There are many cookbooks in this world, too many. Sometimes, when I enter a bookstore and stop in front of shelves of them, I fall into a deep depression just looking at all that glitz and glamour.
Many cookbooks include sumptuous photos of meals; they make your mouth water. On the other hand, they look more like picture books for children than cooking manuals. I am against cookbooks with photos! For one, they make the book more expensive. Besides, they make the reader look stupid, as if he (or, more often, she!) needs to see the food in order to trust the recipe. And then, when the reader, following the recipe, makes the same meal, it looks very different on the plate. The meat is not as pink as in the photo, the bread crust is not as crispy, the salad not as green. Even the expensive tablecloth doesn’t look half as good as in the photo!
Yes, I must admit that glamour, glitz, snobbery, and expensive ingredients put me off. There are, of course, many reasons not to write a simple cookbook, as one is inevitably discouraged to do so every step of the way. But, by the same token, this is precisely the reason for me to write a simple cookbook of my own. You have to have a passion for food (which we pigs usually have!), some basic idea of what it’s all about, and a clear concept of what you want to put on the plate. And in this case that is traditional Hungarian cuisine.
My book is an antisnobbish book with simple, tasty, and easily available ingredients that you don’t have to hunt for in foreign countries, I guarantee you. In my cookbook you will find recipes I cooked and tasted myself, recipes I learned from my mother back in Budapest. She had a box full of them, written down by my grandmother in her neat hoofwriting in green ink on small pieces of cardboard the size of a postcard. My grandma believed that these cardboards were more practical than a notebook or a book, because it is easier to handle a cardboard than turn a page, with an often greasy hoof. Now I have the same box in front of me. But unlike Grandma, I happen to think that a box is really an awkward way to keep recipes. Especially when you are getting ready to leave the country and have to stuff all your possessions into one single suitcase—which is exactly what happened to me in 1989. My cookbook, which you are holding in your hand or hoof right now, is a book of the same size as Grandma’s cardboards, hardcover and no photos, except, of course, for the goulash on the cover.
Goulash, or gulyás, is a typical and surely the most famous Hungarian dish. It roughly translates as beef stew, although it is really a special kind of stew, as you will surely realize. It was invented by herdsmen (gulyás) from the puszta pastures and became extremely popular throughout the world at the beginning of the last century. In my view, its ingredients can vary as long as you throw vegetable oil (instead of the customary lard), add beef cut in cubes, onions, potatoes, garlic, and a lot of peppers into the pot and let it simmer. Tomatoes, carrots, and other vegetables are optional, although there are other, more radical opinions that exclude tomatoes altogether. But all agree about a lot of peppers. Adding more water, or less, determines if it will be a goulash stew pörkölt or a goulash soup (gulyásleves).
Before I tell you more about this cookbook, let me focus for a moment on the political aspect of goulash—that is, on the Hungarian political stew called goulash communism. After all, I was a professor of political science, and it is of the utmost importance to me to clarify the difference between two very similar words: goulash and gulag. Don’t be puzzled because I mention the gulag in connection with goulash. Both have to do with socialism, and I can’t hide either my past or the time when my homeland was a Socialist republic and part of the Soviet bloc. That also goes for the Soviet kind of repression. As Hungary and the USSR were not only neighbors but also, so to speak, comrades in Communism for almost five decades, it is only logical that I should feel that there is a certain danger of confusing the two words.
It is not just because they sound similar and could confuse ears not accustomed to such nuances. No, the distinction is even more important because today’s reader might not be aware that gulag, as opposed to goulash, has nothing to do with food at all! Also, when you think about it, these two words are among the very few words from our part of the world that have succeeded. But the fact that someone might confuse them is not only bothersome, it is offensive to me. Because one stands for something good and the other for something horrible.
GULAG is in fact an acronym for the administration of what officially was called “corrective labor camps” in the USSR between the thirties and midfifties of the last century. Incidentally, it seems that in the USSR and other Socialist states, party and state apparatchiks loved acronyms, like RSDLP(b), CPSU, CPC, KMT, NKVD, GOELRO—our own AVH, SWP, NEM plan, and so on.
But they often hid a terrible reality—as in the case of gulags. In these camps, mostly situated in the frozen tundra of Siberia, inmates died like flies because, looking at it from my perspective, there was no goulash to eat there. Or hardly anything else, for that matter! Indeed, in a very general way, and only for the purpose of this cookbook, the gulag could be defined as a place characterized by its scarcity of food. Inmates, fed on the meager rations of kasha (a kind of porridge), ate rats and dogs and God knows what else—they even killed each other for a portion of food. Many of them ended up in camps for committing ridiculous “crimes” like petty theft, telling what were considered antigovernment jokes, or holding political views revealed to be “counterrevolutionary.” A very wide definition of “enemy,” based on the principle “he who is not for us is against us,” was used to sentence them to the gulag. Innocent people were forced to live together with real criminals and murderers. Perhaps even twenty million passed through these camps, and millions perished. With the passage of time, the acronym GULAG became gulas; that is, a noun symbolizing the repressive Soviet system itself. With this transformation it also became a dangerous word. Those who knew about it had to pretend that they didn’t.
I remember very well the first time I heard the word. It was in the eighties, when I read the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, by the dissident Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who himself had been an inmate for eight years. His novel tells about just that, a day in a camp, how these inmates lived in dirt, were eaten by lice, dressed in rags, and fought for the little food there was. The meaninglessness of that life seemed the hardest thing to put up with. Therefore, at the end of a day Ivan Denisovich was pleased, because he had worked hard and well. This was the first book I had read that described the gulag system and how it was used as an instrument of mental repression.
Later on, I read more of Solzhenitsyn, whose book The Gulag Archipelago made the gulags known throughout the world. I read Varam Shalamov’s memoir Kolyma Tales, as well as Eugenia Ginsburg’s Journey into the Whirlwind, and then Within the Whirlwind, and many more. My generation of pigs at Eötvös University was fascinated by these accounts. But one book of memoirs stuck with me, perhaps because I discovered that my father kept it hidden in his desk. It was Karlo Stajner’s Seven Thousand Days in Siberia. Sentenced for his “antirevolutionary activities,” Karlo Stajner spent twenty years of his life in camps. In his introduction to the English edition, the well-known then Yugoslav writer Danilo Kiš describes a meeting with Stajner and his wife, Sonja, who had waited for him to come back for all those years and to whom he later dedicated his memoir. In one single but tremendously powerful sentence, Kiš describes Sonja’s eyes: ”[T]hey are not like the eyes of the blind, not blind eyes, but eyes that no writer has ever described and few people have seen, dead eyes in a living face.” Stajner was a victim—but so was she; this sentence made me never forget what the gulag had done to Sonja’s eyes.