Borza Tibor (szerk.): A Magyar Kereskedelmi és Vendéglátóipari Múzeum évkönyve 1970 (Budapest, Magyar Kereskedelmi és Vendéglátóipari Múzeum, 1970)

Zolnay László: Magyar szakácsok a középkorban

LÁSZLÓ ZOLNAY HUNGARIAN COOKS IN THE MIDDLE AGES The essay treats the history of the Hungarian kings' cooks at court. The author states that the cooks at Buda court had offices as a heritage devolving from father to son and from the 13th century on they rose to the rank of nobility from the stratum of royal conditionarii. The families of cooks were the landowners of the communities Kölked, Szakácsi, and Vid in County Somogy. There they also had had churches built. The monastery of their clan had already been mentioned in 1263. That there were no food-poisonings at all in the royal court of the Middle Ages is attributed by the author to the cooks' loyalty. From among them not only about 100 cooks of the royal kitchen of Buda emerged. One or two rose to a high rank in other professions. Their trustworthiness is proved further on by the fact that László Anjou, King of Naples kept a Hungarian cook in the 1390s (so did István Báthory, king of Poland later). One of these cooks, Ferenc Eresztvényi was honoured with a "talking" coat-of-arms by king Zsigmond. The coat-of-arms shows a pike being roasted on a spit decorated with bay leaves. The generations of the royal cooks embrace the whole Hungarian Middle Ages. Their first mention comes from the time following the Mongol invasion of 1241—42. The chronicle of Miklós Istvánfi from the 16th century refers to Illés Gondos Szakácsi, chef of Louis II, who in 1526 was cut to pieces by the Turks just at the time when preparing his master's lunch. Their organisation dwindled away with the Turkish occupation and the cessation of the Hungarian national kingdom. Their descendants lived on as members of the landed gentry of County Somogy. 68