Gunda Béla et al. (szerk.): Ideen, Objekte und Lebensformen. Gedenkschrift für Zsigmond Bátky - István Király Múzeum közelményei. A. sorozat 29. (Székesfehérvár, 1989)

Mária Kresz†: Kettle and Pot

Map 2.: Centres for making flameproof cooking pots in the Carpathian Basin according to the collection of the

Ethnographical Museum. (Map by M. Kresz)

Ethnographic material proves that the pot was the same in the whole territory of the Hungarian language and everywhere its name was “fazék”,—a fact that can hardly be stated of any other ceramic vessel. The profil is oval, narrowing towards the top, and still more towards the bottom, so it is often considered “narrow bottomed”, “pointed”. Indispensable for cooking it served many other purposes too. (About its use in Mezőkövesd, see Morvay 1955.) Earthenware pots were rarely, and only in some regions used for cooking out-of-doors, e.g. in the surroundings of Szekszárd or in Zsámbék (62.165.13). As a potter’s wife in Tapolca stated: “Earthenware pots were always needed on the hearth in the kitchen under the open chimney.” Pots were used in the winter when cooking was done in the oven and food was prepared which needed slow even heat. A work of 1933 described cooking in Mezőtúr: “In wintertime the “Slovakian” pots were most important among the working class people when the family stayed in the warm room heated by the oven, and so the housewife did not light a fire in the kitchen, but she would put beans, peas, potatoes or any other food into the “Slovakian” pot, a lid on it, and shove it into the oven where it got cooked without any further trouble.” (Quoted by Kresz 1960, 310).

Though cooking pots were used in the whole country, they could not be made everywhere. As pots were placed

onto an open fire, on flames or cinders, they had to be made of such “fire-clay” which was found only in certain regions of the hills, but not in the Great Hungarian Plain.

In 1885 the Royal Hungarian Geological Institute published a work titled “The detailed catalogue of raw materials for use in clay-, glass-, cement and paint industries in Hungary” byj. Mattyasovszky and L. P e t r i k. In 1892 S. Kalecsinszky prepared a map of the clay-catalogue distinguishing “fire-clay” and “non-fireclay”. After more than a thousand samples had been examined the Royal Hungarian Geological Institute published a book by Kalecsinszky in 1905 titled: “The Analyzed Clays from the Countries Belonging to the Hungarian Crown”. On the basis of these works it can be stated that there were certain regions in Hungary for making pots and pans for cooking, frying, baking and roasting, for “pottery” in the very close meaning of the word. These were: County Gömör, especially the villages around Rimaszombat (today central Slovakia), Rév in County Bihar, Transylvania (today Romania), and Csákvár in Transdanubia, the nearby Vértes hills being an excellent place for “fireclay”. Potters had been travelling with their ware for centuries trading pots for grain. Vendors from Rimaszombat had appeared in the Great Plain, in the region between the Danube and the Tisza already during the Turkish era according to the account books of Nagykőrös in 1661.

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