Early Jewish Cookbooks: Essays on Hungarian Jewish Gastronomical History

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.
Review
"It's not often that I read a book with a title such as this for pleasure, but it was the unexpected bonus. András Koerner has written several books (in English) on Jewish life in Hungary, including the prizewinning Jewish Cuisine in Hungary (CEU Press/Corvina, 2019). The present volume, introduced most intelligently by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, looks not only at the early Jewish cookbooks written in Hungary but also addresses the wider question of the interpenetration of Jewish recipes and what might be called indigenous European cuisine. There is plenty chew on. Each of his chapters boasts a recipe appendix, so the enthusiastic can experiment. An admirable piece
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