The cookbook Z Kuchyne Starého Prešporka (From the Cuisine of Old Pressburg) by Peter Ševčovič with kapustníky. (source: Jana Liptáková)
When walking through the centre of Bratislava, visitors are more likely to come across a pizzeria or a steakhouse than a restaurant offering traditional local cuisine, even though the mixing of cultures made it very interesting and tasty. Fortunately enough, there are several cookbooks, in which the taste of Pressburg, the name by which Bratislava was called until the 1930s, is preserved forever.
One of them is Z Kuchyne Starého Prešporka (From the Cuisine of Old Pressburg) by Peter Ševčovič, a renowned Bratislava gourmand, recipe collector, passionate cook and eater. It features recipes he has selected from collections of recipes by his grandma. She originated from the last generation of the so-called Pressburgers who spoke three languages: Slovak, Hungarian and German.
The multi-nationality of the city is also reflected in its cuisine, bringing together the best of the cuisines of Austria, Slovakia, Czechia as well as Jews, as Bratislava used to be home to a large Jewish community.
“It used to be an extremely varied cuisine, in which you could feel the influence of the Ottomans, the Danube sailors and all the armies that had ever swept through Pressburg,” Ševčovič wrote in his cookbook. He recalled that the range of ingredients was extensive, from such peculiarly funny ingredients like snail caviar, frogs, pigeons or even crows.
