Life in Color

“Florette’s Hands”, 1961. © Ministère de la Culture France/Association des Amis de Jacques-Henri Lartigue, France

This summer’s most charming show in Budapest is an exhibition at the Capa Center of colour photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue (1894–1986).

Lartigue, the son of an amateur photographer, received his first camera at the age of nine, a present from his father. He went on to take photographs all his life, encouraged by his father, who gave him support and equipment and, when he was 18, a Pathé cinecamera.

Lartigue neverthelesss chose a career as a painter and—at least to begin with, partly thanks to his vivacious and well-connected first wife Bibi—enjoyed a successful career in painting and set-design, hobnobbing with artists, writers, journalists, people from the world of film and the theatre, and all kinds of bohemians and hangers-on—not to mention a wealth of minor and major celebrities, as the shot of Cocteau and Picasso at a bullfight in 1955 makes clear.

Lartigue’s colour photography is so refreshing because it reflects little of this life-in-the-fast-lane image. What we see are candid shots of his friends and family, wives and lovers, the view from his bedroom window, holiday snaps, everyday scenes: the sort of thing people might put up on Facebook today, in other words, though snapped with a much acuter eye than most, as the shot above, of his third wife Florette’s painted nails holding open an Italian magazine with an advert for nail polish (1961), amply demonstrates. There is an an honesty and a joy in everything captured by Lartigue’s lens. The 20th century that he presents is an era of imperceptibly-occurring but irreversible change, an end of innocence—and at the same time an age of unaffected beauty and instinctive glamour. Unlike the century that the history books reveal, the photographs in this show present an age of fun and laughter.

Lartigue’s colour photographs were exhibited for the first time in 1954. The real break, though, came in 1962, when Charles Rado (a Hungarian, incidentally), founder of the Rapho photographic agency, showed a body of Lartigue’s work to John Sarkowski, head of photography at MoMA. A solo exhibition and a feature in Life magazine followed. Lartigue’s fame was assured.

The earliest photographs in this show are family lineups from 1912–14 in Pau, Chamonix and elsewhere in France. We also see soft-focus shots of Bibi, with pink roses and red lipstick, and then again at a corner table with a wide sea view in the Cap-Eden-Roc hotel in Antibes. It is impossible to give highlights. Different shots will appeal to different people. Mine were a grim-faced nun lugging an invalid in a dog-cart to Lourdes (1957), laundry flapping wildly outside slum dwellings in Rome (1960), a solitary cyclist on the Appian Way, an elderly Breton widow in traditional black cylindrical headdress sitting incongruously under a red beach umbrella with a bottle of commercial orangeade and a garishly plastic, duck-shaped swimming ring (1970). Striking too is the view of the snowbound Mégève viewed through a gigantic ice-beaded spider’s web and a Palladian villa at Dolo on the Brenta Canal between Venice and Padua, looking, in 1958, utterly derelict and desolate. Today, spruced up, that same villa offers B&B.

Between 1979 and his death in 1986, Lartigue bequeathed his entire photographic oeuvre to the French government. How fortunate that this body of private, intensely personal work did not find its way into a rubbish skip! As the shot of “Florence Pauly, my paintings”, taken in Havana in 1957, shows (though unfortunately, for copyright reasons, we can’t show the image here), Lartigue deserves more from posterity than to be remembered purely as a painter of floral bouquets.

“Life in Color”, an exhibition of the colour photographs of Jacques-Henri Lartigue, runs at the Capa Center in Budapest until 1st September.

Baroque-era spinach patties

Anna Bornemisza (c. 1630–88) was the daughter of an army captain, a noblewoman in her own right and, by marriage (in 1653, to Mihály Apafi), Princess of Transylvania. The story of her husband’s family, and the turbulent times they had to deal with, is covered in Blue Guide Travels in Transylvania: the Greater Târnava Valley. Anna was clever and highly educated. In fact, some historians accuse her husband of having no interest in or understanding of politics and of leaving key decisions to his nimble-witted spouse. Whatever the truth, Anna was also a devoted wife and mother of 14 children (only one son survived to adulthood). She wrote detailed household accounts, which have survived, as well as a famous cookery book (in 1680). Whether or not the cookbook was intended for the instruction of others or whether it was more notes for herself of successful recipes, I do not know. Perhaps the latter, because the recipes are far from detailed, and even by the standards of the times give almost no practical help. Her recipe for ‘Spinach Cake’, for example, reads as follows:

Take spinach. Wilt it in water and squeeze out the liquid. Add parmesan cheese and grated bread. Add mace, pepper, egg yolk and buttermilk. Cook and mix together. Make a cake from it and when it is cooked, serve hot.

It is difficult to make something when you have no idea what it is meant to look like or how it is supposed to taste. How to decide on quantities? We made ‘spinach cake’ for two. By ‘spinach cake’, we assumed a kind of patty, and we added the ingredients proportionally, in order to give it a stiffish consistency. That meant, for half a kilo of spinach, two egg yolks and about three tablespoons of breadcrumbs, with enough buttermilk to make it all stick together without turning to concrete and plenty of grated parmesan (interesting that the recipe specifies parmesan: what does that say about 17th-century trading relations between Tranyslvania and Northern Italy?). We didn’t use mace. It seemed more practical to opt for grated nutmeg, to avoid ending up with hard, gritty bits in the patty. It’s also worth noting that the recipe does not call for salt. And it does not need it. The parmesan fulfils that role.

It is very quick to make. Result? It doesn’t look very elegant or appetising but it tastes delicious. If we had had a set of chef’s forming rings, we could have shaped it better. But we didn’t.

Perfect paprika chicken

István Czifray was the nom de plume of István Czövek, master chef at the court of the Palatine Joseph, Habsburg governor of Hungary in the early 19th century. Czifray’s book of recipes and household tips (including instructions for making perfumes and pomades) first appeared in 1816. Soon to be entitled Magyar Nemzeti Szakácskönyve (Hungarian National Cookbook), it went into numerous editions, the last coming out in 1888. It is an important landmark in the annals of Hungarian culinary history. Czifray includes a recipe for the signature Hungarian dish of paprika chicken (paprikás csirke). Since we had recently eaten this dish at Kárpátia, and old-fashioned restaurant in central Budapest whose opulent interior decoration is a sort of pastiche of the Hungarian Parliament and the Matthias Church, and where tourists’ eardrums are cheerfully assaulted by the squealing of a gypsy band, we were curious to see how Czifray’s recipe measured up.

The Kárpátia version of the dish looked like this:

Ours wouldn’t look quite like that. We weren’t planning to make galuska (that’s a subject for another post). The key thing to get right was the sauce.

Here is Czifray’s recipe:

“Pluck and draw a pair of young chickens. Wash them and cut into equal-sized pieces. Lightly salt these. Finely chop an onion and in a copper skillet fry in butter until translucent. Add the chicken pieces and half a dessert spoon of paprika powder. Cover and steam until tender, shaking periodically. Sprinkle with a little flour, add a scant quantity of meat broth and a few spoonfuls of sour cream. Leave to cook on a low heat, carefully skimming off the foam that forms on the surface. Then serve.”

As with many old recipes, it is hazy on precise quantities and gives no information about cooking time. This is something you either have to know from experience or guess.

We didn’t take whole chickens, we began with chicken legs, bought from the butcher that afternoon. Apart from that, we followed the initial instructions, chopping a bunch of spring onions and sautéeing them in a thick wad of butter in a heavy casserole pan (cast iron, we didn’t have copper). Half a dessert spoon of paprika powder sounded rather little, but anyway, we didn’t add much more (maybe a level dessert spoon). It was good-quality paprika, from Kalocsa.

Covering and steaming without the chicken pieces sticking to the pan is tricky. You might want to—as we did—add a little of the meat broth at this stage. We put in a large ladleful of chicken stock that we had made a couple of days previously.

“Cook until tender” is a difficult instruction. How long is that? To be sure that the chicken is cooked through, you want to cook it for at least 45 minutes in total. We reckoned half an hour at this stage, and then a further 20 minutes once the sour cream and flour have gone in.

Sprinkling with flour and then adding sour cream sounded like a recipe for lumpy sauce but oddly enough it worked fine. You really only need a scattering of flour. For “scant quantity” of broth, we read about 200ml. But if it starts drying out, add more. A good tasty stock won’t spoil the dish’s flavour. “A few spoonfuls” of sour cream we interpreted as three or four generously heaped dessert spoons.

We stirred all this in, left the chicken on the lowest flame for a further 20 minutes or so. We didn’t need to skim off any foam—none formed. But we did add a little more salt.

It looked like this (see below). And it was excellent. Even though the sauce didn’t look as flawlessly smooth as Kárpátia’s, in fact it tasted better. The Kárpátia version lacked the spring onions, which really make all the difference.

A spring recipe from 1891

In some ways Ágnes Zilahy (1848–1908) is the Mrs Beeton of Hungarian cookery. Her publications of recipes, along with tips on household management, made her a household name in her own lifetime and her Valódi Magyar Szakácskönyv (Real Hungarian Cookery), a book of explicitly Hungarian dishes (i.e. not derived from other cuisines), went into a second edition within seven months of its release in 1891.

The daughter of a well-to-do lawyer, Zilahy was suddenly flung on her own resources with her father and all eight siblings died, leaving her alone in the world at the age of 18. Her first husband squandered her fortune; her second marriage was also unhappy and ended in divorce. She eked out a living as a glove-maker until persuaded by Count Sándor Teleky, a hero of the Hungarian Uprising against the Habsburgs of 1848–9, to compile her recipes into a book. This she did and never looked back. We decided to test one of those recipes out.

It’s late April and the markets are beginning to fill up with fresh produce. We chose Zilahy’s recipe for stuffed marrow. She in fact titles the recipe Töltött ugorka, “stuffed cucumber”. But we couldn’t really imagine stuffing cucumbers. Marrow it had to be. Her instructions begin as follows: You need a green “ugorka” as long as a span, well-grown and thick but still young and tender.

So far so good. Next step:

Remove its skin and cut it in half lengthways. Allow one “ugorka” per person. Remove the seeds from the centre.

That part was easy. Now for the stuffing. Zilahy recommends leftover roast pork or beef, which should be finely minced, seasoned with salt and a teaspoon of crushed pepper and mixed with 120g of “rizskása”. Here comes the perennial problem with modern cookery: we don’t make enough use of leftovers, or, when we come to pick something from a recipe book, we don’t have any leftovers to work with and have to start from scratch.

Why is this a problem? Not only because of waste, but because of flavour. Leftover roast pork, whose flavours have had time to develop and coalesce, would be much tastier than the fresh minced pork we had bought from the butcher that same morning. To make the meat more savoury, we sautéed it in oil with diced onion, salt and pepper, some dried sage and crushed caraway seed.

Now for the “rizskása”. This “rice gruel” is difficult to translate. It is essentially a dish of boiled rice flavoured in some way. Zilahy’s cookbook has two separate recipes: for rizskása with onion and rizskása with mushrooms. We chose the former as we had no mushrooms. All it involves is boiling up rice in salted water and mixing with glazed chopped onions and parsley. One thing to note: here, as for most Hungarian cooking, it is best to use medium-grain rice. Long-grain rice is not glutinous enough and the ingredients won’t combine and adhere properly.

Back to Zilahy’s recipe:

Mix the meat and rice well together, then fill the hollowed out marrow halves with this stuffing. Place the stuffed marrows together in a large casserole, with the stuffed side facing upwards. Then fill the casserole with warm salted water and immediately add to the liquid six spoonfuls of strong vinegar, otherwise the marrows will fall apart when cooking.

We did all this, the only difference being that instead of warm salted water we used warm chicken stock, again afraid that our this-morning’s meat would not be flavourful enough and needed some external help.

When the marrows are cooked, add a lightly browned roux made from an egg-sized amount of fat and a large wooden spoonful of flour. When the roux is hot and beginning to brown, add a cup of cold water to it, to stop it from going lumpy. Quickly pour this over the marrow and cook together for a few minutes.

Zilahy gives no indication of how hot the oven should be (or indeed if the marrows should be cooked in the oven or on the hob), nor how long the cooking will take, nor whether the casserole should be covered or not. We chose to bake them uncovered and—because we hadn’t followed her advice of removing the skins—the process took an hour at 200ºC. But ours is a very old oven. In a more efficient fan oven, it should take less. Not covering the pan meant that the meat stuffing went pleasantly crunchy on top.

Zilahy recommends serving this dish with sour cream (tejföl) and beef topside (sült felsál). We didn’t think we needed yet more meat with it. But the sour cream was wonderful.

Gellért 100

Poster advertising the new wave pool.

The title of this engaging small exhibition, on show at the Museum of Trade and Tourism (MKVM) in Budapest, celebrates the centenary of the famous Gellért hotel and baths. Housed in magnificently tiled and decorated late-Art Nouveau halls, the baths are one of the most popular destinations on every tourist’s itinerary. But they still cater to a local clientèle too: as you line up for your ticket, you will see a special queue for people with doctors’ notes, coming here not purely for recreation but to take the cure. In this, the Gellért remains true to its roots.

The curative thermal waters on this site have been known for a long time. In the Middle Ages, St Elizabeth of Hungary used them to bathe lepers. The Ottomans prized the waters too: there was an open-air mud bath here, which, after the Turks were expelled, became a place where horses were treated for distemper and, by the 19th century, a resort of ill-repute. A new spa building was built in 1832 (in fact it is still there, under Gellért Square, though seldom open to the public) but it was not until the construction of the Liberty Bridge (originally Franz Joseph Bridge) over the Danube in 1896 that the area really began to take off. The bridge attracted the developers and the area was cleared. On show in the exhibition is a charming photograph of an improvised summer dance floor, pressed into a secondary role as a cowshed. This, along with numerous cottages, taverns and summer villas, all fell to the wrecking ball.

A tender to design the new baths complex was won by two architects, Artúr Sebestyén and Ármin Hegedus. Their designs were completed in 1909, on a floor plan by a third architect, Izidor Sterk. Construction, delayed by WWI, was completed in 1918. Vintage posters on display make it clear that the business of marketing Budapest as a ‘Spa City’ has been in full swing since the early 1920s. In 1927 a wave machine was installed in the outdoor pool (the original mechanism is still in operation) and in 1933 the palm court and mini-golf course gave way to an indoor pool and whirlpool.

The baths were always intended to be used for recreation as well as therapy and their decoration was lavish and opulent. The huge vaulted halls were designed to recall the massive, overarching spaces of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome. Visiting the baths today, one is still reminded of an Alma-Tadema painting.

Romantic re-creation of the Baths of Caracalla by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912). The Gellért Baths in their heyday were harking back to something similar.

Budapest suffered greatly in both world wars and the Gellért shared the same fate. In 1919, Romanian army chiefs took over the hotel during their occupation of the city. When Admiral Horthy rode into Budapest later that same year, he used the hotel as his headquarters. In WWII the hotel was used as the German military HQ, which made it a target for Allied raids. By the end of the war, the hotel was a burned-out shell and the ladies’ section of the baths was completely wrecked (though fully restored, it is much less ornate than the former men’s thermal section—and today the baths are fully unisex).

Plans to rebuild the hotel to modern, more Rationalist designs (drawings of these are on show) came to nothing and the exterior was restored more or less as it had been. It partly reopened in 1946. In 1948 came nationalisation, since when the hotel and baths ceased to operate as a single unit. Today the hotel is owned and run by the Danubius group while the Budapest municipality is in charge of the baths.

The hotel foyer when the hotel first opened. ©MKVM

In its heyday the hotel rooms had all had hot and cold running water and in the suites, the bathrooms offered three types of water: municipal mains water, thermal water and carbonated water. The mineral content was found to corrode the pipes, however, and the practice was discontinued. Between the wars the hotel restaurant was run by the celebrated Gundel. On show are ice buckets, guest books, monogrammed crockery and menu cards, including that for a gala luncheon in 1933 at which Mussolini was the guest of honour. He ate eggs in aspic, chicken with salad and roast potatoes, and a chestnut cream slice.

Also on show are posters, pamphlets, souvenir keyrings and other knick-knacks, a restored neo-Baroque bedroom and some marvellous archive photographs, showing the hotel both as it was in the glamorous years before the Second World War, and as it became after the 1956 Revolution, when all the old furniture and fittings were thrown on the scrap heap and the interiors were remodelled in a brave new minimalist spirit.

The gallery of the hotel foyer after its remodelling, in 1961. Photo: Fortepan

Everything is excellently captioned and the wall texts are perfectly brief and informative. If you are in Budapest this winter—and especially if you plan to visit the Gellért Baths and/or are staying in the hotel, come and see this show.

“Gellért 100” runs at the MKVM in Budapest until 3rd March. Review by Annabel Barber, author of Blue Guide Budapest (which contains full coverage of both the MKVM and the Gellért Baths).