Hungarian culture & cuisine with a twist.

Ofer Vardi is a successful and popular writer on Hungarian cusine and his latest offering "Goulash Lagolesh" ("Goulash for Surfers") is the first work from Vardi's Lunch Box Press. Instead of being an ordinary cookbook, it's a recipe box with dozens of recipes inside printed on cards that can be pulled out and stuck to the refrigerator door while cooking or baking (even a magnet is included).

The recipes, photos of the dishes, poetry excerpts, thumbnail sketches of Hungarian heroes, anecdotes and historical tidbits that appear on each card are an ode to Hungarian culture and culinary tradition.

With an abundance of talent and love, Vardi brings to life an entire cultural and culinary world, which despite the early efforts of Tommy Lapid (the late Hungarian-born journalist and politician), never earned the respect it deserve. In the stories that precede each recipe, Vardi honors the exploits of princes and kings and emperors for whom quite a few dishes and desserts were named, and also showers affection on goose breeders, chestnut sellers, operetta singers and Hungarian poets, who did an illustrious job of describing the Magyar passion for the pleasures of the palate.

Vardi's research that included a year spent in Budapest, yielded over 100 excellent recipes for Hungarian classics, which are written in a clear and user-friendly manner. All of the recipes were cooked, tested and improved upon by chef Peter Shikloshi, a graduate of the cooking academy in Hungary, before they went into the box.

Like a good Hungarian, Vardi starts off with 15 recipes for soups, cold and hot, including the famous cherry soup, wine soup (borleves), a beef soup with the power to hunt down lovers and snare bachelors (legenyfogo leves), and of course how can we forget gulyas, which is known by its corrupted name: goulash. The first to make it, it turns out, were Magyar tribesmen, nomadic cattle herders. When hunger struck, they would slaughter the most enervated cow and toss its flesh in pieces into an enormous iron cauldron, and the rest is history.

"Goulash for Surfers" also offers appetizers and side dishes, special holiday dishes and a variety of main courses, including cosmic concoctions prepared by Budapest's finest chefs as part of an assignment from Moscow during the space race. For those inclined toward sweet things, which hold pride of place in the Hungarian kitchen, Vardi provides no fewer than 30 dessert recipes, but naturally does not omit beforehand the vital role that cabbage plays, even offering a paeon to stuffed cabbage.

Hungarian leader admits he feared deaths after lifting Iron Curtain

On August 19 1989, Hungary's prime minister, Miklos Nemeth, symbolically lifted the Iron Curtain by briefly opening the border with Austria at the Hungarian village of Sopronkohida.

Hundreds of East Germans who had taken refuge in the country cheered and cried as they poured out to start new lives in the West. It was the moment which set off the chain of events that would lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. But on the 20th anniversary of that moment, Mr Nemeth has admitted he feared a bloodbath could follow as he had only a verbal promise that Soviet troops would not move in.

His decision to trust a personal promise from Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader, that there would be no repeat of the brutal and bloody military suppression of Hungary's 1956 uprising sounded the death knell for Communism.

"This was a test to see whether what Gorbachev had told me held true, or whether the Soviet Union would respond by ordering several of its battalions stationed in Hungary to intervene," he said.

Two decades ago, Hungarians and Austrians organised the now famous Sopron pan-European picnic to mark the dismantling of a notorious fortified border between Hungary, in the Soviet bloc and Austria, in the free West. Mr Nemeth knew the opening of the border gates for a few hours, would mean thousands of East Germans would make break for freedom.

A crowd of more than 600 East Germans crashed through the border in the first mass exodus to the West since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, an event that set the pattern for the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Without any instructions from Mr Nemeth or the authorities Hungarian border guards spontaneously countermanded their standing orders and refrained from shooting.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who lived in East Germany, yesterday (WEDS) visited the border crossing, just outside the Hungarian city of Sopron, to mark the 20th anniversary of events there.

Hungary's western border eventually opened for good on September 11, just weeks after the events at Spron. Up to 50,000 East German refugees flooded through Hungary until October 7 without any Soviet intervention. Two months later on November 9, the Berlin Wall fell.