Böcker av Andras Koerner

"Andrâas Koerner is the author of a number of critically acclaimed, award-winning CEU Press titles on the cultural history of Hungarian Jews and Jewish cuisine. This volume continues that tradition by discussing the phenomenon of exhibits on Jewish culinary culture in museums and galleries around the world.The first part of the book provides an overview of the cultural history of "foodism" and the proliferation of Jewish museums. In addition, it examines the role of cuisine in Jewish identity. It offers an analysis of the history and recent examples of exhibitions on Jewish culinary culture, a subject that has not received scholarly attention until now.The second part complements this by offering a detailed case study of the book's subject. It showcases a 2022 exhibition in Budapest on the History of Hungarian Jewish Culinary Culture. Andrâas Koerner was the co-curator of the show, thus he is able to offer an insider's account of its implementation - concept, scope, goals, audience, and design. He also openly discusses the compromises made and mistakes committed in the exhibition's preparatory work.This subjective account, quite different from the dry objectivity of catalogues, offers an unusual, behind-the-scenes look at how a complex exhibition like this is prepared. At the same time, the book's appendix includes images of the display boards and some of the exhibited objects - thus it can also stand for a valuable ex-post catalogue"--

The seven essays in this volume focus such previously unexplored subjects as the world's first cookbook printed in Hebrew letters, published in 1854, and a wonderful 19th-century Jewish cookbook, which in addition to its Hungarian edition was also published in Dutch in Rotterdam. The author entertainingly reconstructs the history of bolesz, a legendary yeast pastry that was the specialty of a famous, but long defunct Jewish coffeehouse in Pest, and includes the modernized recipe of this distant relative of cinnamon rolls. Koerner also tells the history of the first Jewish bookstore in Hungary (founded as early as in 1765!) and examines the influence of Jewish cuisine on non-Jewish food.In this volume Andrs Koerner explores key issues of Hungarian Jewish culinary culture in greater detail and more scholarly manner than what space restrictions permitted in his previous work Jewish Cuisine in Hungary: A Cultural History, also published by CEU Press, which received the prestigious National Jewish Book Award in 2020. The current essays confirm the extent to which Hungarian Jewry was part of the Jewish life and culture of the Central European region before their almost total language shift by the turn of the 20th century.

Winner of the 2019 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Food Writing & Cookbooks. The author refuses to accept that the world of pre-Shoah Hungarian Jewry and its cuisine should disappear almost without a trace and feels compelled to reconstruct its culinary culture. His bookwith a preface by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblettpresents eating habits not as isolated acts, divorced from their social and religious contexts, but as an organic part of a way of life. According to Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: "e;While cookbooks abound, there is no other study that can compare with this book. It is simply the most comprehensive account of a Jewish food culture to date."e; Indeed, no comparable study exists about the Jewish cuisine of any country, orfor that matterabout Hungarian cuisine. It describes the extraordinary diversity that characterized the world of Hungarian Jews, in which what could or could not be eaten was determined not only by absolute rules, but also by dietary traditions of particular religious movements or particular communities. Ten chapters cover the culinary culture and eating habits of Hungarian Jewry up to the 1940s, ranging from kashrut (the system of keeping the kitchen kosher) through the history of cookbooks, the food traditions of weekdays and holidays, the diversity of households, and descriptions of food and hospitality industries to the history of some typical dishes. Although this book is primarily a cultural history and not a cookbook, it includes 83 recipes, as well as nearly 200 fascinating pictures of daily life and documents.

Having presented the physical conditions among which Hungarian Jews lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries--the kind of neighborhoods and apartments they lived in, and the places where they worked--this second volume addresses the spiritual aspects and the lighter sides of their life.