A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism

VI FROM GULAG TO GOULASH: THE INTRODUCTION TO MS. PIGGY’S HUNGARIAN COOKBOOK

I am not a professional cook. The life of a pig is not easy, and the life of one who is an intellectual and immigrant from Hungary is even more difficult, first of all because no one ever expects a pig to be an intellectual, an immigrant—or an amateur cook, for that matter! As if a pig in connection with any of these characterizations would be a contradictio in adjecto. In addition, there are many intellectuals who are unsympathetically called “pigs.” This is usually the case when they sink morally, not only literally, too deeply into mud. Not to mention that we pigs are called intellectuals—also contemptuously, of course!—when we aspire to something higher than our generally low status in society.

My name is Magda. I am a female pig of the illustrious and almost extinct Hungarian Mangalitza family. Here, in London, friends call me Ms. Piggy after the famous puppet from the TV series The Muppet Show. Allegedly I resemble her, with my curly blond hair, being nicely rounded and very opinionated. And also “hot,” because that goes without saying for any female of Hungarian origin in this male-dominated world. However, she is Miss, while I insist on being addressed as Ms. That complicates my life even more, as if it weren’t complicated enough already.

I have to say that, in the first place, writing this cookbook has given me the chance to go back in time. A sentimental journey into the kitchen of my mother and my grandmother—which actually was one and the same until we moved to Budapest—remembering and re-creating the smells and tastes of my childhood. I recall my grandma taking down the dried hot paprika from the rope in the storeroom, where it had been hung to dry. As she pulverized it with her mortar and pestle, I felt the sharp smell in my nostrils. I also remember the strong smell of cabbage from my mother cooking Székely goulash and the smell of barack pálinka brandy. Sometimes I get carried away… My family comes from a small village near Kecskemét, where I used to spend my summers surrounded by the puszta plain and plum tree orchards. In the late autumn, the main occupation in our village used to be cooking apricots to make strong pálinka brandy.

My parents moved to Budapest in the seventies. They simply wanted a better life for their children, and a free education was the way to bridge social differences. Back then, and until twenty years ago, Hungarians lived under a political system called socialism. Or what in the West was wrongly called Communism (because of Communist parties’ leadership in Socialist countries). Why wrongly? Because Communism, in the fulfilled vision of its theoreticians Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is the last stage in the development of human society, a kind of “end of history,” as we would say today. Socialism was only a step along the way. Fortunately or not, depending on the political beliefs one holds, this whole Socialist practice of life, together with the Communist dream, collapsed in 1989. I was twenty-seven years old.

I have to make yet another personal remark in connection with this cookbook—I ended up writing it by chance. Not only am I not a cook, but by profession I am a political scientist. However, what does my diploma mean here, in London? During these last twenty years since I left Hungary, even though I hold a degree in Scientific Socialism from Eötvös University in Budapest I was forced to do all kinds of odd jobs. At first I was a babysitter, then a nanny, and proud to become the first pig who ever got official permission to do this job. After that I worked as a salesperson in the food department of Harrods (which came in handy for my CV later on!), then as a teacher of English for Hungarian immigrants, until I finally got employed on a TV cooking show. At least this job is fun, and I get decent money and a lot to eat. To tell the truth, my PhD would not be worth much even in Hungary, as I graduated during Communist times. So many of my colleagues who taught Marxism found themselves jobless in the “brave new world”—to quote Aldous Huxley. Moreover, a whole generation of scholars, if not two, suddenly had their pasts invalidated—even if they weren’t teaching Marxism, even if they had never been sympathetic to Marxism at all. Take my friend Aniko, whose specialty was American feminist literature: She has spent much of the past decade requalifying for the same university position just because her Communist-era doctorate was no longer taken seriously. Consequently, many of us left the country after 1990. It is a sad fact of life that my education is more or less worthless in both countries, but I am reconciled to it. This cookbook testifies to that.

I slowly advanced to assistant cook on the TV show Cook and Enjoy, now in its fifth season. The star of our program is the not yet famous Oliver Marshall—please, note the nice twist in his name! I am one of the very few creatures who has a real insight into his cooking and who knows that he will never become as famous as Jamie Oliver! Among other tasks, I have often had to sample the food he cooks; this is what we pigs do best. And this is how this book came about. I often told Oliver: Listen Ollie (we call him Ollie because, for obvious reasons, he hates to be called Oliver), you could add a bit more pepper to that stew, or, listen Ollie, I would cut the onions more finely, because they need to actually melt… and so on. I have a lot of ideas of my own. One day he said, “Well, Ms. Piggy, since you are so smart, why don’t you cook all by yourself, eh?”

He did not mean it seriously; his intention was to be ironical. But the producer of our show heard him and immediately thought that this, indeed, was an interesting idea. A pig who cooks? Better still, a pig writing a cookbook! Let’s say, a Hungarian cookbook—because I am from there, am I not? “What do you think about that?” the producer asked me. “And then, perhaps, I could get you your own TV show,” she added. I am not crazy about having my own show; it is a lot of work and a big responsibility for a single pig—even for a proud Mangalitza. I remember how the audience used to laugh at poor Miss Piggy on The Muppet Show, thinking that she was vain and stupid. But I accepted the offer: Who, in my position, wouldn’t? Considering that I can certainly cook better than Ollie, and I can write, too. Besides, there is a direct connection between cooking and politics: As a political scientist, I would argue that politics is—cooking.

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.

If the gulag stands for the Soviet kind of repression, in Hungary during the late sixties a set of economic changes turned the totalitarian system in another direction, toward goulash communism.

It is hard to understand any of these changes without mentioning Stalin—even if a history book, rather than a cookbook, offers perhaps a more appropriate place to learn about Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. By removing everyone who stood in his way to ultimate power in the early thirties, he rose to the position of a Communist dictator whose nom de plume, Stalin, was given to this specific type of Socialist government—not only in the USSR. But to simplify the explanation, the reader should imagine Stalin as a kind of Darth Vader, the lord of the “dark force.” On the other hand, his army did defeat Hitler. The experience of living under socialism teaches us that political leaders are neither heroes nor villains—but sometimes even both. And to go back to the Star Wars movie metaphor I just used, Luke Skywalker came very late to the USSR, only in the late eighties. He appeared under the name Mikhail Gorbachev, and he was not a hero from the start either, just a party bureaucrat, but that is another story.

The so-called goulash communism started when János Kádar, the general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party—who remained in office for more than thirty years—introduced his New Economic Mechanism, or NEM, in 1968. Not that he was such a good guy—he himself had skeletons in his closet; for instance, mass arrests right after the revolution in 1956. First students rebelled against the Stalinist type of government. When the police shot at them, the uprising spread throughout the country, and the government fell. But then the Soviets decided to step in, and the Soviet army invaded the country on November fourth. The revolution, which lasted only a few weeks, was crushed at the price of thousands upon thousands of civilians killed. A new, pro-Soviet government was installed, with János Kádar as prime minister. As Americans would say: There is no such thing as a free lunch! So Kádar ordered (or, better said, was ordered to order) the persecution of some 26,000 rebels, of whom 13,000 were imprisoned and several hundred even executed. Some 200,000 people fled the country.

On the other hand, he knew that the whole of Soviet-style socialism was hated, and he needed to introduce compromises in order to keep socialism going. And Hungarians knew that Kádar knew, and he knew that they knew that he knew.

When he introduced the new economic plan, Kádar was confronted with the same question of ingredients: How far could one go in introducing various additions and changes—and still call it socialism? His unorthodox mixture of ingredients from both the planned and the market economies made our bellies full, our newspapers more liberal, our piggish rights more respected. Our life improved. Obviously, he decided that it was better to offer a meager goulash—with somewhat unconventional ingredients—than the gulag. The main principle of goulash communism became, to quote him: “He who is not against us is for us.” Instead of weeding out “counterrevolutionary” elements, Kádar sort of dumped them into his stew, which only made it thicker. It worked in the same way as when a cook adds some flour to the sauce: “With us” functioned just like that, like a cohesive element in the society, a glue of sorts. Out came a bearable, edible stew based on compromise—a golden cage of a sort.

Thus, two similar words canceled each other out: There was no goulash in the gulag—and there was no gulag in goulash communism. The reader must admit that there is a remarkable difference between these principles, marking the distinction between life and death. In a Socialist country, generally speaking, life boiled down to politics; we did not exist outside of the political realm. A wrong word and one was demoted, lost a job, or was gone forever. I happen to know this not only because I read about it, but also because this was why my cousin had grown up without a father. He was executed in the Stalinist purges in Hungary in 1949. Yes, the Communist revolution did eat its children, after all. We pigs could bear witness to that…

If you ask me, the era of Kádar started in 1970, when my family first bought a car, a Trabant made in the GDR. It was small and ridiculous from today’s point of view, but it took us to Grandma’s village, to Lake Balaton to swim—which we pigs particularly liked—and as far as the Adriatic coast of what was then Yugoslavia. At the border, though, we did encounter some minor problems, as Yugoslavs did not expect pigs to be driving a car or to have passports. Thanks to father’s knowledge of their pig language, and even more to the American cigarettes he had obtained illegally, we always crossed over. Swimming in the Adriatic Sea, at the coastal town of Baška Voda, was simply a fantastic experience for us piglets. The sea was warm, blue, and transparent, and I remember seeing a tiny fish swimming close to me. Ah, those were good times for pigs! But it doesn’t mean that my generation grew up politically unaware of the kind of political circumstances we lived under, especially as it was not easy to cross the border toward Italy or Austria.

By the way, let me tell you that I was among the first Hungarian pigs who, together with citizens of the GDR, crossed that very border, near Sopron, where in August of 1989 Austrians and Hungarians together cut down the barbed wire and let us cross over to the western side. How euphoric we were then… We believed that everything would change overnight. In fact, instead of goulash communism, we got goulash capitalism. That is, capitalism with a lot of leftovers from Kádarism, if one may say so. However, there is hope! Because, to paraphrase Heraclitus, one could not step twice in the same goulash. But I did not get too far. I came back home soon afterward. However, since with my qualifications I couldn’t get a suitable job, I went farther west. Twenty years later, here I am in London, writing about goulash and, inevitably, about goulash communism.

Allow me, please, one more explanation: Besides writing a Hungarian cookbook, I also want to draw the reader’s attention to another, if not political then important social aspect of cooking: to the fact that women usually cook for a family, and they cook every day. Even though many women would probably prefer to do it only from time to time, like men. That they have to feed us on a daily basis doesn’t mean that women are not good, solid cooks and even excellent chefs. But, in contrast to men, they don’t consider their daily meals as masterpieces that deserve to be admired.

Male cooks primarily want to show off. Did you ever notice that almost all great chefs are men? Why? Because males of all kinds need spectators. To them, preparing a fine meal is yet another way of demonstrating their egos. Therefore, they cook for special guests, while females do the everyday cooking. However, I have noticed that there is hope for men and other males, because a change is taking place among youngsters. You just can’t overlook the fact that female and male roles in the kitchen are rapidly changing.

I think that cookbooks should be divided into male and female. Call me a feminist pig if you want, but my cookbook is a feminist one! Does that sound contradictory? The reader must wonder what a feminist cookbook really means? Does it have something to do with frozen food from a supermarket, since feminists certainly are not into spending their lives in the kitchen, as women did for generations? No, it has to do with simplicity. By the way, let me declare here and now that I consider all females of all kinds to be emancipated if they can earn their own living and can make their own decisions independently. To me, economic independence is the main criterion for emancipation.

Although feminism might sound a bit old-fashioned nowadays, it is still needed. Look at the countries in transition, where I come from. In my political scientist’s opinion, women are the biggest losers with the downfall of Communism in Eastern Europe. I saw with my very own eyes how dissidents, suddenly coming to power, forgot all about their female partners. What about all the female legwork done for the “velvet revolution” to happen (although it wasn’t velvet all over Eastern Europe)—from planning, discussing, writing, printing, distributing leaflets, and marching together to cooking for them, getting them back on their feet when they drank too much, or hiding them from the police? After 1990 these dissident females vanished into thin air! So much for equality… Obviously, there is no equality when it comes to acquiring power. Women in the former Communist countries are, generally, worse off. They were the first ones to lose jobs and the last ones to get them. A friend back home told me that her thirty-year-old daughter had to sign a secret contract when she finally got a job. She had to promise that she wouldn’t have children for the next five years! And many of her friends, young females, are forced to do the same, because this is the only way to get employment. They have to live with the laws of “cowboy capitalism,” more cruel than here in the West. I saw that in my part of the world there is nobody to protect women; no government will take care of their rights if they don’t learn to do so themselves.

Now, my task in this book is, as I said, to introduce the reader to traditional Hungarian cuisine. Please bear in mind that I consider myself to be a patriot when I say that, compared to French or Chinese cuisine, I think Hungarian cuisine is hardly a great cuisine at all! But this goes for most other cuisines as well. In Hungarian cuisine there are a number of recipes, some of them originating in the vast plains situated between Austria to the west and Ukraine and Romania to the east—that is today’s Hungary. But we must admit that many of these meals are just local variations of Turkish recipes. This is the case in all European countries where the Ottomans ruled for hundreds of years, places like Greece, Bulgaria, the former Yugoslavia, Romania, and, yes, my beloved Hungary.

But Hungarians believe that the world, especially real gourmets, surely knows about its fantastic achievements. As every Hungarian cookbook will proudly inform you, it has a “long and rich tradition.” Of course, like all intellectuals, I like to challenge prejudices, here, for example, the notion that its tradition is long. Since Magyars are of nomadic origin, regardless of whether you support the Finno-Ugric, or even the most exotic Sumerian theory of their origin, it hardly facilitates cooking. It is not easy to imagine all those Magyar warriors furiously spurring their horses in order to scare off their enemies while the pots and pans tied to them (to their waists, perhaps?) are clanging and making a hellish noise. Or perhaps it was the very noise that helped them to chase away their enemies? I even dare say that this is a new and original hypothesis that might be worthwhile pursuing further!

The most characteristic spice that earned Hungarian cuisine (as well as its females!) the reputation of being hot is red paprika—or peppers. And although the Turks had already introduced it in the sixteenth century, it only became widely used relatively recently. We could date the traditional (i.e., hot) Hungarian cuisine back only to the nineteenth century. As for Hungarian cuisine being rich—well, let me tell you that the basic ingredients usually include various meats and poultry, as well as fish, carrots, cabbage, sauerkraut, a lot of sour cream, red beets, beans of all kinds, and mushrooms (cooked in lard, which in the modern world is absolutely unacceptable)—and there you are. It sounds to me poor rather than rich. However, one can cook fine food with these ingredients, providing that they are fresh.

Yes, it is hard for me to be a patriot in cooking, although I am expected to be just that when writing a Hungarian cookbook—even if a pig of any other nationality would be in the same position. We Hungarians still like to believe and convince others that our cuisine—well, “our” indeed!—is one of the most famous and best in the world—at least to us! I invite you to judge for yourself, to try it out. Here you will find tasty and practical meals, a bit exotic perhaps for your palate, and therefore new and exciting. But why not? Westerners always seem to be looking for these qualities in everything, although it is not clear why. I suppose that today, more than ever, people are looking for excitement everywhere.

Finally, a word about recipes.

Recently I invited a friend to dinner and served her—guess what?—goulash. She was delighted. A few days later she called me because she wanted to make it herself, which is one of the reasons for writing this book. But she did not call me to ask for the recipe. She called to tell me that she had discovered that there are too many recipes! As she did not have a Hungarian cookbook, she went on the Internet and immediately, with a single click, found hundreds of recipes for goulash at a single address! Among others, they included goulash cooked with rice, or with ground beef or even precooked meat, not to mention Parmesan cheese, ketchup, and even apples, which some people apparently add to the dish. These recipes, however, have little to do with goulash the way we Hungarians make it, or with the recipe you can find in this cookbook. In her confusion, my friend phoned me. “What shall I do?” she asked. “Is there no original, meaning one single, recipe for goulash?” She may have thought that this was a simple question, not being aware that this meal had also become a metaphor for our society—indeed, for the Socialist political regime we had. In the last decade, however, sooner than you could say the name of this stew, the recipe for goulash turned into a question of nothing less than—national identity!

The question of whether there is one original, traditional recipe (with obligatory ingredients excluding all others) for a goulash seems to be central to this discussion. But for Hungarian nationalists, the concept of national identity is modeled—I am afraid—after the old-fashioned model of national emancipation of peoples living in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. In those days, national identity was perceived as static, as something cast in stone: There is a people; there is a language, culture, tradition—as well as a food, I might add—so there should be a state, too. And all that (except for the state) is God given and has to be guarded with one’s life, because it is always under threat from its enemies. Still, today apparently there are people who propagate this calcified idea of national identity. For them, goulash is part of their Magyarness and, therefore, something sacrosanct. They fear for it now; Hungary is a member of the European Union and the forces of globalization are threatening our identity more than ever. If we are not going to disappear as a nation, we have to protect it fiercely, they say. Even if it is a question of using a tomato when making goulash! There are particularly nationalist political parties that pride themselves on being at the front line of defending this beef stew. They promise to return its national pride and dignity, forgetting that nowadays the original ingredients mostly come from elsewhere: peppers from Holland; beef from Denmark; potatoes maybe from Spain; and garlic from as far away as China. Forgetting also that it is not in the nature of this meal to be strictly controlled, or it could easily turn into something opposite that smacks of… well, yes, of the gulag.

Social scientists today know that there is, of course, a modern approach to the national identity issue. From this point of view any national identity, rather than something God given is a social construct. It means something created (perhaps like goulash) as opposed to something God given (like paprika). Paprika is—well, paprika. But goulash changes constantly—as does national identity, composed of many more elements than a nationality, a language, a history, or a tradition. To such an extent that it is nowadays called a multiple identity. In the context of this cookbook, I myself would name it a sandwich identity! For example, I am of Hungarian origin, but I have dual citizenship, and my loyalties are never in conflict except during the World Cup in soccer, when I tend to root for the Hungarian team. My individual identity, my family identity as a Mangalitza pig—followed by my local, regional, national, and European identities—are not in conflict. Rather than only through national belonging (and national food), I define myself through my other interests—like my feminism, club membership, love of travel and swimming, and so on.

Therefore, in regard to the goulash-as-national-identity question, I think that it is important to stick to the basic recipe, but various additions are allowed, although (again!) the question can be raised: How far can one go and still be able to call it a goulash? But according to my friend, to my astonishment and amusement, this dilemma has already been solved on the Internet. There every mixture remotely similar to our kind of goulash is a goulash nevertheless. At least the name remains, and I hope that it is never going to be confused with gulag. Isn’t that something to be proud of?

As any reader of this introduction will surely understand by now, the most important ingredient of any goulash—as well as goulash communism—is tolerance. Even though this particular ingredient is never mentioned in any Hungarian cookbook. And this is why my cookbook, in the end, is inevitably political. This is why it stands for the freedom to interpret basic recipes while still preserving the identity, the Magyarness, of the dishes, of Tokay wine, of PIK salami, and all what we call Hungarica.

I like to think of my cookbook as promoting a Hungarian nouvelle cuisine of a sort. I also like to think—perhaps this reveals my vanity!—that understanding the difference between a goulash and a gulag could contribute to understanding why it is so hard, and why it takes such a long time, to change the mentality of people who for decades were haunted by this difference.

At the end, dear patient reader, I am aware that I started this long but necessary introduction in a light tone and ended up embroiled in politics, history, and identity—just like a typical East European intellectual—and I don’t apologize for that.

As for the recipes that follow, I can only wish you enjoy them regardless of how original they are! Jó étvádyat!