On The Bookshelf

`A Taste Of The Past'

As readers prepare their Thanksgiving table, author provides glimpse of the domestic life and recipes
of a 19th-century Hungarian Jewish woman.

SAND EE B RAWARS KY
Special to the Jewish News

I

ax

11/19
2004

58

apologize to Andras Koerner for being late, but I
promptly realize that in his apartment on
Manhattan's Upper West Side, time is measured
in centuries, not minutes. We sit down to talk at his
dining room table, with large portraits of his
Hungarian great-great-grandparents and great-great-
great-grandparents on two walls and a family heirloom
grandfather clock tickinab on another.
Koerner, 63, came to the United States from
Budapest in 1967 with these paintings hidden in his
bags. He had tried to leave in 1956, but he "woke up
late," and was caught twice trying to cross the border,
was arrested and spent a day in jail. Ultimately, he
married an American woman and moved to the U.S.
with her.
Once in New York City, he reunited with his grand-
mother, who had come here in 1946; the two of them
had spent the last years of the war together and were
liberated together from the Budapest Ghetto.
When his grandmother immigrated, she brought a
chest full of personal memorabilia: He explains that
she was unable to part with her past as she knew she
would begin the dauntina task of building a new
future — learning a new b language and getting to
know a new country — while in her 60s. But once
transplanted, the chest stayed largely untouched.
Almost 50 years later, its contents provided the raw
material for Koerner's first book.
A Taste of the Past: The Daily Life and Cooking of a
19th-Century Hungarian Jewish Homemaker
(University Press of New England) is inspired by
Koerner's great-grandmother, who left a handwritten
journal of recipes, complete with an index, put togeth-
er in 1869 when she was about 18.
Koerner, an architect who learned to cook 15 years
ago after his marriage ended, updated her Hungarian
specialties for the modern cook, adjusting measure-
ments and ingredients. He had to figure out how to
translate an amount like "3 kreuzer of chocolate,"
referring to a unit of money in the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. In addition, he made some substitutions,
replacing goose fat with chicken far or margarine.
The book's 85 recipes include almond-studded
meatballs in sweet-and-sour sauce, gooseberry sauce
for boiled beef, fish with walnut-vegetable sauce, cab-
bage dumplings, bread pudding in noodle dough, sour
cherry cake and pastries called kindli. Koerner's text
draws on family recollections and research, and is illus-
trated with more than 100 of his original pen-and-ink
drawings.
More than a cookbook, the book is a portrait of a
life and a world that no longer exists.
Therese (Riza) Baruch was born in 1851 in the
western Hungarian town of Gyor and then lived in

T aste

oft

the

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as t.

The Daily Life and Cooking of a
I9th-Centuly Hungarian Jewish
Honiemaker

With 85
Authentic Recipes

Adapted for the
:Modern Cook

ANDRAS KOERNER

with illustratiotts by tbr author

the town of Moson, near
the Austrian border, after
her marriage. Koerner
explains that she was a mid-
dle-class woman eager to
write stylishly in spite of her
limited education; she wrote
many letters to friends and
saved copies of them, which
Koerner found.
Andras Koerner:
Although she herself was a
"Luckily, my great-
religious woman, she was
grandmother's 1869
open to townspeople of
collection of recipes
other religions and was very
has survived and
much integrated into the
made it possible to
life of the town, which
include updated
seemed like a place of toler-
versions."
ance. Koerner says that, to
his surprise, he did not find
evidence of anti-Semitism in
this late 19th-century era.
"So much has been written about Eastern European
Jews and how they died — perhaps because it's so
traumatic and dramatic — but also in a way it stole
the focus from how they lived," said Koerner.
"Much of what I write is about where they kept
eggs, how they went shopping. It's trivial, the kind of

stuff people attach little significance to," he says,
noting that most people don't record this type of
information and by the time it becomes significant,
it has disappeared and is irretrievable.
"Through a lucky combination of coincidence, I
was handed down a fairly comprehensive cache of
documents and oral history," he says, but admits that
he still doesn't have a complete picture. "I wish I
could go back to ask [my great-grandmother] to fill in
the gaps.
This project grew out of Koerner's visits with his
mother, who remained in Budapest after he moved to
the United States. As a way to keep a connection with
her, he began taking down her oral history on his visits
and was impressed with the sharpness of her memo-
ries.
She had been raised in part by her grandmother,
Riza, and she remembered not only what their house
was like, but all about their daily life, meals and holi-
day celebrations. A cousin who heard of his interviews
led Koerner to the unofficial archive, which he
describes as a time capsule.
In the living room he has set out a selection of his
Hungarian heirlooms, including monogrammed table-
cloth and napkins, china, silverware from his great-
grandmother and the actual book in which she wrote
down her recipes. The ink is now brown and the pages
are spotted with ancient food stains, but the elegant
handwriting still stands out.
We move back to the present when we enter his
compact Manhattan alley of a kitchen. He has laid out
all the ingredients for one of the simpler recipes in the
book, "Almond-Chocolate Kisses."
Using a food processor to chop chocolate and nuts,
he mixes a batter and gets the cookies into the oven in
less than 10 minutes, remarking how his great-grand-
mother would have used a hand grinder — and that
her kitchen was five or six times the size of his. Soon,
the entire apartment is fragrant with the sweet
morsels. When the cookies come out of the oven,
they're good looking as well as good tasting.
Koerner has also prepared Leberpastete, "Chopped
Calves' Liver," from a recipe in the book. He says that
he is not aware of any Hungarian equivalents of the
many American jokes about chopped liver. I stick with
the cookies.
He explains that writing the book was a "road of
discovery."
Not that I'm a religious Jew now," said Koerner.
"One would not say that. It just completely drew me
to read about Judaism and discover that part of my
ancestor's tradition, which was not part of my
upbringing."
Now, for Koerner, home is "absolutely New York. I
feel more anchored here than there," he says, referring
to Budapest. "I will die with an accent." ❑

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