After finding Slovak cuisine reduced to a brief entry in a European food encyclopaedia, Jarmila Hlávková decided to create a culinary portrait of her country.
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The idea for A Taste of Slovakia began when Jarmila Hlavková picked up a large European culinary encyclopaedia and started looking for her country.
"We were mentioned in just a very short paragraph," she recalls. "And some of the things written there were presented as Czech. The country was even mixed up with Moravia, a historical region in today’s Czech Republic." The book was published after Slovakia became independent in 1993, following the peaceful split of Czechoslovakia, at a time when, she says, "people were just becoming aware of Slovakia as an independent country."
Her response was practical rather than indignant. If Slovak cuisine was going to be misrepresented in the world's reference books, the answer was to write a better one — and to write it in English, so it could reach an international audience. What she could not have foreseen was that the project would eventually span four volumes and twelve years of her life.
