A Debreceni Déri Múzeum Évkönyve 1976 (Debrecen, 1977)

Néprajz - Cs. Tábori Hajnalka: A Relic of Cooking in the Oven

Hajnalka Cs. Tábori A RELIC OF COOKING IN THE OVEN Parallel to the general transformation of the traditional life of peasantry in Hungary during the past thirty years or so, the customs connected with food and eating exhibit considerable changes as well. The traditional implements of peasant households are rapidly vanising and so are the old methods of cooking. Up till about World War I in Hungary mostly pottery was used in peasant houses in cooking, storing, and serving up meals. Cooking was done either on open fire or in large, closed ovens, in pottery pots of various sizes. During the autumn and winter months the well-heated ovens ware used for cooking, which had a double advantage; in addition to heating the house, the oven served as an excellent place for cooking the food for the family. They put the food they wanted to cook into the large pots, pushed them into the hot oven, then took them out a couple of hours later readycooked. The thickening of the meal with roasted flour, and additional seasoning was done on the protruding narrow stand at the front of the oven. The ovens used in Hungarian peasant houses being large and bulky constructions with a relatively small mouth, an implement was needed for handling the fragile pots filled with hot water or hot food. Because in most cases it was not enough to place the pots into the oven, but occasionally they had to be taken out, e. g., stuffed cabbage, to be stirred and shaken up to ensure better cooking. Such an implement was the so-called 'pot-lifter (kuruglya karaglya, bürügle, kemencevella, vellavas, kemencekocsi, kantatoló, kantakocsi, fazéktoló, tolórúd, kemencebőgetö, ördögszekér etc.), a handy device with a long handgrip and two wheels. The iron parts were made by blacksmiths, the wooden parts by handy peasants. Although the custom of cooking in the oven was farly widespread in Hungary up till World War I, pot-lifters were not in general use in the whole of the country; various other methods were found instead (e.g., cloths to handle the pots with, pokers, etc.). The present paper offers a survey of the survival of the custom of cooking in the oven in our days and also of the custom of cooking in the oven in our days and also of the relics, which are now mostly out of use. Owing to the rapidly changing way of life, not only the ovens as a traditional requisite of peasant homes, but also certain archaic cooking utensils, like the pot-lifter, are doomed to extinction. The implement described in the paper is connected with probably the last surviving relic of an archaic method of cooking in Hajdú-Bihar County and in the southern parts of the Great Hungarian Plain. 180