Hungarian Recipes From a Secret Jewish Family in the Northwoods of Minnesota
Shared by Julia Silverberg Nemeth
Recipe Roots: Cluj Napoca, Romania > Timișoara, Romania > Budapest, Hungary > Morristown, NJ > Los Angeles > Park Rapids, Minnesota
In the 1970s and 1980s, Julia Silverberg Nemeth’s childhood wasn’t like many others. Her parents and grandmother, who lived with them, built a homestead in the woods of northern Minnesota 20 miles outside of a town called Park Rapids. The family foraged for mushrooms to mix into a hunter’s stew and her mother Edith stuffed kohlrabi and simmered the root vegetable in a Hungarian sour cream and dill sauce. On Fridays, her grandmother Juliana made golden chicken soup with farina dumplings called galushka and the family fried doughnuts filled with apricot jam that they called fánk in December. “I didn’t know I was Jewish, but we were eating chicken soup every Friday,” Julia says. “I thought that was maybe a Hungarian tradition.”
Julia’s mother Edith, who always wanted to be a dancer, and grandmother Juliana in Transylvania in 1938.
When Julia was 20, her mother said she had something important to share with her. Overwhelmed by tears and fear, she never revealed her secret and passed away shortly after. Looking back, Julia writes, “I know without a doubt that my mother was going to tell me we are Jewish. She wanted me to help her find a way back from her secrets.”
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Born in 1896, as an ethnic Hungarian of Israelite descent, Julia says, her grandmother Juliana lived outside of Cluj-Napoca in Transylvania and worked as a hairstylist, owning her own salon, a rarity for women at the time. Her grandmother gained fame and was invited to do the hair of the queen of Romania, Marie, at her home near the Black Sea. In 1925, she gave birth to Edith and in the 1940s, they left Transylvania for Budapest. It’s “very lucky they did so because all their relatives who stayed behind... were sent to Auschwitz and died,” Julia shares.
They found a small reprieve in Budapest for a time. But, in 1944 during a bombing raid, Edith was turned away from two shelters because of her yellow star, which declared she was Jewish. Amidst mortar shells, she ripped it off. “This was a crime that was punishable by death,” Julia explains. “But my mother's choices seemed to be death by bombs or death because of her crime. She chose to try to survive the crisis at hand.” Passing as a gentile, she was allowed into a shelter.
Julia’s grandmother Juliana in Park Rapids, Minnesota in 1994.
Later that year, Edith was forced to march the 150 miles to Vienna and was sent to Bergen-Belsen while her mother remained in the Budapest ghetto near the Dohány Synagogue. Everytime authorities came, “she would just lay on the ground and pretend [to be] dead…. She said she felt she had survived by this roose,” Julia explains.
Edith, who contracted typhus, nearly didn’t make it back to Budapest after the war. “Hardly anyone came home, but my Editke came home,” Julia’s grandmother would later tell her. In 1964, the family left for the U.S. as refugees.
“When they came to America, they decided not to tell anyone they were Jewish, including me,” Julia explains.
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Missing the scent of her mother after she died, Julia went to her dresser to find her hairbrush. Under it, she found a small yellowed envelope. “It really felt like she’d left it there for me,” she explains. In it, Julia found her mother’s liberation papers from Bergen-Belsen and other documents that showed she was Jewish.
Edith’s liberation papers from Bergen-Belsen.
The papers felt like a liberation to Julia too, from the secrets and fears she felt growing up. It set her on a path to explore her family’s history at Holocaust museums and in Central Europe. “I’ve been everywhere putting together this puzzle,” she explains.
She’s also thought a great deal about the story her grandmother shared with her of the moment her mother ripped off her yellow star, considering how safe she must have felt to pass as a gentile and that she wanted that feeling for her children. Symbolically, though, Julia writes, “I see myself picking up the yellow star she cast away and saying to my mother, ‘It's ok, mama, I can take this over now.’”
She has. Celebrating her Jewish heritage through holidays and Shabbat dinner with her own daughter Zsófia and by preparing the family recipes like the chicken soup and the fánk for Hanukkah. In making the food and sharing it, she says, is proof that the family survived.
Fánk (Donuts with Apricot Jam)
Every winter, Edith would fry these doughnuts for the family. “I thought it was a Christmas tradition even though my mom told me the story of the miracle of oil when she made the donuts,” writes Julia. “I just thought all biblical stories were the same, as in Christian.”
Total Time: 1 hour 15 minutes, plus rising
Makes: 30 doughnuts
Ingredients
For the dough:
2 cups milk, warmed to 115 degrees, divided
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 (¼ oz) packet active dry yeast
½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, melted
5 egg yolks
1 teaspoon kosher salt
5 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
For frying and assembly:
Nonstick cooking spray
Vegetable oil for frying
4 cups apricot jam
½ cup confectioners’ sugar
Directions:
1In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment, add ¼ cup of the warm milk. Sprinkle in the sugar and yeast, stir gently and let stand for 10 minutes, until foamy.
2. Add the remaining milk, melted butter, and egg yolks. Mix well to combine. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the flour and salt. Increase the speed to medium, and mix until the dough is smooth and starts to pull away from the bowl, about 10-12 minutes.
3. Form the dough into a ball, and transfer to a large bowl sprayed with nonstick cooking spray. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 45 minutes.
4. After the dough has risen, punch it down and transfer to a lightly floured surface. Roll the dough out to ½ inch thick. Using a floured 3-inch circle cutter, punch out 30 circles, rerolling scraps as needed.
5. Transfer the circles to 2 large baking sheets lined with parchment paper. Cover doughnuts with plastic wrap or damp kitchen towels and let rest for 30 minutes.
6. Heat about 10 cups of oil (oil should be 2” deep, so add more if needed) in a large heavy-bottomed pot or Dutch oven and set over medium-low heat. Using a deep-fry thermometer, heat the oil to 350F. Add 4 doughnuts at a time and cook for 2 minutes per side until golden. Remove the doughnuts from the oil with a slotted spoon and transfer to a cooling rack or paper towels over a large baking sheet to drain excess oil. Repeat with remaining doughnuts.
7. Dollop 1 tablespoon of apricot jam on top of each donut, then dust with confectioners' sugar. They are best eaten warm.
Hen Soup with Galuska Dumplings
“My Friday afternoon chicken soup & galuska memories with my mom and grandma are some of my best memories,” Julia writes. “After we ate, they read the Nok Lapja (Hungarian women's magazine) out loud to me and often the articles were humorous and they belly laughed for a long time.”
Total Time: 3 Hours
Serves: 8-10
Ingredients
For the soup:
1 small hen or chicken, about 3 ½ pounds, cut into 8 pieces (bone-in and skin-on)
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
2 tablespoons kosher salt
3 medium russet potatoes, peeled and quartered/ into 2” pieces
3 large carrots, peeled and cut into 2” pieces
2 large parsnips, peeled and cut into 2” pieces
1 medium onion, peeled and quartered
1 small celery root or celeriac, peeled and cut into 2” pieces (you can use 3 stalks of celery if unavailable)
1 small kohlrabi, peeled and quartered into 2” pieces (you can use ¼ of a small cabbage, roughly cut) if unavailable)
2-3 cloves garlic
For the dumplings:
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons oil
½ cup + 1 tablespoon farina wheat cereal
1 ½ teaspoons kosher salt
4 cups of chicken stock (premade or store-bought) or water
Fresh parsley for garnish
Directions:
1. Make the soup: Place the hen or chicken into an extra large soup pot. Cover with 8 cups of cold water. Add peppercorns and salt, and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low, and simmer for 30 minutes. Skim impurities occasionally.
2. Add the potatoes, carrots, parsnips, onion, celery root, kohlrabi, and garlic and simmer for 1 ½ - 2 hours. Add up to 2 cups additional water if it reduces too much.
3. While the soup cooks, make the dumplings: Add the eggs and oil to a large bowl and mix well. Add the farina and salt and mix thoroughly. Chill the dumpling batter in the refrigerator uncovered for 1 hour.
4. Bring the premade stock to a boil (this stock is separate from the chicken soup that’s simmering). Take 1 teaspoon of the dumpling batter and use two teaspoons, to shape it into an oval shape dumpling on one spoon and push it off into the broth using the other spoon. Repeat with remaining dough.
5. Simmer and cook the dumplings for about 15-20 minutes until they are cooked through. They will start to float, then cook until they are cooked through inside.
6. Transfer the dumplings directly into the hen soup and serve immediately.
7. Serve the soup and dumplings hot garnished with fresh parsley if using.
Mákos Nudli (Poppy Seed Pasta)
“My grandmother had a notorious sweet tooth,” Julia says. During WW2, Edith gave Juliana her sugar rations to sustain her — both physically and emotionally. Even decades after the war, when Julia was growing up in Minnesota, Edith continued to lovingly make sweets for her mother.
Among them was mákos nudli, a Hungarian dish of hand-cut pasta tossed with poppyseeds, topped with powdered sugar, and served in the family with apricot jam or plum jelly. Edith would make the dish for a sweet dinner around Purim and tell Julia the story of Esther. But, “I just didn't put it all together back then,” she says. Looking back, though, she sees things in a different light. “My grandmother's story reminds me of Queen Esther in the palace of Shushan, because she hid her Jewish identity.”
For the last 10 years of Juliana’s life, she ate almost nothing but sugary treats. “I think my grandmother loved sweets as a way to combat all this sorrow,” Julia adds.
Makes: 6-8 servings
Total Time: 2 hours
Ingredients
For the nudli:
4 medium Russet potatoes
1 large egg, beaten
1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons salt, divided
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
1 ½ cups all-purpose flour, plus more
For the bread crumb topping:
6 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup plain breadcrumbs
For the poppy seed topping:
1 cup finely pre-ground poppy seeds or poppy seeds finely grinded in a spice blender
¾ cup powdered sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon lemon zest
For garnish:
1 tablespoon powdered sugar
Preparation:
Place the potatoes into a large pot and cover with cold water. Cook the pot over high heat and bring the water to a boil. Reduce the heat to medium low and cook the potatoes on a simmer until fork tender, about 45 minutes.
In the meanwhile, make the bread crumb topping: Add the butter into a wide skillet over medium heat. Once the butter is melted, add the breadcrumbs and toast them until golden brown, stirring often. Once the breadcrumbs are golden brown transfer them onto a heatproof plate and set aside.
Make the poppy seed topping: Place the ground poppy seeds, powdered sugar, lemon zest, toasted breadcrumbs and powdered sugar in a bowl. Mix well until the mixture is combined. Set side.
Fill up a large pot halfway up with water. Add 1 tablespoon of salt and bring the water to a boil over medium high heat and place a lid to cover. Keep this water boiling on the stove.
Once the potatoes are fork tender, drain them and let them cool enough so that you can easily handle them. Peel the potatoes and grate them into a large bowl or put the potatoes through a potato ricer. Place the grated or riced potatoes into a mixing bowl and add the eggs, salt, vanilla, and flour. Mix the ingredients with a wooden spoon or by hand until a dough is formed. Turn the dough onto a floured surface and use your hands to form a ball. Divide the dough into two piece and roll each piece into a long log that is about 1 inch thick. Use a sharp knife to cut each log crosswise into inch long pieces, these will be cooked into nudli. Drop half of the pieces of dough into the pot of boiling water. While the nudli cook they will rise to the surface. Continue cooking for 1 more minute and the nudli should be ready. Use a slotted spoon to scoop out the cooked nudli and place them into the bowl with the poppy seed and breadcrumbs mixture. Toss to evenly coat the nudli. Repeat cooking the remaining nudli and coating them in the poppy seed mixture.
Serve hot with a light dusting of powdered sugar on top and prune jam on the side.
