FENYVES FAMILY RECIPE BOOK, undated 2014.317.1 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW Washington, DC 20024-2126 Tel. (202) 479-9717 e-mail: [email protected]Appendix A. Commentary on the Fenyves Family Recipe Book & Table of Contents The following Commentary on the Fenyves Family Recipe Book, written by Steven Fenves, is housed in the donor files of the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum. A transcribed Table of Contents is also attached.
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FENYVES FAMILY RECIPE BOOK, undated 2014.317.1
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives 100 Raoul Wallenberg Place SW
Appendix A. Commentary on the Fenyves Family Recipe Book & Table of Contents
The following Commentary on the Fenyves Family Recipe Book, written by Steven Fenves, is housed in the donor files of the United State Holocaust Memorial Museum. A transcribed Table of Contents is also attached.
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COMMENTARY on the RECIPE BOOK of Mrs. Louis Fenyves
by Steven Fenves
Origins.
I have no idea when my mother, Mrs. Louis Fenyves, started authoring her Recipe Book, how often she added to it, or how frequently she or her cook Maris (whose last name I don't remember) consulted it. The book survived the Holocaust thanks to the efforts of the cook Maris, whom my parents had to let go following the Hungarian occupation of Subotica, Yugoslavia, in 1941, because (a) the occupying army expelled my father from his office, cutting off all of his income and (b) a law was introduced, prohibiting employment of gentiles by Jews.
Following the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, when we Jews were ordered to move to a ghetto facing the railroad yards, Maris competed with the crowd that jostled to ransack our apartment. She entered and saved the Recipe Book, a slim diary our mother kept of my sister Eszti's and my early development, and a cardboard binder into which Maris stuffed all of mother's lithographs, etchings, school exercises, sketchbooks and other works on paper that she could grab (the inventory of the family's artwork holdings lists over 250 items).
When my sister Eszti and I returned to Subotica from the camps the following year, Maris returned to us everything she had. In 1947, before we escaped from Yugoslavia, we turned everything back to her for safekeeping until we could find a permanent home. Finally, in the early 1960s she sent the material to us in Chicago. Eszti and her family visited her later in the sixties, but by the time I first got back to Subotica in 1976 I could no longer locate her.
The Recipe Book and its fate featured prominently in both my sister's and my Shoah Foundation testimonial. On that basis, we were asked to lend the book to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for the Some were Neighbors special exhibition. After my sister passed away in 2012, with her four daughters' concurrence, I donated the recipe book to the Museum.
Description of the Recipe Book.
The Recipe Book bears all the hallmarks of books produced in the bookbinding shop of the Minerva Publishing House, co-owned and managed until 1935 by my father, Louis Fenyves. The maroon cloth binding of the cover with the gold imprint of the title and author's name on the front cover, the hand-cut tabs, and the pages printed on the machine that was used to print ledger book pages all point to that shop. The book consists of five sections, delineated by tabs, with many spare pages at the end of each section. My rough estimate is that only a third of the book contains entries.
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The Recipe Book must have seen heavy usage in the author's kitchen. Only the first two tabs are legible; the other three tabs are smudged or entirely worn away from frequent usage. The conservator who prepared the book for display in the Some were Neighbors exhibition remarked on the large number of food stains on the pages. There are a few entries at the end of each section that are not in the author's handwriting; I presume that they were made by Maris while the book was in her possession, and I did not include these in the Table of Contents. The last time I examined the Recipe Book was in 2012 or 2013, prior to the Some were Neighbors exhibition opening, when I was asked to select a page for display in the exhibition. The last time I held the Recipe Book in my hands was at An Evening to Honor Holocaust Survivors at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum on November 17, 2018. In preparing the table of content in January 2020, I noted two things. One, the cookbook was in a much worse condition than the one I remembered, and two, that the section identified on the tab as Soups, meats, sauces, etc. was extremely short, containing only 7 entries. i have no explanation for either of these two observations.
Contents of the Recipe Book. The Recipe Book contains146 entries. A typical entry (page 51, dish 86 in the Tables of Content), in my translation, reads as follows: Date cake (mother)
8 egg whites beaten into foam, 25 dkg (approximately 9 ounces) sugar, 25 dkg dates cut into slivers, 25 dkg blanched almonds, half ground half cut into slivers, 2 soupspoons of flour. Bake for an hour, when cooled coat with whipped cream.
As can be seen, an entry identifies a dish, described by: • the name of the dish, • the source (person or publication) that provided the recipe, and • the recipe for producing the dish.
The Tables of Content contain translations of the names and sources of the dishes, but omit the recipes. The Recipe Book is divided into sections by tabs. The sections, their subject matter, and the number of entries in each section are as follows:
Section Subject matter Number of entries One From tab: Appetizers, pastes, salads 37 Two From tab: Soups, meats, sauces, etc. 7 Three By inspection: Tarts, slices, cakes 28
Four By inspection: Tortes, slices, cakes, pastries, breads, crèmes, glazes 51
Five By inspection: Jams, preserves 16
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The recipes have clearly been accumulated over time; there is no internal organization of the various kinds of dishes in a section. There is no apparent reason why dessert recipes are presented in two overlapping sections.
Contents and organization of the Tables of Contents.
An entry in the Table of Contents (TOC), identifying one dish, consists of the following fields:
• Page Number. The page in the digitized Recipe Book, accessed at the USHMM Collections website:https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn48140#?rsc=196909&cv=0&c=0&m=0&s=0&xywh=-1113%2C-271%2C5994%2C5411
• Dish Number. For organizational purposes, sequential numbers are assigned in the TOC to each dishin the Recipe Book, starting with 1.
• Name. This is the translated name of the dish. If the name cannot be adequately translated("Florentine" tarte, etc.) or if the translated name is not descriptive of the dish (Urchins' salad, etc.)the major ingredients are listed in the Comments column (Urchins' salad contains cucumbers,peppers, tomatoes).
• Source. The person or publication that provided the dish description. The Recipe Book uses specificpersonal names, but in the TOC these are replaced by generic relation names (mother, aunt, sister-in-law, etc.). Names that could not be translated or classified by relation are shown verbatim, forexample, "B. N."
• Comments. Ingredients, as stated above, or other facts about the dish are added here (for example,"Louie" cookies, a recipe supplied by the author's mother, are named after the author's brotherLouis)
Two versions of the TOC are presented in the tables that follow.
TABLE ONE retains the original order of the dishes in the sequence that they were entered in the Recipe Book. As can be observed, there is no pattern: identical or similar dishes pop up everywhere and there is no way to examine them together.
TABLE TWO adds a layer of organization within each section by grouping together dishes of similar type. The types used are not necessarily those that an expert cookbook author would use, but they should be helpful in searching the TOC for certain types of dishes. For reference, the groupings used are shown below. The original Page Number and Dish Number of each dish is displayed so as to facilitate the retrieval of the full entry, including the recipe, from the Recipe Book.
Note to potential users of the recipes: The recipes are rather minimal. There are no temperature indications anywhere, and few timing indications; "bake" or "fry" instructions appear without any further detail. Units are kilograms and liters.
Note to potential researchers: In order to facilitate the use of the Tables of Contents (TOC) in connection with the digitized Recipe Book, it would be helpful if the Dish numbers assigned in the TOC were entered on the master document of the digitized Recipe Book for faster retrieval of the recipes.