William Penn Life, 2012 (47. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2012-04-01 / 4. szám
íhe yimpfim Kítch^D* with Főszakács Béla 9 years 540+ recipes, I cookbook FÁRADJON BE A MAGYAR KONYHÁBA! April 2012 marks the ninth anniversary of "The Hungarian Kitchen." I started writing and took over for Chef Vilmos, who wrote the previous column about Magyar food. Thanks are in order to John Lovász, managing editor of this publication, for offering me the opportunity to write this column and share my knowledge of food; to Chef Vilmos for working behind the scenes in the kitchen to help me perfect many a recipe; and to my mother for inspiring me and giving me technical advice when needed. Most importantly, I thank all the readers who supported this column with your letters, emails, phone calls and personal greetings as I traveled to many locations during my years as a member of the National Auditing Committee and Board of Directors. During these nine years, we learned a lot about food. We learned about not just Hungarian dishes but also many ways to prepare food. All told, I have shared with you more than 540 recipes in "The Hungarian Kitchen" and hundreds more associated with The HK were published in the WPA's cookbook. My original intention was to write the column in conjunction with a website that would promote Hungarian culture and food. Some years back, the website became outdated, needed an overhaul and is still a work in process. Another intention was to promote the scholarship fund and solicit donations for all our Hungarian students. This task was accomplished when the cookbook, "A Taste of Hungarian Heaven," was published, with all proceeds going to the William Penn Fraternal Association Scholarship Foundation. Cooking reveals a lot about a society or ethnic group. Food has its own identity, but our food choices help set many cultures apart. America is a melting pot of ethnic culture that originated from the mixing of many nationalities brought here from all over the world. The common ingredient making all this possible is ethnic food; it feeds people, makes money to support their lifestyle and provides the opportunity to elevate their lives to a higher social ranking. Food is a cultural product from which ethnicity is composed, reproduced, negotiated and realized. Ethnic food then becomes a social construct allowing for the identity of cultural differences. A way of keeping ethnic originality is through cookbooks and recipe collections. Cookbooks are social works with their own rules that gather, evaluate and contrast knowledge, mark boundaries, establish culinary knowledge and allow for simultaneous representation of many cuisines in a simple yet precise way. By combining practical knowledge in the form of culinary techniques with ideological knowledge, cookbooks reveal popular attitudes of the group producing the book.
