Chapter IV — Our story
From a Sunday kitchen
in Szeged.
Kitchen · flour on wood · 1982
Plate I
The recipe is not ours. It belonged to a grandmother who wrote it with a pencil on the back of an envelope, then folded the envelope into a tin she never labelled. We found it the way everyone finds these things — too late to thank her.
The diócska she made every Sunday smelled of cocoa and apricot, and tasted like the kind of afternoon nobody schedules anymore. We have tried, several times, to make them as well as she did. Every now and then, on a Tuesday, we get close.
Nussique is a small attempt to keep one Sunday afternoon going — little walnut things, Hungarian by heart, in a corner of a city that needed them.
“Nem kell mérni — tudni kell.”
— Don’t measure. You’ll know. (Grandmother, always.)
A small chronology
1962
The first diócska is baked in a kitchen in Szeged. (Probably. Records vary.)
1998
Grandmother stops baking; the recipe is folded back into the tin.
2024
The envelope is found. The handwriting is hard to read; the smell is not.
MMXXVI
Nussique opens. The first dozen is given away, with apologies for the imperfect first batch.