Németh Szandra - Saly Noémi: Catering for guests, being a guest. Permanent exhibition on Hungarian hospitality (Budapest, 2016)
77 Dobos was an eminent collector and specialist of all that is gastronomy. His Hungarian-French Cookery-Book can be useful for chefs and courageous housewives alike even today. The master’s professional prestige is marked by the fact that one of our great schools of catering trade bears his name. The famous Dobos cake was presented in 1885 at the National Fair. He could not make enough of the pastry to meet the demand. Later he produced industrial quantities of the pastry, dispatching it in ice-chests to cities of Western Europe. Later many a confectioner tried to copy the cake, but they could not get to the bottom of the secret: the master mixed butter with cocoa-butter for the crème making it wonderfully smooth and especially delicious. Dobos got tired of the copycats (or rather copycakes) so in 1906 he passed the recipe free of charge to the Trade Association of Confectioners and Gingerbread-Makers so that any of his colleagues could produce it. The layered sponge-cake filled with cocoa crème and topped with glazed caramel is one of the most famous Hungarian cakes. HENRIK KUGLER AND HIS MIGNON PASTRIES, ALIAS PETITS FOURS In Hungarian the word “kugler” became a common name for a kind of small fancy cake covered with coloured icing known as petits fours in French. Henrik Kugler, one of the most famous Hungarian confectioners imported the idea of this kind of pastry from Paris. His grandfather opened a confectionery in Sopron at the end of the 18 th century and his father established his one in 1847 in Pest, in today’s József nádor Square. Henrik Kugler (1830–1904) took over his father’s shop in 1852 and later he moved it to today’s Vörösmarty Square in 1870. His special cakes, ice-creams, liqueurs, crème coffees were partaken of by notabilities like Queen Elizabeth (Sissy), Ferenc Deák, and prime minister Gyula Andrássy as well as Franz Liszt. Kugler Confectionery was purveyor by appointment to royal courts. In 1884 a young star of the profession, Émile Gerbeaud started to work here. He soon took over the company. Hereupon Kugler went on with making sweets and writing cookbooks. His essential volumes are: The Most Up-to-date and Most Complete Great Home Confectionery – the Most Practical Great Budapest Cookbook and Home Confectionery (1896) and The Latest and Most Complete Practical Great Budapest Cookbook and Home Confectionery (1899). GERBEAUD AND THE GERBAUD SLAB OF CAKE (ZSERBÓ-SZELET) Émile Gerbeaud (1854–1919) was born in Carouge, near Geneva to a family of confectioners. He learnt the trade in Germany, France and England, and opened a confectionery shop in Saint-Étienne in 1879. In 1884, after having taken Kugler’s shop over, he also established a small chocolate factory. In 1909 he acquired another chocolate factory in Fiume (today’s Rijeka, Croatia) and merged them in Budapest in 1919. It was in this factory that the first langue-de-chat and chocolate-covered cherry bonbons were produced, the latter is still a worldwide success due to the delicious Hungarian fruit. There soon worked sixty journeymen instead of ten in the famous Gerbeaud-confectionery as well as twenty sales- and parcel wrapper girls and five delivery boys, but they hardly could fulfil the orders. The workshop produced more than a hundred kinds of fancy biscuits, special cakes and bonbons,the packages of which were masterpieces on their own right. Gerbeaud was granted several Hungarian and foreign medals including the French Legion of Honour. The name of his shop was made unforgettable by hit songs and chansons of the age. One of the popular cakes of the shop was Gerbaud Slab of Cake (zserbó-szelet), a sister of the Viennese Sacher cake, created in the 1950s after the shop was taken into public ownership. The basic materials are similar, but the walnut filling, fine apricot jam and chocolate glaze meet in a different harmony in Budapest comparesd to Vienna. There is definitely no tourist who would miss tasting this or some other Gerbeaud delicacy.
