Just as the title suggests, this book is far more than a cookbook—it is a personal memory book, trying to capture through recipes the flavor of traditional Jewish life in prewar Hungary. The book began as an attempt to complete two unfinished projects of the author’s parents— her mother’s recipe collection and her father’s autobiography. Kirsche Shapiro has truly fulfilled kibud av v’em with both—and in the process filled in her family tree, explored her family’s history, and learned a lot about kosher food and wine production and modernizing recipes.
The cookbook project began as a collection of recipes for the author’s bubbie’s eightieth birthday, and expanded to a paean to her family’s tradition of providing food and groceries to Jewish communities in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Chicago. Her mother’s uncles and father’s maternal grandparents had owned small grocery stores in prewar Czechoslovakia, where they baked matzah and supplied the Jewish community. Her parents, both Holocaust survivors who came to America, opened the first kosher-only supermarket in Chicago, Hungarian Kosher Foods, where her father worked until shortly before his death in his eighties.
The recipes themselves have been on a long journey, conveying memories of food traditions such as stuffed chicken prepared in the manner of gefilte fish, but modernized with precise measurements and using foods available today. The directions are clear, the photographs mouthwatering, and the recipes, as far as I tried them, work. One may be surprised to find among the Hungarian classics—such as goulash, chicken paprikas with dumplings, and lekvar (prune butter)—some newcomers such as chop suey and Israeli salad (the author now lives in Israel). These new faces reflect the neverending journey of Jewish food, always picking up new ideas from its changing surroundings. B’tayavon.