My coworkers and I were sitting down for our Thanksgiving carry in. We were ready to nosh and chat about our upcoming long weekend. As a food history geek, one of the questions I enjoy asking coworkers is what traditional family dish they eat at Thanksgiving. And I thought I had heard it all – stories of that weird cranberry sauce or funky stuffing a relative makes. For my family, it’s my grandmother’s oyster stuffing that I now make for our feast. So, I asked my coworker, Anna, and she told me about a new dish I’d never heard of, and a connection to the wonderful Hungarian immigrant community in the Old North Dayton neighborhood.
Anna said that as a kid her Hungarian grandmother made these crepes called Palacsinta at Thanksgiving. She filled some with strawberry preserves, and others with apricot preserves, chocolate, and even cottage cheese. Anna said they’re hard to make without a crepe maker because they’re so thin and burn easily in a standard pan, but her grandmother made piles of them. Her grandmother had immigrated to America from Hungary when she was four years old, most probably to escape communism after World War II or the Revolution in the 1950s.
Palascinta are a light, super-thin, simple pancake, like the French crepe, or the Russian blini. They are typically rolled or folded in a triangle and filled. Fillings come in sweet versions, like Anna’s grandma made – filled with apricot, poppyseed, or other fruit preserves; and savory – filled with eggs, cheeses, creamed meats, or mushrooms. There is also cake made from stacking the pancakes over sweet cream.
So then my boss started talking about the Old North Dayton neighborhood, which was where the Eastern European immigrants from Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, and Hungary settled in the early part of the last century. Like most immigrant neighborhoods in America, many of its original inhabitants and their descendants have moved on and up to different areas. But there are still remnants of these immigrants if you look hard enough. The area is bounded by the Mad River to the South, the Miami River to the North, and the Chessie Railroad system to the West.
The first Hungarian immigrants settled in what is known as the Kossuth Colony. It was a section of houses created by Hungarian immigrant, Jacob Moskowitz, for immigrant workers he recruited for the Barney & Smith Car Company, which made elegant wooden rail cars. The area was named after Louis Kossuth, the Hungarian hero of democracy during the Germanic Revolution of 1848. Both Columbus and Cincinnati, Ohio’s old German / Hungarian neighborhoods have streets named after Louis Kossuth. A few of the original houses are standing in the old Kossuth Colony, and the area is on the National Historic Register. In the early 1900s, due to the industrial jobs available, there were thousands of Hungarian immigrants in Dayton, Ohio.
There was another Hungarian neighborhood in West Dayton, larger than Kossuth Colony, at Conover Street and Dakota Streets. It housed small Hungarian restaurants, like the Gypsy Hut, operating from the 1930s to the 1980s, which had an onion shaped cupola and a popular walk up window. It was also where the local Hungarian language newspaper was printed. Again, much of that heritage is gone today, but the food and the customs still exist in families and homes of the descendants, like Anna’s.
The Old North Dayton neighborhood has a church for each group of immigrants – St. Stephens Byzantine Catholic Church for the Hungarians, St. Adelbert for the Poles and Czechs , Holy Cross for the Lithuanians. Today, in addition to the Czechoslovakian, Polish and Lithuanian Clubs, there is the Magyar (Hungarian) Club of Dayton, which meets in the neighborhood and also hosts a Hungarian dance troupe, which performs at Dayton’s International Festival every year. Although mass is no longer said there, plans are being made to turn St. Stephens into a Hungarian Museum and neighborhood cultural center.
There is one Eastern European restaurant left in the Old North Dayton Neighborhood, called the Amber Rose, which has food representing all the immigrant groups who settled the neighborhood. The Rose is housed in the 1912 Sig’s General Store, founded by Polish immigrant Sigmund Sziezopolski. But to get true Hungarian pastries in Southwest, Ohio, you have to travel farther north to Dobo’s Bakery in Piqua, Ohio, which has Hungarian beigli or nut rolls, dobos tortes, and hajas, the Hungarian cookie version of Russian rugelach. The owners of Dobo’s are members of the Dayton Magyar Club’s Hungarian dance troupe.
My next foodie road trip is to Old North Dayton to explore the Hungarian remnants of the past and have a cabbage roll at the Rose.
dannwoellertthefoodetymologist 