Filled with 133 easy recipes for everyday and holiday occasions, each entry in this resource is drawn from the most popular Hungarian cookery book--including the best of traditional Hungarian cuisine.

Hungarian cuisine is very unique: it has been influenced by many different cultures. Based on the diversity of European folk traditions, over the centuries we developed our own ways. In this book, my intention was to introduce Traditional Hungarian Cooking. In addition to keeping alive age-old recipes, I also created some new dishes that were originally not part of the traditional Hungarian cuisine, but their roots can be found in our culture. Although I live in Canada, I was born and raised in Hungary. During these long years I have spent in North America, I have kept my passion for Hungarian food culture. Making delicious dishes is not an everyday chore for me, but rather a passion and an art. Seeing my family and friends enjoying the meal I made for them is the greatest reward I can imagine. I started mastering my cooking skills in my early teens. Long before that, even as a child, I would watch my mother in the kitchen with great curiosity. She was preparing Hungarian Style Stew, which is known as the famous Pörkölt, or the Hungarian Apple Pie that is not round but square shaped. I think I inherited my passion for cooking from my mom, although my dad was a great cook as well. In our family, good food has always played an important role, and was the focal point of holiday gatherings and special occasions. I hope everybody will enjoy this book and find their favorite foods, have fun, and create your own masterpieces. To get new ideas, please check out my webpage regularly to see my latest recipes.

These enticing Old World Hungarian recipes were brought to America by the author's grandparents, but they have been updated to accommodate today's dietary concerns and faster-paced lifestyles. The author also explores the seasonal and ceremonial observances still practiced by Hungarian Americans: bacon cookouts, fall grape festivals, weddings, Christmas, New Year's, and Easter.

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.

"Our appetite for this interesting cuisine, a melding of Germanic, Slavic, Tartar, and Turkish influences, has been whetted by [this] excellent new work."--New York Times