Pajerské kolache and the rural nature of Czech cuisine: An interview with Jitka Sobotková
Jitka Sobotková
Jitka Sobotková is a historian specialising in contemporary history, and for the past eight years she has devoted herself to researching the culinary heritage of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. In addition to her research, publications, exhibitions, and workshops, she has participated in projects such as the Cesty jídla (Food Journeys) event.
Jitka, how do you view Czech cuisine after years of research?
I have come to the conclusion that our cuisine is extremely diverse. In collaboration with historian Irena Korbelářová from the University of Silesia and other colleagues, we started to uncover the culinary heritage of the Czech lands years ago, and soon discovered that even though our country is small, there are many influences at work here, all of which are mixed together across micro-regions. We realised that this was not a five-year project as we had originally estimated. So, our research, and in addition to various events or exhibitions, we have published an encyclopaedia which shows how many variations and names a single dish can have - and how culinarily rich we are. We continue to verify and develop all our findings.
What approach did you take to mapping the regions?
In the initial phase, we commissioned an oral history survey, which involved interviewing eyewitnesses, and immediately afterwards we announced a national collection of recipes and cookbooks. It was an avalanche. People brought old cookbooks and recipe books to the museum or sent us photocopied recipes. Today we archive all this in the Gastronomy sub-collection. We keep printed books and handwritten home recipes, and draw on these for our research.
What do you personally attach the most importance to?
In my opinion, the most valuable source of information about Czech cuisine are the aforementioned home recipes. The books by Rettigová, Sandtnerová and others went through a certain filter - they were expensive to publish, so the authors thought carefully about what to include. Their recipes may be considered national or traditional, but none of us can trace back how often people cooked these dishes, if at all. In contrast, the true picture of our cuisine is found in recipe books created out of the pure need of housewives to record and cook something.
What can we read from the recipe books?
For me, they are first and foremost intimate confessions of a given family, capturing taste preferences - foods that people liked or would have liked to eat. In this way, these pieced-together scrapbooks speak to us. But it's hard to define regional cuisines by them. For our purposes, we have divided the Czech Republic into ethnographic regions, but it turns out that although region is the defining factor, other influences are too fast and pulsating.
What complications does this bring?
For some dishes, we can tell for sure which region they belong to. This tends to be the case with festive or ceremonial pastries, cakes and other desserts. Even dishes that feature a specific combination of ingredients or have a unique name are easy to locate. Mostly, however, we encounter dishes that were popular across the Czech lands and differed only through nuances in ingredients, procedure or serving. Moreover, recipe books often do not reflect local tradition, especially when a girl married into another region and attributed local specialties to recipes from home. We would need to know the whole family stories, and these can only rarely be traced.
How then does the historian arrive at an opinion on Czech cuisine?
I think it's the bits and pieces that gradually shape our impression of it. Firstly, it is impossible to determine what is 100% Czech - Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia have long operated in the context of larger political groupings. And secondly, we must distinguish between rural and bourgeois cuisine. The bourgeois cuisine has always looked abroad, wanted to be worldly and move with the times, whereas the rural cuisine has looked after its own and responded mainly to natural conditions, which have been almost unchanged for centuries and have brought a more or less similar repertoire of ingredients. So if I were to describe Czech cuisine, I would emphasise recipes made from root vegetables and various porridges, thick soups and casseroles.
Many people would probably list the classic sauces.
Czech cuisine is a sauce cuisine, but this applies to its bourgeois or aristocratic class. Just think about it a little. Sauce is more difficult to prepare and takes a long time to cook. The average person in the countryside didn't have time for this on a weekday.
So the pure essence of our cuisine is humble and agricultural...
We don't see it so much nowadays, in the home or in the restaurant. We can buy whatever we like, regardless of the season or the origin of the ingredients. However, people in the countryside used to have at their disposal what they grew, stored or 'preserved' until the next harvest, while in barren regions they had to wait more than six months. As for meat, they usually sold it for money and didn't keep much themselves. Their diet tended to be simple, yet not monotonous. I come from the Vysočina, so I know well the dozens of savoury and sweet ways potatoes are prepared.
Both the agricultural year and the holiday calendar used to be written on the menu. Is our contemporary cuisine losing its festivity?
Yes and no. Modern times are sort of mixing everything together, and so we can eat svíčková from Monday to Sunday, and when we want to step out of the everyday, we try, paradoxically, turnips, once a common ingredient for the poor, or we order elderflower "kosmatice" as an exclusive dessert in a restaurant. We get vánočka, a traditional Christmas bread, year-round in the bakery, while our ancestors set aside nice white flour during the harvest to make a festive bake, which really tasted different from today's simple pastry made of "inferior" flour. I would say the problem today is excess. Because of it we are, often unwittingly, depriving ourselves of the festive feeling and joy of seasonal food.
Harvest festivals prove that our ancestors knew how to celebrate abundance.
It is true. The proof is in the traditional dishes associated with the season, such as scrambled eggs, which were made in the spring, at Pentecost, when the hens start laying again. People gather to celebrate, scramble eggs in huge cauldrons and then eat them together. There is also a long tradition of Mrkvancová pouť in Polná where older women at the stalls offer pastries called mrkvance, and comparte who has the prettiest. I was born nearby and my grandmother used to bake them at the fair. Such customs, which accompany rituals, may even make it onto UNESCO's list of intangible heritage.
In an interview you said that the most traditional dishes are usually missing from recipes. Why is that?
It is due to the fact that such dishes are cooked from memory, based on our memory of taste. In the past, people lived more communally. Several generations lived in a house and cooked and dined together, and it didn't seem important to them to write down the usual recipes, because they all knew them. We remember the taste of traditional dishes from our childhood, but few of us can cook them that way. We simply didn't learn it from our grandmothers or mothers, let alone write down the recipes.
I believe that we also have a collective taste memory that stores the deepest characteristics of local cuisine. Which of these would you include?
I will try to answer briefly. Our cuisine is identified by the ingredients and techniques we use to prepare food. Here I would mention the typical preparation by stewing, which is repeated quite a lot in recipes, whether it's stewing meat or vegetables. The basis of everything is onions and root vegetables - the same starting point leads to different results. The second level is made up of the dishes themselves, which are mostly found only in the Czech Republic, and one of them is undoubtedly sweet leavened dough served not only as a dessert but also as a main course. By the way, leavened dough is a very interesting topic.
Why are you interested in it?
I find kolache remarkable, a phenomenon of Czech cuisine. They can have all sorts of decorations according to the customs of the region and carry ceremony and symbolism. My mother-in-law still bakes so-called pajerské kolache, traditional in the Jihlava and Horácko regions. In some families, these cakes were made over generations - the grandmother kneaded the dough, the mother shaped and filled it and the daughter decorated and baked it.
A colleague once excitedly told me that when she was young she was allowed to make the dough exceptionally and it meant a lot to her at the time. Food is not just there to fill you up. It helps us to maintain family traditions, it brings us together. That's why when I go to visit my parents, I always order my mother's buns made from yeast dough that is steamed in milk and coated in poppy seeds and sugar. The food brings us back home.
What kind of past should gastronomy look into when it decides to renew the diversity of our cuisine?
I would look back to the days of the First Republic. Back then, small-scale farming was still thriving and gastronomy had strong local links with farmers. It was only collectivisation that finally broke them. At the same time, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, 'trends' came to us from outside, especially from France. The former bourgeois cuisine was dazzled by the French café culture, but at home people ate their traditional cuisine, while in restaurants they went for the 'better' one. Now it may be the other way round, and all the more reason not to abandon home cooking.
Do you think cooking at home protects the culinary treasure we have inherited?
I'm convinced of it. Our job is to preserve our heritage for future generations, and we can do that by passing it on through food and naming it correctly, whether it's at home, in schools, or in gastronomy. I run workshops for children, and when I ask them what that culinary heritage might be, they hesitate. I tell them to imagine that they are abroad and they miss dumplings, cabbage soup, mazanec... Because what we miss in the world is often the most accurate definition of our Czech cuisine.
For the record:
The National Museum of Agriculture held a conference this year named Horse in agriculture, which focused on the changing role of the horse and the use of horse meat in Czech cuisine. In spite of preconceived ideas, the tradition of horse meat is being revived. Horse meat has always been somewhat marginalised and even banned. As a result, once horses ceased to fulfil their role in service or agriculture, they were often condemned to live out their lives in undignified conditions. This is one of the reasons why, in the mid-19th century, an initiative was launched to prevent the animals from suffering and to use their meat for human consumption. This was only partially successful. In the Czech lands, horse slaughterhouses continued to be built outside the gates of towns and cities - people deliberately avoided slaughtering horses, which have always been considered more noble than a cow or a pig.
