HUNGARY

READ

I finished reading Magda Szabó’s The Door a couple of days ago, but it’s been hard for me to figure out how to describe it. It’s a completely character-driven novel, with an old woman named Emerence at its center. When the narrator, who is a writer, and her husband, an academic, move into a new home, they need a housekeeper, and someone recommends Emerence to them.

It is clear from the beginning that, although the narrator is the employer, Emerence is calling the shots. She works for people other than the narrator, even doing work such as sweeping or shoveling snow for the whole neighborhood, so she comes to work when she wants to and does the work that she believes to be important. She doesn’t think that writing and academia involve really work – she values only physical labor – so she always appears to be looking down on the narrator.

Over the years, however, they build a fairly close relationship, marred at times by Emerence’s eccentricities and the narrator’s reaction to them. The narrator is always the one who has to back down from these quarrels, as she and her husband have reached the conclusion that they can’t do their work if Emerence isn’t there to handle the domestic chores.

One of Emerence’s peculiarities is that she refuses to let anyone into her home. This becomes a problem when she becomes very ill and everyone in the neighborhood begins to worry about her. She won’t let anyone in to help her, and the narrator is called upon to figure out what to do, since she is considered to be the person closest to Emerence. This all happens at a time when the narrator’s writing career takes a huge leap forward, requiring her to make television appearances and attend banquets and conferences. The way in which she deals with Emerence during this time will change the narrator’s life forever.

COOK

One of the quarrels that takes place between Emerence and the narrator in The Door is because the narrator asks Emerence to make plum soup for Lent. When the narrator returns from church, however, she finds that there “was no question of plums for lunch. Waiting for us were paprika chicken, cream of asparagus soup and crème caramel.” At first I thought about finding a vegan plum soup recipe, but instead found a vegan chicken paprikash recipe on the "Fool a Carnivore" website. The recipe calls for Quorn Meatless Vegan Pieces, which I didn’t have on hand, so I chopped Gardein Chick’n Strips into inch-long pieces instead. This dish was tasty enough, but not so good that I’d want to make it again.

GIVE

GlobalGiving had four Hungarian projects listed on their website, and the one that appealed to me the most was the one providing healthy school lunches to some low-income children attending a Waldorf school. According to the project description: “In Hungary poor children should receive free meals in school by law. However, for some of these children, nobody - neither the state nor the local municipalties - provide the costs of these meals.” The lunches for this project come from “a local social enterprise specialising in providing healthy food for schools and kindergartens.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/give-healthy-food-to-poor-children-in-hungary/.

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