In Memory's Kitchen
What is most important to a cook and eater, far from the place where he or she grew up? I was reminded again of this question when I came across an interview of award-winning journalist Cara De Silva by medieval scholar and food writer Irina Dumitrescu who is, herself, no slouch when it comes to fine writing.
The subject of this interview was Cara's book, 'In Memory's Kitchen: a legacy from the women of Terezin' about the women incarcerated in what the Nazis positioned as a 'model ghetto' and the wider subject of wartime cookbooks. To say hunger was a permanent part of life in Terezin is a gross understatement, and, as the book's introduction points out, for some women, the only way to deal with this was to repress the past and live purely in the present. We are talking about brute survival here, a distillation of the human spirit down to a sparse biological essence.
For the women who compiled this cookbook, though, we see a different coping method, and in their doing so, they redefined eating and food as a spirited act of defiance through the recording of recipes. Not all of the recipes in Cara's book will 'work' though, and this really is not the point, for they are 'dream recipes', remembered and recorded by women who were in extremis, dying slowly of starvation. As Cara explains in the interview with Irina, 'In a sense, the condition of some of the recipes bore witness.'
Looking back to a time when we ate and cooked well can carry within it the kernel of hope that one day in the future, we shall do so once more or- if we do not survive- that the memory of us and the food we cooked will continue to nourish others as the decades pass. In Memory's Kitchen is a profoundly painful book, but as I have always believed, if women had the strength to live that life, and Cara had the courage to write about it, we must be prepared to read it.
I recommend you read Irina's sensitive interview here before you read Cara's book.
In Memory's Kitchen.
Cara De Silva in conversation
Since I published this newsletter, an English translation of "Recipes for a New Beginning: Transylvanian Jewish Stories of Life, Hunger, and Hope” by Kinga Júlia Király has been published. Király spent three years researching and reviving recipes and meals from her homeland by interviewing survivors of the Holocaust to create a book that weaves testimony and cultural history, giving us forty-one recipes that each reflect a time and place.
An interview with New Orleans chef Alon Shaya (whose food I have been lucky enough to eat) about his work helping a survivor of the Holocaust revive her family’s recipes.