Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, and haughty Juno's unrelenting hate.... But wait, this is not about an epic battle between armies or even about the fate of the country - though it does look like it. So what is it all about? O Muse! the causes and the crimes relate; what sauces were broken and whence the hate. It was not so long ago that Uncle Laci Benke stood before a buoyant Katalin Szili, Speaker of Parliament, and presented her with At the Hungarian Table (A magyarok asztala), a hundred-kilogram book bound in Hungarian grey cattle hide, in which it was all there in black and white: ‘Hungarian cuisine is world famous'. And when he was made a grand master of the First Hungarian Order of the White Table, Uncle Laci swore an oath to ‘preserve the heritage and noble traditions of Hungarian cuisine' - while his website was advertising smelly Brazilian gelatine.

Those were the halcyon days when Hungary's kitchens were lit up by a uniform coursebook written by József Venesz and Emil Turós, in which ‘kitchen production' was just as thoroughly regulated as food portions, garnishes and ‘the sale of leftovers'. Juno smiled upon the Hungarian National Gastronomic Association (MNGS), the organisation that ran the show. And order and discipline reigned supreme. There was only a handful of troublemakers who stared uncomprehendingly at the menu and asked, if this tiny country has so many Olympic medal-winning (and Oscar-winning) master chefs, why then is it so hard to get a decent meal? But the majority were blissfully tearing off another piece of bread and soaking up the sauce on their plate. And so, apparently, Hungarian catering was, well, cooking with gas.

The musician turned food expert

At that point, Tamás Molnár stormed onto the scene and caused quite a stir. He established a small, but efficient association orientated toward haute cuisine to counter the MNGS, a socialist-era holdover which had been formed in the late 1960s as a mass organisation for the food service industry and which held exclusive rights to run domestic and international cooking competitions. Mr Molnár called his upstart group the Hungarian Gastronomy Association (MGE) and issued a declaration of independence known as the Culinary Charter, which was signed by over 100 restaurateurs, chefs and public figures who were dissatisfied with Hungarian cuisine (these included writer Péter Esterházy, journalist István Lovas and Péter Uj, the editor-in-chief of e-zine Index.hu.). The MGE president also announced a crusade on his website, ‘The Magic Chef' (A bűvös szakács), against a Hungarian catering industry gagging on grease and roux.

At first, everyone was in agreement that Hungarian cuisine could do with some revamping. The fighting flared up (in November 2007) when it turned out that after many failed attempts Hungary was being given the chance to enter a contender for the world's most prestigious culinary competition. However, the two camps could not even agree on who would sit on the jury. Mr Molnár announced that the MNGS could not select the judges because it did not have a single chef who was suited to the job. He did not even accept master chef Endre Tóth, whom the MNGS had recommended as jury chair, saying that he considered it a ‘burning disgrace' that someone who sells powdered food for a living should head Hungary's panel of judges. István Pető (who has now stepped down as MNGS president) responded by saying that he would not be given an ultimatum by an amateur food critic, some double bass player whose only connection to the kitchen was the fact that he'd found work as a dishwasher in a couple of restaurants.

Of course, all hell broke loose. Members of the ‘magic team' called their MNGS colleagues a bunch of ‘aspic pasters' and ‘vegetable whittlers' whose food knowledge was lacking, who were unfamiliar with state-of-the-art kitchen equipment and who were living under the irresistible spell of lard, paprika and onions. The rival camp dubbed the ‘new wave' cooks ‘snail eaters' who were aping the West and called Mr Molnár a musician turned food expert who knows nothing about the traditional Hungarian palate.

The Bocuse d'Or competitions, or Culinary Olympics, were founded in 1987 by Paul Bocuse, the award-winning Frenchman commonly known as Chef of the Century and the pope of French cuisine. From the outset, the MGE had been planning to obtain the rights to hold the qualifying round and to select a competitor for the European finals. The group has listed mounting the event among its gastronomic goals, it has collected winners' recipes going back 20 years, and it has launched the Tradition and Evolution competition for haute cuisine - which it considered the Hungarian qualifying round for the Culinary Olympics. More importantly, it had previously angled and lobbied to get Bocuse d'Or to allow Hungary to participate. This is why it came as a great disappointment when it turned out that the French had chosen the MNGS (which had also been competing in secret) to organise the Hungarian round - and not the MGE - and that they had also granted the MNGS the right to establish the Hungarian Bocuse d'Or Academy.

The MGE naturally lodged a protest and attempted to explain to the 83-year-old Mr Bocuse who it was that he was giving his name and his competition to, but the organising committee had already been warned that Mr Molnár is a double bass player and not a chef, that the MGE is a tiny organisation with no experience of managing an international cooking event and that its president writes his articles based on translations done by his wife (MGE co-founder Dóra Bittera). The ancient Magyar curse of discord was being fulfilled again, and the culinary world was laughing at the Hungarians as they denounced one another left and right.

This was the low point of Hungary's gastronomic history. Like when we lost at Mohács to the Ottoman Turks. (Well, something like that anyway.) So the two camps dug in. Meanwhile, Sándor Kovács, the Hungarian competitor selected for Bocuse d'Or (and ‘a several-time world champion') met his own Waterloo at the qualifying round in Norway. He finished a humiliating 17^th out of the 20 who had entered.

The food diplomat

At first, it seemed as if tempers had calmed. In fact, diplomatic feelers had been put out to pursue the possibility of co-operation between the two camps. And then the founding of the Bocuse d'Or Hungary Academy (BDOR) was announced. That is the organisation whose job it would become to hold the national qualifying round for the Culinary Olympics, and so BDOR set 21 February 2010 as the date for the Hungarian finals. Bocuse d'Or normally represents the best of a country's cuisine throughout the world. But it won't here in Hungary because the MGE has put the finals for its own Tradition and Evolution event, now being held for the third straight year, on the exact same day. Yet even vegetarians in this nation of meat-eaters know that the 20 best chefs belong to the MGE. If they compete in the Bocuse d'Or qualifying round, they legitimise their rivals; if they stay away, Hungary has no chance of making a strong showing.

Vilmos Kreil, BDOR's new president, had grasped the absurdity of the situation as well and so released a statement to the catering world that ‘another cooks' association has announced a so-called haute cuisine competition on the very same day' and that therefore anyone wishing to enter for both events could compete in BDOR's on the 22^nd. (As if competing in each one would not require weeks of preparation.)

It wasn't the disdainful tone that enraged the MGE camp. They were much rather shocked by how Mr Kreil (who had popped out of the steam of the kitchen a few months before like some nymph emerging from the sea mist) became the head of one of the country's most important cooks' societies. Journalists, chefs and bloggers alike were asking, ‘Who is this man?' Mr Kreil provides the answer on his website, where he tells us he is a food diplomat (or, to quote his own dubious English-language version, an ‘Ambassador of the Hungarian Gastronomy'). Although it is unclear who appointed him, his diplomatic skills are not particularly in evidence on his website: ‘I believe that it was simply a matter of inattentiveness on the part of the Tradition and Evolution organisers because such an outrage cannot possibly have been perpetrated against the professional cooking community on purpose'. (As if the MGE move did not in fact represent a boycott of his own organisation and competition.)

On his website, Mr Kreil introduces himself as a renowned chef and prominent food writer whose wealth of experience includes stays in a number of places whose names he is apparently unable to spell (including ‘Provance' and ‘South-Britan'). He also claims that he has worked as an executive chef in famous restaurants abroad. Alas, he is not prepared to say which ones and for how long.

But Mr Kreil is the hero of the age. A knight errant who will enter into anybody's service. Here a founding membership in the MGE (he has since been kicked out and his signature removed from the Culinary Charter), there a failed attempt to become MNGS president. In any case, he was as artful in snatching up the right to organise Bocuse d'Or as TV entertainer Ádám Fásy was in grabbing the licence to the Miss World Hungary beauty contest. So it is fair to say (and a lot of bloggers agree) that Mr Kreil is the Ádám Fásy of Hungarian cookery.

Cabbage and noodles à la János Kádár

And while the kingpins of Hungarian gastronomy are caught up in their own kitchen sink drama, Kádár's people keep shovelling down cabbage and noodles out of their little saucepans. The past 60 years have witnessed our culture of food production brought down, our traditions destroyed and our roots cut off. We have seen the creation of an underinformed, undiscerning and insolvent mass of people, one that wants a lot to eat, fast and cheap. First, the catering industry was reduced to providing dining for the masses (kitchen Kádárism) and later a cynical lack of responsibility permitted markets to open up to second-rate factory-made or semi-finished products (food court gastronomy). Generations have grown up without a culinary culture. Indeed, gastronomy is not a subject in schools. And nothing changes so slowly as dining habits. If there is any truth to the idea that a country's eating culture is a gauge of how civilised and cultivated that country is, then we are in deep trouble. How deep? We would probably need to turn to lifestyle research, history and ethnography for the answer.

But now everyone is pointing the finger at everyone else. The issue of ingredients falls under the ministry of agriculture, catering under the economy ministry, and tourism under regional development. Vocational training involves not only the education and labour ministries, but also the National Institute of Vocational and Adult Education, the Vocational Coursebook and Equipment Council, the Tourism Unit of the regional development ministry and the Hungarian Food Safety Office. And then who knows how many other institutions there are that make both running an eating establishment and producing food all the harder with their pointless regulations.

‘An influential circle', as we learn from the Culinary Charter, ‘took the cooking world hostage decades ago and holds it captive to this day. It has virtually banned professional information about the twentieth century while it beats bad dining habits and mediocrity into the heads of a wide swath of the public in the name of tradition'. For years, young people have been taught from the recipe collection by Venesz and Turós, which was already obsolete the moment it was published, and they have been trained out of low-budget coursebooks simply tossed together by the presidents and vice-presidents of the MNGS.

As Lajos Bíró, head chef at the Bock Bistro, sees it, ‘In the West, a cook gets a solid grounding, he's trained in equipment and ingredients and he learns a few basic recipes so that he can build his creativity on that. The typical Hungarian chef, on the other hand, has a minimal grasp of the basics and almost no understanding of available foods, but has swotted up a bunch of (obsolete) recipes in school from which he must never stray'. What is more, Mr Bíró adds, ‘Three quarters of a Hungarian cook's working hours are spent hunting for ingredients, while his western counterpart spends that time thinking about what he can do with them'. And the worst bit, according to Chef Bíró, is not the training. Apparently, it pales by comparison to the superficiality of the examiners. So the more discerning restaurants have no other choice but to train their own cooking staff.

Faux chefs

This is about a clash between two different approaches. An anxious clinging to tradition, where one shuts oneself in as if in a castle under siege. After all, nobody is happy to have time pass him by and to discover that what it took years to learn has by now become outdated. To realise that the rank-and-file members of Hungary's cooking community have been played off one against the other. That the whole ‘war of the chefs' is a well-planned provocation designed to create mutually profitable alliances and unrestrained access to state and Union monies. As Péter Mózes, president of the Diet Association puts it, ‘The MNGS have been standing still for years. They set up events where they hand out nonsensical, no-name prizes that they've come up with themselves so that all these perfectly serious cooks can display them proudly, even though the prizes have no substance'.

Representatives of the old cuisine have to realise that Mr Molnár and the MGE are not the enemy. By the same token, Mr Molnár's people should see that not everyone who has chosen to remain ‘over there' is an ‘aspic paster' and that an increasing number of young people are saying that a real restaurant is more than a business - it's a way of life that comes with responsibility. But they're caught in a trap. They've been led to believe that you can always ‘please the Hungarian palate' with potatoes strewn with paprika and dripping with grease, with overdone meat that's as dry as old leather, with soggy, listless noodles, and with vegetable dishes cooked beyond recognition and pale from too much roux, whereas artichokes, smoked eel and coquilles Saint-Jacques are just some kind of scam. It's as if a faux chef imitating the molecular cuisine of Catalonia's Ferran Adrià without any creativity would have less of a chance of being exposed than the good old reliable head cook who takes the same cut of pork and serves up roast cutlets on Monday, cubes it and tosses it together with garlic and chips on Tuesday, and then minces it for pork burgers on Wednesday.

So there are not two kinds of cookery, ‘traditional Hungarian' and ‘redefined modern'. Indeed, in the MGE manifesto on the new Hungarian cuisine we find: ‘The baker who bakes bad bread betrays bread and betrays his own trade. The restaurateur who serves such bread betrays the customer and his own restaurant. The customer who accepts all this - whether he knows it or not - betrays himself.' It's really that simple. The rest is fiction. Whether it's mainstream or molecular.

MNGS - Hungarian National Gastronomic Association

This socialist-era mass organisation was founded in 1968. István Pető was its president between 2003 and 2009 (and is now its honorary president). Since April 2009, the post has been filled by Venesz Prize-winning master chef Béla Prohászka. Endre Tóth is its chef vice-president. According to Mr Pető, ‘For nearly 40 years, we have held the rights to select the national team for international competitions, to represent the field on professional boards that work with the existing government, to act as the exclusive Hungarian representative within the World Association of Cooks Societies (WACS), to organise Hungary's championships and much more'. (‘Much more' means training cooks and awarding the title of master chef to individuals and certifications of excellence to catering establishments.)

MGE - Hungarian Gastronomy Association

This group was founded in 2006 by Tamás Molnár and his wife, Dóra Bittera. Its website (in Hungarian) is called ‘The Magic Chef' (A bűvös szakács) (buvosszakacs.blog.hu). The MGE mounts two top gastronomic events in Hungary, Tradition and Evolution and the Czifray competition course.

BDOR - Bocuse d'Or Hungary Academy

Founded in June 2009, the organisation declares itself independent. It obtained the right to organise the Hungarian qualifying round for Bocuse d'Or. In future, it will decide who represents the country in the world's most prestigious culinary olympics. President: Vilmos Kreil Members of the Academy: Endre Tóth and István Pető (both MNGS members)