From Budapest to Bondi: A Refugee Kitchen Manifesto is a project born from my mother Eva’s handwritten, now tattered recipe book, which became my holy grail as I searched between its pages for forgotten etchings of cultural heritage. Her book was my first stone thrown into an ocean of archives, family memory, and collective history; its pages still half unglued from the binding that holds us together. It morphed into a unique retelling of the history of Eastern European and Jewish immigrants in Sydney, Australia following World War II, and how food became a proxy of their journey in balancing adaptation, assimilation, and the preservation of tradition. Recipe preservation then served as an analog for cultural preservation and transmission.
By Nadia Sopher
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In Hungary, even before the 1st World War, approximately three million immigrants from the country were registered by the United States Office of Immigration between 1899 and 1913. Thousands were displaced as Austro-Hungary contracted from a wide empire to a smaller, more modern state under the Soviet regime, and the Hungarian diaspora spread throughout the world. The dwindling of their once great empire was a great source of anxiety for Hungarians, who saw this widespread emigration not only as a loss of territory, but as a serious threat to the survival of Hungarian culture.
The current idea that wider forces are threatening the survival of Hungary is nothing new; visions of the nation’s death became a prominent metanarrative in the poetry of the Romantic period produced in Hungary. Kolcsey’s famous poem “Himnusz,” meaning Hymn, which later became Hungary’s national anthem, invoked the tragic demise of the nation. This later became known as the “Death of a Nation Prophecy” and was bolstered by the fact that Hungarians had survived without any form of independent statehood since the early 16th century, and had been hemmed in by hostile German and Slavic populations that threatened their existence.
These fears were carried by the Hungarian diaspora, who saw the final death knell of the nation in the cultural assimilation of its younger generations. I participate in these themes not only as a researcher and writer, but also as part of this same Hungarian diaspora.
Soon after World War II, my family became part of a wave of immigration to Australia, where I was raised. With my lineage in mind, I set out to investigate how the “Death of a Nation” and its surrounding anxieties manifested in Australia. A nation’s food is inextricable from its culture, and I wanted to use this lens to comprehend the unique story of Hungarian migration and the way the culture persisted, adapted, and evolved. The case of Hungarian cuisine in Australia, one of the multicultural food capitals of the world, encompasses perfectly the particular tension between tradition and assimilation that is the hallmark of immigrant experiences. Although not thoroughly present in scholarly sources – indeed, I found no academic texts dealing with this directly – Hungarians and Eastern Europeans represented an early migration into Australia that fundamentally changed its landscape, influencing the food and cultural scene in deep, long-lasting ways.
"Within the rubble of one of the worst tragedies in human history, this small community helped convert Sydney into the center of culture and food that it is today."
The upheavals and crises of the 20th century marked my family’s exile from Europe, across oceans and to new frontiers. Against all odds, both of my Hungarian parents survived World War II and genocide, making their way to the promising land of Australia. My mother was just a baby on the banks of the Danube when she became one of the thousands rescued by the Swedish diplomat and humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg. They settled in Double Bay and Bondi Beach, which, although now known as one of the main tourist attractions of Sydney, was then a less fashionable district where most Eastern European immigrants lived. And while my grandparents toiled and searched eagerly for a different life in Sydney’s innovative, urban landscape, they were still ravenous for their roots and ancient traditions.
This is how From Budapest to Bondi emerged: as an attempt to provide this particular history with a more systematized background. It is part of a wider project that consists of uncovering and preserving the recipes that my mother cultivated throughout her life in Sydney, as she was feeling as if the flavors she longed for – the essence of her own and her community’s history – were slipping away as they struggled and adapted. I inherited a trove of recipes that the Jewish, Hungarian, and Eastern European community cultivated, which demonstrated their particular translation of tradition as they adapted to the wider landscape of Australian ingredients.
One example here is my aunt Vera’s layered cake. Although working and cooking in this new climate and environment was both a challenge and an opportunity, recipes like this made it possible to retrace back from Bondi to Budapest: no matter where you are, there is always sugar, vanilla, milk and coffee around. Eastern Europeans transformed the local food landscape too; the arrival of Eastern Europeans led to a sharp rise in the popularity of the foods from their native countries. Foods like sour cream and walnuts became more visible and popular than ever before. Elegant and gracious Eastern European style coffee shops became trendy and proliferated the city. The fact that Vera used the distinctly Australian product Arnott’s Biscuits in her cake demonstrates how this dialogue of change wasn’t unidirectional; the Hungarian mixed with the Australian and vice-versa. And, as an anecdote, I can also testify that this was a communal experience: women would get together on the weekend, after tennis matches or birthday parties, and work as an ensemble to both modify and recreate their past, mixing community with tradition, past with future.
Behind these recipes, I subsequently intuited that there was a wider story to be told – namely of how, within the rubble of one of the worst tragedies in human history, this small community helped convert Sydney into the center of culture and food that it is today. Some of these recipes work as fixed points in memory, handwritten by my mother and her immigrant friends in a historical time in which memory itself was being debated, erased and preserved at the same time, after WWII and the holocaust.
In my own immigrant kitchen in New York, my adopted American influences and ingredients continue to meld with Hungarian and Australian culinary history, as I sub in Pepperidge Farm for the Arnott’s Biscuits. Eva’s recipe book, tattered as it may be, remains a testament to the endurance of cultural memory and the power of food to sustain it.
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Nadia Sopher is a graduate of the NYU Food Studies program. Hailing originally from Sydney, she currently lives in New York City with her family and works as a wellness coach and entrepreneur.
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