Csapó Katalin - Füreder Balázs - Sári Zsolt: Reneszánsz ételek – Ételek reneszánsza Időszaki kiállítás 2008. március–május (Budapest, 2008)

The rise of the soup is an interesting question. Some scholars claim that soup was late in entering culinary history in Hungary but others maintain it appeared in refectories in the mid-seventeenth century. The three most staple foodstuffs were meat, bread and wine. In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the nobility shifted from the mediaeval two-meal-a-day routine to three meals a day, consisting of breakfast, lunch and supper. Breakfast was increasingly being organised around the new hot drink, coffee, which was served with various breads. Lunch provably started with soup, and as a consequence, soup plates appeared alongside of flat dinner plates. At the same time, round tables supplanted the former large rectangular ones. At the turn of the seventeenth century plants from the New World were introduced in European culinary culture. The most significant one was corn, potato and the bell pepper. Corn became widespread in Transylvania in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The north Carpathian zone was too cold to grow corn. Potato is known to have been first grown on the so-called chamber estates. The first description of the plant dates from 1762, from the pen on István Kolozs-vári Mátyus. He recounts how in the Flemish and the French boiled it in water and ate it with butter. From the 1760s onwards governments popularised the potato not only for direct consumption, but also for animal feed and industrial use (distilleries), but it was not until the rainy and faminous years of 1814 and 1817 that it became widely accepted. The most typical plants of Hungarian gastronomy, the paprika, came to Hungary in the 1720s. It came via the Balkans, and consequently, the south Great Plain was the first to start growing it, but it was confined exclusively to the peasantry. The nobility refused to touch it for a while, and only in the form of a relish, to go with meat dishes, was it served towards the end of the century. The real breakthrough came in the nineteenth century during the Reform Era. The nobility and the middle classes were increasingly interested in their country, the nation, the past and the roots of the Hungarian people. In an effort to identify with those roots, they introduced into their own culinary traditions. More and more recipes for dishes with paprika featured in cookery books dating from the middle of the century. Of course, the changes did not reach people at the same time. The transformation of the Renaissance culinary idiom - the use of pepper, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, saffron, ginger, wine, vinegar, sugar; and the shift from using bread as a thickening agent - did not occur until the late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. The new dishes and ingredients did not fundamentally change Hungarian cuisine. As late as 1840, István Czifray listed the ingredients for the recipe of "Hungarian-style carp" in his Hungarian National Cookery Book as follows: carp, roe, salt, apples, butter, the cooking juices of peas, ginger, sugar, nutmeg, wine, bread rolls and lemon zest!