connecting with his roots through food. In 2016, while doing research for his book Jewish Cuisine in Hungary, Koerner came across a reference to the 1854 cookbook in a bibliography. Read More…
