Hungarian Cuisine – A Foreign Food?: The Inaccessibility of Hungarian Cuisine in the United States When Compared with French

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Hungarian Cuisine – A Foreign Food?

The Inaccessibility of Hungarian Cuisine in the United

States

When Compared with French

Kenneth Mick III

Originally composed for HIS 595F, May 7, 2013

The cuisine of Hungary is one of the premier foods of

Europe, or so says my German-American grandfather. According

to him, France and Hungary have long engaged in a cultural

battle as to who makes the best cuisine.1 History supports

the view of Hungary as a cuisine master, since figures as

diverse as François Coppeé, Immanuel Kant, Alexander Dumas,

and Edward VII praised and patronized Hungarian cooking. Yet

in the United States, Hungarian cuisine receives much less

renown than French cooking, which has long held sway over

American cooking perceptions. In 1969, Henri Gualt reported

to Sanche de Gramont of The New York Times Magazine that food

remains one of the few areas where France maintains a sense

1 Albert Lindenschmid, interview with Kenneth Mick III, April 15, 2013. My grandfather did stipulate that he never personally experienced eithercuisine. He grew up during the Wiemar Republic and German depression andthus his family could not afford expensive food. My grandfather emigrated to Canada in 1950 or 51, and subsequently to the United States, and he says that he heard of this cultural contest after his immigration.

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of superiority.2 This cultural respect results from

centuries of history in which French cuisine saw promotion

as a foremost example of high culture. This promotion peaked

during the 1950s and 1960s, when French cooking exploded

into American media and Americans began adopting French

cuisine as their own high culture which they could replicate

for themselves. In contrast, Hungarian food in the United

States for the most part stays within areas with large

Hungarian immigrant populations. While French cuisine

managed to permeate American society and cultivate a sense

of cultural authority, Hungarian cuisine remains a foreign,

outsider food that never truly integrated with American

culture.

Hungarian cuisine traces back to the origins of Hungary

itself, with the settlement of the Carpathian basin by

Magyar nomads c. 850. The numerous invasions, occupations,

and other international relations that followed over the

course of over a millennium have all left their mark on

Hungarian food. Hungarian chef and restaurateur George Lang,

2 Henri Gualt, qtd. in Sanche de Gramont, “French Cooking à La Courtine,” The New York Times Magazine, 6 July 1969, 19.

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in the “Note of Intention” from the 1994 edition of his work

The Cuisine of Hungary, states that much of the food of Hungary

originates from the influence of foreigners who passed

through over the centuries. This includes the Tartars

(Mongols), Turks, Germans, Austrians, Italians, French,

Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Croatians, and, says Lang, to a

lesser degree, Americans.3 Thelma Barer-Stein in her work

You Eat What You Are adds Polish, Romanian, and Russian to that

list.4 Chef Károly Gundel stresses that out of these

influences, Turkish and French are the most important.

Turkey occupied most of Hungary for 150 years after the

Battle of Mohács in 1526, with the exception of

Transylvania, whose national character remained free of

foreign influence.5 The French influence entered Hungary via

the Royal Court of Vienna when Austria controlled Hungary,

and Gundel says that this influence became predominant in

the latter half of the 19th century in the nation’s rapid

3 George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary, 2nd ed., (Avenel, New Jersey: Random House, 1994), ix.4 Thelma Barer-Stein, You Eat What You Are, 2nd ed. (Ontario: Firefly Books, 1999), 187.5 Károly Gundel, qtd. in Corvina Kiadó, Gundel’s Hungarian Cookbook, 11th

ed. (Békéscsaba: Kner Printing House, 1984), 13.

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restaurant development.6 According to Gundel, Hungarian

cuisine lost its ancient heaviness but kept its

characteristic taste, enhanced through paprika.7

George Lang states that despite these influences from

outsiders, whether in a special dish or a technique, the

Hungarians always turned the ingredients into an

authentically Hungarian food.8 Some of the staple

ingredients to Hungarian food are breads, meat, spices,

tomato, and animal fat. Goulash, pork rolls, and strudel are

just a few examples of the dishes that Hungarians produce.

They also have an affinity to wines and coffee. Hungarians

love their bread, and Lang claims that this love traces back

to the 16th century.9 He mentions that in the 15th and 16th

centuries the Hungarians enjoyed seasonal salads, but salad

making subsequently disappeared for the most part and only

now, after a period of two hundred years, has regained

popularity.10 Prior to the 16th century, desserts comprised

only one tenth of the daily fare, though in the past two 6 Ibid, 14.7 Ibid.8 George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary, 2nd ed., ix.9 George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 22.10 Ibid.

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hundred years this number has increased to one-third.11

Paprika and tomato, now extremely important to

Hungarian cuisine, only appeared less than three centuries

ago.12 Paprika, the signature spice of Hungary, originates

as a New World pepper which the Hungarians genetically

modified into a uniquely Hungarian spice.13 According to the

Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, the signature dish of Hungary,

gulyás (goulash), originally a stew prepared by cattle

drivers, became a national icon in the 19th century. As the

national movements in Hungary during the 19th-century

latched onto the unfettered lifestyle and distinctive diet

of the cattle drivers, goulash rose to its iconic status.14

The preparation of goulash and its ingredients vary

regionally, but in most Hungarian restaurants, goulash

consists of a meat soup or stew, with onion, paprika, cubed

potatoes, and bits of dough paste (csipetke).15

11 Ibid. In the text Lang says 175 years, but the book was written 40 years ago, so I have added this gap in time to the number given.12 Ibid, 27.13 Linda Civitello, Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 250.14 Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, Vol. 1, Solomon H. Katz, ed. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2003), 347-348.15 Gundel, Gundel’s Hungarian Cookbook , 15; Károly Gundel, Hungarian Cookery Book, 8th ed. (Budapest: Egyetemi Printing House, 1974), 17.

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In regard to pastries, Lang states that most Hungarian

pastry recipes come from France and Austria, as Hungary’s

own recipes disappeared in the Middle Ages. Yet the

Encyclopedia of Food and Culture traces Austrian pastry making back

to Hungary, Bohemia, or some other “far-flung part of the

old Austrian Empire,”16 which complicates Lang’s narrative.

This complex history of pastries in Hungary and Central

Europe only illustrates the intricate mixture of culinary

influences in this region.

With its motley collection of influences, cuisine in

Hungary coalesced when the nation broke away from Austria in

the revolution of 1848 and 1849, after which it experienced

a surge in the establishment of restaurants and hotels. The

hotels of Budapest ranked alongside Vienna, Munich, and

Paris. According to Linda Civitello in her work Cuisine and

Culture: A History of Food and People, Hungary developed its own

sophisticated cuisine centered in Budapest.17 George Lang

describes the Angol Királyno, which innovated a “ladies’

dining room” in 1854, probably one of the first grand hotels

16 Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary, 52; Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, 128.17 Civitello, Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People, 250.

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of Europe. Other large scale dining facilities such as The

Cáfe New York, The New Gundel Restaurant, and Gerbaud

patisserie also opened in Budapest, and other major cities

such as Szeged, Debrecen, Sopron, and Györ also opened

comparatively large scale dining facilities.18 The Swiss

Kugler family established a pastry shop that Lang calls the

“grandest pastry shop in Hungary, and probably the world.”19

Lang sums up the culinary impact of Hungary near the end of

his chapter “The New Era:”

Hungary never conquered significant foreign territories, but its women’s cooking and its chefs’ creations triumphed with the people of faraway lands. The famed academician François Coppeé wrote an ode to the chef of the Hotel Hungaria for his chicken paprikás;Kant bragged about the mustard sauce he learned to makefrom his friend Count Fekete de Galántha; Dumas pére “in ecstasy” copied recipes while visiting Hungary; Edward VII requested a Hungarian chef, and Rezsö Török took this exalted position.20

Hungarian cuisine only continued to develop as the 19th

century transitioned into the 20th. The Gundel, the most

famous restaurant in Budapest, originally opened in 1894 as

Wampetics before Károly Gundel (1883-1956), purchased it in

18 Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary, 49.19 Ibid, 56.20 Ibid, 64.

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1910. Gundel helped pioneer a modern Hungarian cuisine by

adopting French influences, and invented many now standard

dishes, such as Gundel pancakes. In 1992, George Lang

purchased the restaurant and renovated it. Time Out’s travel

guide to Budapest calls the menu a little old-fashioned

since the starters and desserts outshine the main courses.21

Gundel features standard Hungarian fare and Magyar

renditions of international dishes, as well as lighter

variants of Hungarian favorites, designed to “please modern

palates.”22 Along with the efforts of Gundel, Hungarian-

American chefs such as Paul Kovi, Louis Szathmáry, and the

afore-mentioned George Lang have all published English

language descriptions of Hungarian cuisine.23 Károly Gundel

wrote in the first half of the 20th century that “the

flavours and compounds of Hungarian cuisine, which were

previously almost unknown, have in recent years gained a

steadily growing reputation.”24

Yet despite the efforts of these chefs and the growing 21 Time Out Editors, Budapest (London: Time Out, 2011), 126.22 Ibid.23 Mark H. Zanger, The American Ethnic Cookbook for Students (Phoenix: Oryx Press, 2001), 143.24 Gundel, Hungarian Cookery Book, 17.

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international acceptance of Hungarian cuisine, the American

perspective comes loaded with negative stereotypes. Reporter

Richard W. Bruner in his 1990 article “Hungary: Land of

Lard,” which examined the poor health of Hungarians in post-

Communist Hungary, states that visiting American gourmet

friends remarked to him once that “Hungarian cuisine is

composed mainly of ‘lumps of lard.’”25 Bruner wrote that

when he repeated remark to a Hungarian friend, this friend

“shrugged and speculated that Communist repression had led

to some suicidal tendencies.”26 Fiona Pitt-Kethley in the

travel article “A Life Devoted to the Pursuit of Pleasure”

called Hungarian cuisine “over-rich” by modern health-

standards but also an “under-rated mixture of French and

Austrian with a few touches of its own.”27 Hungarian chef

Viktor Merényi stated on the radio station WAMU that

“usually the people thinking about Hungarian cuisine [think]

it’s fatty, spicy, always [has] pork inside[.]”28

25 Richard W. Bruner, “Hungary: Land of Lard,” Advertising Age, v61 (n42) (Oct 8 1990): 56(1).26 Ibid.27 Fiona Pitt-Kethley, “A Life Devoted to the Pursuit of Pleasure,” The Times, (n64948) (May 7 1994): WT21(1).28 Viktor Merényi, interviewed by Rebecca Sheir, “Eating In The Embassy:Getting Hungry For Hungarian Food,” WAMU, March 15, 2013.

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In addition to these cultural differences between the

United States and Hungarian tastes, the US lacks Hungarian

restaurants of any significant number outside Hungarian

immigrant areas. Merényi commented on the difficulty of

finding authentic Hungarian restaurants in the Washington

D.C. area, and George Lang commented that throughout the

United States, even the world, very few Hungarian

restaurants exist, because small Hungarian restaurants “do

not travel well.”29 Julius Fabos, a Hungarian-American

immigrant and amateur cook, stated in an interview with me

that Hungarian restaurants remain quite scarce in the United

States outside of regions with high Hungarian populations.30

Overall, the population of Hungarian-Americans remains

small, with a 1990 census listing 1,582,000 Americans

claiming Hungarian descent.31

Probably a result of the small population numbers of

Hungarians and little diffusion of restaurants, basic

cultural misunderstandings underlie the American

29 George Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary, 43.30 Julius Fabos, interviewed by Kenneth Mick III, April 18, 2013.31 Zanger, American Ethnic Cookbook, 143.

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perspective. Julius Fabos mentioned in another portion of my

interview with him that Americans often conflate Central

Europe, which includes Hungary, with Eastern Europe. I

proposed that this conflation perhaps resulted from the

East-West division of Europe during the Cold War, and Fabos

readily agreed.32 More specifically food related, Karóly

Gundel noted that outside of Hungary, goulash simply means

stew with paprika in it.33 The 1945 film Christmas in Connecticut

provides an example of this with the scene where Hungarian

chef Felix Bassenak puts paprika in the housekeeper’s Irish

stew and exclaims “now it’s goulash!”34 Gundel stated that

within Hungary, restaurants attempt to follow a uniform

designation of dishes, but sometimes regional differences

result in variations of local designations.35

This lack of exposure and therefore the unfamiliarity

of it to Americans might explain some of the negative

stereotypes and general misunderstandings toward Hungarian

32 Ibid.33 Gundel, Gundel’s Hungarian Cookbook, 15.34 Lionel Houser, Adele Comandini, and Aileen Hamilton, Christmas in Connecticut, directed by Peter Godfrey (1945; Burbank, California: WarnerBros.), Video.35 Gundel, Gundel’s Hungarian Cookbook, 15.

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food. But why has Hungarian food never established itself

within America, and so remained unfamiliar and inaccessible

to the American populace, while France has so greatly

impacted America? At least part of the answer lies in the

rise of French cuisine in the 19th century and its

subsequent diffusion into 20th century America.

Thomas Jefferson laid much of the groundwork for the

future French reputation in the United States. In the late

18th-century, Americans felt ambivalent about French food,

but Jefferson sought to widen the American palate. After his

stay in Paris, he brought back French cookware with him, and

during his presidency he hired a French cook for the White

House.36 Jefferson grew much of his food at home, and

blended his French taste with foods produced in Virginia in

an original diet that Daniel Webster called “half Virginian,

half French.”37 Jefferson even paid to have his slave James

Hemings instructed in the art of French cooking in Paris.

Upon completion of his training, Hemings became chef de

36 Jennifer Jensen Wallach, How America Eats: A Social History of U.S. Food and Culture (Plymouth, UK: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013), 52-53.37 Wallach, How America Eats, 53.

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cuisine at Jefferson’s diplomatic household, a position

which paid him the prevailing wage.38

Following this initial trend-setting work by Thomas

Jefferson, the next major step in the diffusion of French

cooking into America came in the early- to mid-19th century,

when Marie-Antoine Carême, a brilliant French chef, codified

French cuisine and established an international cooking

style. Concerned about hygiene and safety, he invented the

modern chef’s hat, the toque blanche or toque, a tall, stiff,

pleated white hat, and designed the current chef’s uniform,

a white coat with a double-breasted front, and loose, black-

and-white checkered pants.39 Considered the father of haute

cuisine, or high cuisine, he re-defined French cooking, and

his reorganization and codifying of the French kitchen

resulted in the development of an international cooking

system used by chefs across the globe.40 Even Hungarian

38 Ibid.39 Civitello, Cuisine and Culture: A History of Food and People, 210-211; Le Cordon Bleu, Cuisine Foundations: The Chefs of Le Cordon Bleu (Stamford, Connecticut: Cengage Learning, 2010), 29.40 Ibid, 210; Wayne Gisslen, Professional Cooking, College Version, 7th edition, (Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 3; Juliette Rossant, Super Chef: The Making of the Great Modern Restaurant Empires (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 3.

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cuisine itself testifies of Cerême’s influence, as Karóly

Gundel’s creation of modern Hungarian cuisine borrowed from

the French model.41

In the US, the work of French chefs like Carême is

evidenced through the permeation of French technical

language into English food-related vocabulary. According to

the Oxford English Dictionary, “cuisine” first appeared in the

English language in 1786 in reference to French cuisine, and

first appeared outside a reference to France in 1817,

“gourmet” first appeared in 1820, “restaurant” appeared

outside of references to France in 1864, “fillet” first

appeared in 1430 as a noun and 1846 as a verb, and

“julienne” first appeared in 1841 as a soup and 1906 as an

adjective.42 The dates for most of these terms roughly

correspond to the time period of Carême’s activity, and

support the claim that his system of high cuisine went

international.

Prior to the 1920s, this high cuisine culture remained

an activity strictly for the elite. Harvey Levenstein stated

41 Time Out Editors, Budapest, 126.42 Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com.

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in Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet that

French cuisine was a cultural practice “behind whose

elaborate methods of preparation, foreign code-words, and

complex dining rituals the wealthy could find refuge from

those trying to scale the ramparts of their newly acquired

status.”43 In contrast to the French, America struggled with

creating an image of “high” culture separate from “low”

culture. In her Master’s Thesis “Image of Nation, Image of

Culture: France and French Cooking in the American Press,

1918-1969,” Ashley R. Armes quotes a statement by Henry

James, a wealthy, late-19th century American who travelled

Europe extensively throughout his life, as saying that “it’s

the absolute and incredible lack of culture that strikes you

in common travelling Americans.”44

America was uncouth, uncultured, a nation formed with

the “culture quite left out.”45 James stated that if he had

43 Harvey Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 15.44 Henry James Letters, Ed. by Leon Edel, Volume I, 1843-1875, (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974), 152, qtd. in Ashley R Armes, “Image of Nation, Image of Culture: France and French Cooking in the American Press, 1918-1969,” Texas Tech University, 2006, 2.45 Ibid, 1.

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to choose a word to describe American culture, he would

choose “vulgar.’”46 Before the turn of the 20th century,

America had few museums, opera houses, and other

institutions deemed necessary by the elite for high-

culture.47 American high culture relied initially upon the

history and institutions of Europe for high culture. Armes

argues that during the 19th century, “high” and “low”

culture in American intermingled, and so in the turn of the

century the upper class established “high” institutions to

separate themselves from the lower classes, and therefore

seem “less devoid of ‘culture.’”48 Armes states:

The importation of French culture to the United States through cuisine aided in the achievement upper-class goals of “culturing” Americans by introducing those outside of the elite to French cooking. This saleof France and French-ness in the United States reflectsthe continuation of the Progressive and elitist impulseto uplift and “better” American citizens by establishing high culture in the United States.49

Simultaneously with the efforts of the American elites

to distinguish themselves from the lower classes, 46 Ibid, 2.47 Armes, Ashley R Armes, “Image of Nation, Image of Culture: France andFrench Cooking in the American Press, 1918-1969,” Texas Tech University,2006, 2.48 Ibid, 3-4.49 Ibid, 32.

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Progressive Era reformers sought to improve the social

status of immigrants by showing them how to assimilate into

American society.50 During the late 19th and early 20th

century, immigrants to the United States in general faced

hostility and xenophobia, particularly Italian and Central

European immigrants. For instance, Julianna Puskás notes in

From Hungary to the United States (1880-1914) that American

nationalists, or nativists, viewed Southern and Central

Europeans as miserly and prone to commit violent crimes.51

In 1890, a nativist militia fired on Austrian-Hungarians in

the Pennsylvania coal-mining region, and in 1981 a mob

lynched a group of Italians after accusing them of murdering

a New Orleans police captain.52 D. A. Souders,

Superintendent of Immigration for the Reformed Church in

America, wrote in 1922 that the Magyars, as of all

immigrants, “keep very much aloof from Americans.”53 He

continued that “it must be borne in mind… that all

50 Ibid, 26.51 Julliana Puskás, From Hungary to the United States (1880-1914), Maria Bales and Eva Pálmai, trans., (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982), 118.52 Ibid, 118-119.53 D.A. Souders, The Magyars in America (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1922), 68.

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immigrants of the laboring class are unwelcome to the

American laboring class, and that the higher classes in

America do not freely associate with the laboring classes

either foreign or American born.”54

To improve the status of these immigrants, Progressives

attempted to integrate these workers into American society.

Gwendolyn Mink, author and scholar on labor and women’s

history, states that Progressive Era social workers

“discouraged ‘garlicky,’ spicy, mixed foods like spaghetti

and goulash.”55 Notice here the explicit mention of

distinctly Hungarian and Italian foods. During the twenties,

Progressives attempted to shape the food tastes of

immigrants to America, and part of this involved steering

them away from, among others, Hungarian and Italian dishes.

Ashley Armes describes the Progressive viewpoint as stating

that “in order to be fully Americanized immigrants should

abandon their ethnic food and cook like Americans did--with

few spices.”56 This at least partially explains the American

54 Ibid, 69.55 Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 84. 56 Armes, “Image of Nation,” 27.

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avoidance of Hungarian food due to its spicy-ness, even up

to the present day: Progressives intentionally steered

American immigrants food tastes away from spicy dishes. And

as an alternative, Progressives offered French cuisine.

According to Armes, “while simultaneously frowning upon the

cuisine of the new immigrants, who were largely from

Southern and Eastern Europe and Latin America, another

foreign food, French cuisine was being sold to middle-class

American women as a prestigious way to prepare food in their

homes.”57 Foods such as Italian and Hungarian remained too

disparate from the rest of America and presented therefor

presented obstacles to Americanizing immigrants. As French

cooking had already established a reputation for itself

within American high culture, American Progressives could

easily latch onto it. French cuisine now served as an easy

target at which the Progressive movement could direct

American appetites.

All of this work by Progressives led to the promotion

of French culture, particularly cooking, in the 1920s and

57 Ibid.

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1930s. Literature and magazine media in the 1920s and 1930s

was filled with criticisms of the fast-paced, consumerist

mentality of America in the 1920s, and offered the French

lifestyle as a viable alternative. In her thesis paper,

Armes cites Charlotte T. Muret, who, in the 1934 article “On

Becoming French” for Harper’s Magazine, said of the French that

“their most outstanding characteristic is intelligence. They

are both quick-witted and penetrating, and this is true of

all classes, even of the peasants,” claiming that “in

America some inward unrest, some need of excitement seems

always to be driving us on, and it was good to escape from

that feverish rush.”58

Along with this admiration for the French were attempts

by magazines to bring high culture to middle-class women.

Armes features as an example the editor Edward W. Bok of The

Ladies Home Journal, who viewed middle-class women as occupying

“the unrest among the lower classes and rottenness among the

upper classes.”59 According to Salme Steinberg in Reformer in 58 Charlotte T. Muret, “On Becoming French,” Harper’s Magazine, July 1934, 222-234, qtd. in Armes, “Image of Nation,” 17-18.59 Salme Harju Steinberg, Reformer in the Marketplace: Edward W. Bok and The Ladies Home Journal, (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 44, qtd in Armes, “Image of Nation,” 20.

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the Marketplace: Edward W. Bok and The Ladies Home Journal, Bok “aided

in the uniformity of middle-class life” through an emphasis

on style, interior decorating, manners, and taste.60 Armes

states that

By targeting magazines more to middle-class women,as Bok did in the early twentieth century, magazine publishers recognized that they represented an increasingly important influence in developing middlebrow culture in America. The promotion of French cuisine in magazines like The Ladies Home Journal was one way that the press encouraged the fostering of “high” culture in America.61

Armes notes that the type of cuisine promoted by these

magazines was cuisine bourgeoise. Haute cuisine, the “high,” more

complex cuisine practiced by male chefs, stayed out of the

reach of the general public.62 In contrast, Americans saw

the simpler cuisine bourgeoise as the domain of the women, and

it was this latter cuisine that magazines marketed to the

middle-class housewife.63

However, even as American women adopted fine French

cooking in the form of cuisine bourgeoise, mass production

threatened to undermine the quality of this new cuisine. 60 Armes, “Image of Nation,” 20.61 Ibid.62 Ibid, 35, 41.63 Ibid.

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From the 1940s into the 1960s, American food became more and

more standardized. During the fifties, companies such as

Pillsbury, General Mills, and General Foods heavily marketed

pre-packaged food products, with mixed success.64 Since the

1940s, French cuisine appeared in magazines and books at

exponentially growing rates, and Armes states that “unlike

the Progressive reformers who frowned upon immigrant food

during the interwar period, foreign cuisine was becoming

more and more popular with native-born Americans, many of

whom had served overseas during World War Two.”65 American

obsession with mass production ended up mixing with the

French food culture, with undesirable results. Laura Shapiro

notes in her book Something in the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s

America that American housewives often used one or two

shortcut ingredients to otherwise standard recipes.66 Peg

Braken, who published her highly influential book I Hate to

Cook in 1960, attracted criticism from people like James

Beard, who viewed her as the “enemy camp.”67 Sylvia Lovegren64 Laura Shapiro, Something in the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, (London:Penguin Books, 2004), 20-23, 72-73, 82-8365 Armes, “Image of Nation,” 76.66 Shapiro, Something in the Oven, 165.67 Ibid, 166.

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summed up the mixing of American shortcuts and French

cuisine in her book Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads,

stating that Americans “marched into the brave new culinary

world…armed with a can opener in one hand and a recipe for

bouillabaisse or tomato aspic in the other.”68

All of this changed with the entrance of Julia Child

into the American cooking scene. Child, after studying at

Cordon Bleu, became a master of French cooking. Her 1961

book Mastering the Art of French Cooking propelled her to stardom,

and her technique of simple recipes that avoided the use of

shortcuts was met with critical and popular acclaim.69 In

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Child states in her foreword:

One of the main reasons that pseudo-French cooking, with which we are all too familiar, falls far below good French cooking is just this matter of elimination of steps, combination of processes, or skimping on ingredients such as butter, cream – and time.70

Ashley Armes claims that due to the popularization of real

French cooking, Julia Child made French cuisine something

that Americans could own – French cooking had finally become68 Sylvia Lovegren, Fashionable Food: Seven Decades of Food Fads, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 167.69 Shapiro, Something in the Oven, 222-22370 Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), xxiv.

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truly Americanized.71

In the same year, 1961, the Kennedy administration

employed a French chef at the White House. Harvey Levenstein

argues that at this moment, “the realization that French

cuisine had reoccupied its place at the pinnacle of status

burst into mass consciousness.”72 In the 1960s, America now

had its own version of a French chef, Julia Child, and the

President further legitimized French cooking in the mind of

the public by hiring a French chef. French cuisine, part of

American history for almost two centuries, now secured its

place in American hearts. French cuisine was not something

foreign and exotic, but something that every American could

potentially produce.

As Julia Child Americanized French cuisine, she also at

least partially destroyed the barrier that stood between

haute and bourgeoisie cuisine. As France at that time barred

women from working at haute cuisine restaurants, when Child

enrolled in a professional course at Cordon Bleu she was the

71 Armes, “Image of Nation,” 126-127.72 Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 140.

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only woman. Child later remarked that “it wasn’t until I

began thinking about it that I realized my field is closed

to women.”73 Julia insisted that she taught “cuisine bourgeoise…

rather than haute cuisine, the beautiful things in aspic, the

fancy presentations you see on great ocean liners.”74 Yet in

a 1969 issue of Vogue, Child published an elaborate multi-

step recipe for pain de poisson cardinale, involving a mousse of

sole molded around filets of sole and lobster, baked, and

then covered with a lobster wine sauce.75 Even though she

did not considered herself a purveyor of haute cuisine, Child’s

work, as this example shows, did much to bring higher, more

complex forms of French cuisine to the middle-class

housewife. Thus, Child broke down some of the class and

gender distinctions in French cooking, and made French

cuisine accessible, at least in theory, to every American.

In contrast to French cuisine, Hungarian cuisine never

experienced this partial dissolution of gender roles and

bridge-way between high and low cuisine to the same extent 73 Shapiro, Something in the Oven, 229.74 Joan Barthel, “How to Avoid TV Dinners While Watching TV,” The New York Times, August 7, 1966, 38.75 Mary Roblee Henry, “The Wonder Child: Julia in Her French Kitchen,” Vogue, June 1969, 161-162.

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as French. Julius Fabos explained that when he lived in

Hungary, he and the rest of the men in his family did not

know how to cook at all, since this task belonged to the

women in his family. He credits the more open culture of

America for allowing him to cultivate an interest in cooking

as a man. According to Fabos, he broke down much of the

gender roles he grew up with in Hungary.76 Noting the

distinction which George Lang made in 1971 between Hungary’s

“women’s cooking and its chefs’ creations,”77 Hungary seems

to have the same gender and class based divisions as France.

As Hungarian cuisine does not appear to have experienced

much of a breakdown of these divisions as French cuisine in

the US, the relative inaccessibility of it in comparison to

French is explained.

The Americanization process provides a strong

explanation as to why French cuisine garners such

recognition in the United States as opposed to Hungarian

cuisine. Thomas Jefferson’s pioneering work to bring French

food to the United States exposed the country very early on

76 Julius Fabos interview.77 Lang, The Cuisine of Hungary, 49.

Mick 27

to the excellence of French food. Marie-Antoine Carême

developed a technical language and consistent uniform that

established France as an international food standard for

countries the world over, including both the US and Hungary.

In the late 19th and early 20th century, US immigrants faced

discrimination and even violence from American-born

laborers, and so Progressive social workers attempted to

Americanize them by steering them toward French food. In the

1950s and 1960s, American media heavily promoted French

cooking, and figures such as Julia Child demolished much of

the separation between high and low French cuisine, making

it possible for American women to make French food in their

own kitchens.

In contrast, Hungarian cuisine, though highly

respectable, never permeated the United States in the way

that French food did. Attempts by Progressives in the 1920s

to steer the diet of immigrants away from their spicy native

food most probably contributed to the American aversion to

the spicy-ness of Hungarian food that continues today. Also,

Hungarian restaurants remain mostly in areas with heavy

Mick 28

Hungarian-American populations. Furthermore, Hungarian

cuisine never experienced a break down between genders and

high and low forms as French food did through Julia Child.

Lastly, Hungarian cuisine never became Americanized the way

which French food did, again through the work of Julia

Child.

It is clear then that the cultural respect of French

cuisine in the US results from centuries of promotion of

French food as an example of high culture. The peak of this

promotion during the 1950s and 1960s resulted in Americans

assimilating French cuisine as their own high culture which

they could make on their own. Unlike French food, Hungarian

cuisine never experienced this type of assimilation. The low

numbers of Hungarian immigrants and restaurants in the US

mean that Americans have only very limited exposure to

Hungarian food. While French cuisine cultivated a sense of

cultural authority and diffused throughout American society,

Hungarian cuisine remains a foreign food which never fully

integrated into the American culture.

Mick 29

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