Author: Anne Ewbank / Source: Atlas Obscura
You might already know about Hungarian gingerbread. After all, in 2018, a set of cookie-decorating videos made their way around the internet. In them, a pair of hands busily lays line after line of white icing with the mathematical accuracy of a 3D printer.
Incongruously, the baker pipes a vaguely Old World piece of embroidery atop the cookie in mere minutes. The videos, which were many people’s first introduction to the elaborate, painstaking art of Hungarian gingerbread, went viral.Such masterful work, at least to me, seems to exist almost entirely on the internet or in the realm of “cookiers” extraordinaire. But gingerbread artists walk among us. At a Hungarian Christmas fair, I saw traditional gingerbread art by Klara Repas. While Repas is not the baker in these viral videos (that honor goes to decorator Tunde Dugantsi), her creations were equally stunning, and prompted me to ask for a demonstration.
A week later, I visit Repas at her sunny New Jersey home, overlooking the Hudson River. (I’m ignoring my coworkers’ jokes, inspired by Hansel and Gretel, about fleeing at the first sight of a human-sized oven.) There’s a tiny gingerbread house on an entryway table, mitten and star cookies along a sideboard, and deep Tupperware bowls filled with undecorated cookies on the counter. Repas herself is soft-spoken and elegant, donning a pair of eyeglasses every time she needs to peer at the fine pattern of her gingerbread, or mézeskalács.
While it’s mainly a Christmastime treat in countries such as the U.S., Repas says gingerbread is a year-round affair in Hungary, made by bakers for weddings, Easter, and birthdays. In this respect, her homeland hews to “very old tradition,” she says. Ancient Greeks enjoyed an ancestor of gingerbread, cakes made with honey, and put it in the mouths of the dead for the trip to the afterlife. In many countries, bakers made honey cakes for all kinds of events, such as saint’s days. In the days before icing, the dough was pressed into carved wooden molds, and esteemed bakers had their own proprietary designs.
When spices from the east circulated throughout Europe, gingerbread made with ginger, pepper, and other warming spices became a hot commodity for special occasions. Repas’s recipe includes a Hungarian spice mix, of pepper, cardamom, and others. To make it easier to handle, she allows the dough to rest a minimum of eight hours before baking it.
Since Hungary has long been a honey-producing powerhouse, it was a natural place for honey-based gingerbread to take root (though Hungarian mézeskalács don’t typically contain ginger). The Hungarian town of Debrecen, Repas says, “was a center of gingerbread preparation,” and the home of a guild dedicated to baking it.
As Repas tells me this, she busily swipes red food coloring over a heart-shaped gingerbread cookie with a paintbrush. Red is a traditional color for Hungarian gingerbread, and can be added in two…
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