A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism (14 page)

I have to make yet another personal remark in connection with this cookbook—I ended up writing it by chance. Not only am I not a cook, but by profession I am a political scientist. However, what does my diploma mean here, in London? During these last twenty years since I left Hungary, even though I hold a degree in Scientific Socialism from Eötvös University in Budapest I was forced to do all kinds of odd jobs. At first I was a babysitter, then a nanny, and proud to become the first pig who ever got official permission to do this job. After that I worked as a salesperson in the food department of Harrods (which came in handy for my CV later on!), then as a teacher of English for Hungarian immigrants, until I finally got employed on a TV cooking show. At least this job is fun, and I get decent money and a lot to eat. To tell the truth, my PhD would not be worth much even in Hungary, as I graduated during Communist times. So many of my colleagues who taught Marxism found themselves jobless in the “brave new world”—to quote Aldous Huxley. Moreover, a whole generation of scholars, if not two, suddenly had their pasts invalidated—even if they weren't teaching Marxism, even if they had never been sympathetic to Marxism at all. Take my friend Aniko, whose specialty was American feminist literature: She has spent much of the past decade requalifying for the same university position just because her Communist-era doctorate was no longer taken seriously. Consequently, many of us left the country after 1990. It is a sad fact of life that my education is more or less worthless in both countries, but I am reconciled to it. This cookbook testifies to that.

I slowly advanced to assistant cook on the TV show
Cook and Enjoy
, now in its fifth season. The star of our program is the not yet famous Oliver Marshall—please, note the nice twist in his name! I am one of the very few creatures who has a real insight into his cooking and who knows that he will never become as famous as Jamie Oliver! Among other tasks, I have often had to sample the food he cooks; this is what we pigs do best. And this is how this book came about. I often told Oliver: Listen Ollie (we call him Ollie because, for obvious reasons, he hates to be called Oliver), you could add a bit more pepper to that stew, or, listen Ollie, I would cut the onions more finely, because they need to actually melt . . . and so on. I have a lot of ideas of my own. One day he said, “Well, Ms. Piggy, since you are so smart, why don't you cook all by yourself, eh?”

He did not mean it seriously; his intention was to be ironical. But the producer of our show heard him and immediately thought that this, indeed, was an interesting idea. A pig who cooks? Better still, a pig writing a cookbook! Let's say, a Hungarian cookbook—because I am from
there
, am I not? “What do you think about that?” the producer asked me. “And then, perhaps, I could get you your own TV show,” she added. I am not crazy about having my own show; it is a lot of work and a big responsibility for a single pig—even for a proud Mangalitza. I remember how the audience used to laugh at poor Miss Piggy on
The Muppet Show
, thinking that she was vain and stupid. But I accepted the offer: Who, in my position, wouldn't? Considering that I can certainly cook better than Ollie, and I can write, too. Besides, there is a direct connection between cooking and politics: As a political scientist, I would argue that politics is—cooking.

There are many cookbooks in this world, too many. Sometimes, when I enter a bookstore and stop in front of shelves of them, I fall into a deep depression just looking at all that glitz and glamour.

Many cookbooks include sumptuous photos of meals; they make your mouth water. On the other hand, they look more like picture books for children than cooking manuals. I am against cookbooks with photos! For one, they make the book more expensive. Besides, they make the reader look stupid, as if he (or, more often, she!) needs to see the food in order to trust the recipe. And then, when the reader, following the recipe, makes the same meal, it looks very different on the plate. The meat is not as pink as in the photo, the bread crust is not as crispy, the salad not as green. Even the expensive tablecloth doesn't look half as good as in the photo!

Yes, I must admit that glamour, glitz, snobbery, and expensive ingredients put me off. There are, of course, many reasons
not
to write a simple cookbook, as one is inevitably discouraged to do so every step of the way. But, by the same token, this is precisely the reason for me to write a simple cookbook of my own. You have to have a passion for food (which we pigs usually have!), some basic idea of what it's all about, and a clear concept of what you want to put on the plate. And in this case that is traditional Hungarian cuisine.

My book is an antisnobbish book with simple, tasty, and easily available ingredients that you don't have to hunt for in foreign countries, I guarantee you. In my cookbook you will find recipes I cooked and tasted myself, recipes I learned from my mother back in Budapest. She had a box full of them, written down by my grandmother in her neat hoofwriting in green ink on small pieces of cardboard the size of a postcard. My grandma believed that these cardboards were more practical than a notebook or a book, because it is easier to handle a cardboard than turn a page, with an often greasy hoof. Now I have the same box in front of me. But unlike Grandma, I happen to think that a box is really an awkward way to keep recipes. Especially when you are getting ready to leave the country and have to stuff all your possessions into one single suitcase—which is exactly what happened to me in 1989. My cookbook, which you are holding in your hand or hoof right now, is a book of the same size as Grandma's cardboards, hardcover and no photos, except, of course, for the goulash on the cover.

Goulash, or
gulyás
, is a typical and surely the most famous Hungarian dish. It roughly translates as beef stew, although it is really a special kind of stew, as you will surely realize. It was invented by herdsmen (
gulyás
) from the
puszta
pastures and became extremely popular throughout the world at the beginning of the last century. In my view, its ingredients can vary as long as you throw vegetable oil (instead of the customary lard), add beef cut in cubes, onions, potatoes, garlic, and a lot of peppers into the pot and let it simmer. Tomatoes, carrots, and other vegetables are optional, although there are other, more radical opinions that exclude tomatoes altogether. But all agree about a lot of peppers. Adding more water, or less, determines if it will be a goulash stew
pörkölt
or a goulash soup (
gulyásleves
).

Before I tell you more about this cookbook, let me focus for a moment on the political aspect of goulash—that is, on the Hungarian political stew called goulash communism. After all, I was a professor of political science, and it is of the utmost importance to me to clarify the difference between two very similar words: goulash and gulag. Don't be puzzled because I mention the gulag in connection with goulash. Both have to do with socialism, and I can't hide either my past or the time when my homeland was a Socialist republic and part of the Soviet bloc. That also goes for the Soviet kind of repression. As Hungary and the USSR were not only neighbors but also, so to speak, comrades in Communism for almost five decades, it is only logical that I should feel that there is a certain danger of confusing the two words.

It is not just because they sound similar and could confuse ears not accustomed to such nuances. No, the distinction is even more important because today's reader might not be aware that gulag, as opposed to goulash, has nothing to do with food at all! Also, when you think about it, these two words are among the very few words from our part of the world that have succeeded. But the fact that someone might confuse them is not only bothersome, it is offensive to me. Because one stands for something good and the other for something horrible.

GULAG is in fact an acronym for the administration of what officially was called “corrective labor camps” in the USSR between the thirties and midfifties of the last century. Incidentally, it seems that in the USSR and other Socialist states, party and state apparatchiks loved acronyms, like RSDLP(b), CPSU, CPC, KMT, NKVD, GOELRO—our own AVH, SWP, NEM plan, and so on.

But they often hid a terrible reality—as in the case of gulags. In these camps, mostly situated in the frozen tundra of Siberia, inmates died like flies because, looking at it from my perspective, there was no goulash to eat there. Or hardly anything else, for that matter! Indeed, in a very general way, and only for the purpose of this cookbook, the gulag could be defined as a place characterized by its scarcity of food. Inmates, fed on the meager rations of
kasha
(a kind of porridge), ate rats and dogs and God knows what else—they even killed each other for a portion of food. Many of them ended up in camps for committing ridiculous “crimes” like petty theft, telling what were considered antigovernment jokes, or holding political views revealed to be ʺcounterrevolutionary.ʺ A very wide definition of “enemy,” based on the principle “he who is not for us is against us,” was used to sentence them to the gulag. Innocent people were forced to live together with real criminals and murderers. Perhaps even twenty million passed through these camps, and millions perished. With the passage of time, the acronym GULAG became gulas; that is, a noun symbolizing the repressive Soviet system itself. With this transformation it also became a dangerous word. Those who knew about it had to pretend that they didn't.

I remember very well the first time I heard the word. It was in the eighties, when I read the novel
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
, by the dissident Soviet writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who himself had been an inmate for eight years. His novel tells about just that, a day in a camp, how these inmates lived in dirt, were eaten by lice, dressed in rags, and fought for the little food there was. The meaninglessness of that life seemed the hardest thing to put up with. Therefore, at the end of a day Ivan Denisovich was pleased, because he had worked hard and well. This was the first book I had read that described the gulag system and how it was used as an instrument of mental repression.

Later on, I read more of Solzhenitsyn, whose book
The Gulag Archipelago
made the gulags known throughout the world. I read Varam Shalamov's memoir
Kolyma Tales
, as well as Eugenia Ginsburg's
Journey into the Whirlwind
, and then
Within the Whirlwind
, and many more. My generation of pigs at Eötvös University was fascinated by these accounts. But one book of memoirs stuck with me, perhaps because I discovered that my father kept it hidden in his desk. It was Karlo Stajner's
Seven Thousand Days in Siberia
. Sentenced for his ʺantirevolutionary activities,” Karlo Stajner spent twenty years of his life in camps. In his introduction to the English edition, the well-known then Yugoslav writer Danilo KiÅ¡ describes a meeting with Stajner and his wife, Sonja, who had waited for him to come back for all those years and to whom he later dedicated his memoir. In one single but tremendously powerful sentence, KiÅ¡ describes Sonja's eyes: ”[T]hey are not like the eyes of the blind, not blind eyes, but eyes that no writer has ever described and few people have seen, dead eyes in a living face.” Stajner was a victim—but so was she; this sentence made me never forget what the gulag had done to Sonja's eyes.

If the gulag stands for the Soviet kind of repression, in Hungary during the late sixties a set of economic changes turned the totalitarian system in another direction, toward goulash communism.

It is hard to understand any of these changes without mentioning Stalin—even if a history book, rather than a cookbook, offers perhaps a more appropriate place to learn about Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili. By removing everyone who stood in his way to ultimate power in the early thirties, he rose to the position of a Communist dictator whose nom de plume, Stalin, was given to this specific type of Socialist government—not only in the USSR. But to simplify the explanation, the reader should imagine Stalin as a kind of Darth Vader, the lord of the “dark force.” On the other hand, his army did defeat Hitler. The experience of living under socialism teaches us that political leaders are neither heroes nor villains—but sometimes even both. And to go back to the
Star Wars
movie metaphor I just used, Luke Skywalker came very late to the USSR, only in the late eighties. He appeared under the name Mikhail Gorbachev, and he was not a hero from the start either, just a party bureaucrat, but that is another story.

The so-called goulash communism started when János Kádar, the general secretary of the Hungarian Socialist Worker's Party—who remained in office for more than thirty years—introduced his New Economic Mechanism, or NEM, in 1968. Not that he was such a good guy—he himself had skeletons in his closet; for instance, mass arrests right after the revolution in 1956. First students rebelled against the Stalinist type of government. When the police shot at them, the uprising spread throughout the country, and the government fell. But then the Soviets decided to step in, and the Soviet army invaded the country on November fourth. The revolution, which lasted only a few weeks, was crushed at the price of thousands upon thousands of civilians killed. A new, pro-Soviet government was installed, with János Kádar as prime minister. As Americans would say: There is no such thing as a free lunch! So Kádar ordered (or, better said, was ordered to order) the persecution of some 26,000 rebels, of whom 13,000 were imprisoned and several hundred even executed. Some 200,000 people fled the country.

On the other hand, he knew that the whole of Soviet-style socialism was hated, and he needed to introduce compromises in order to keep socialism going. And Hungarians knew that Kádar knew, and he knew that they knew that he knew.

When he introduced the new economic plan, Kádar was confronted with the same question of ingredients: How far could one go in introducing various additions and changes—and still call it socialism? His unorthodox mixture of ingredients from both the planned and the market economies made our bellies full, our newspapers more liberal, our piggish rights more respected. Our life improved. Obviously, he decided that it was better to offer a meager goulash—with somewhat unconventional ingredients—than the gulag. The main principle of goulash communism became, to quote him: “He who is not against us is for us
.
” Instead of weeding out ʺcounterrevolutionaryʺ elements, Kádar sort of dumped them into his stew, which only made it thicker. It worked in the same way as when a cook adds some flour to the sauce: “With us” functioned just like that, like a cohesive element in the society, a glue of sorts. Out came a bearable, edible stew based on compromise—a golden cage of a sort.