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I think it would make them smile to know that their history continues and I am teaching my daughters about their history as I teach them to cook.There is something wonderfully cyclical in that knowledge. Then I had to search for the book -- and it is now one of my most favorite cookbooks.I use the recipes often and each time I turn to the book, I think of the women who passed on these gems.
What caught my eye was a recipe for roast goose (a weakness of mine) and then I read the accompanying piece -- I was moved to tears and tore out the recipe and placed it on my refridgerator under a magnet. A few months later, I was preparing New Year's Day dinner -- I got up at 5am to boil chestnuts for the stuffing.
I first learned of this book when it was initially published and a small article about it was carried in The Parade Magazine appearing in The Boston Sunday Globe. and have cherished this recipe ever since.
and cursed my hangover as I was peeling the shells off and cutting up apples. I followed the recipe and made the most delicious roast goose I have ever eaten.
it gives me great pleasure to know that they live on and remembered every time I cook. and it brings a smile to my lips as I watch my daughters stir and taste and know that they will teach their daughters in this same way.
I am blessed beyond measure in comparison to the brave souls who lived their last days in a place of horror, yet kept alive their hopes and dreams of lovely times by recording their recipes. I now keep Cara De Silva's In Memory's Kitchen on my cookbook shelf, not for the recipes, since most don't translate well to a modern day kitchen. No, I keep this book there to remind myself that even on my toughest day, when conflicting family schedules and obligations pull me in all directions and cooking is a chore, I have it so good. I wept at the descriptions of conditions in this place and marveled at the faith and ingenuity born of such times. This book uplifts and exalts the women ~~ and men ~~ who preserved with such dignity the reflection of their spirits, and in so doing uplifts the spirits of those who learn their stories.
This book is an amazing document and is a important part of holacaust literature. Furthemore it is most moving and keeps us connected to the past.
In Memory's Kitchen is the moving story of how during World War II the women of the Terezin concentration camp spent evenings writing down recipes that reminded them of their previous 'real' lives: when they lived with and cooked for families and friends. This book is a unique combination of scholarship, history, and memory. Although it contains recipes, this is not in any traditional way a cookbook. They substituted memory for food and in doing so kept their humanity alive. The 'recipes' were smuggled out of the camp and years later found their way to the surviving daughter of one of the 'cooks.' Definitely worth reading.
This deeply moving book doesn't pretend to be either a history, or a cookbook. Nor is there a more poignant witness to the indomitability of the human spirit than the determination of these women, as they confronted annihilation, to preserve some part of their culture, their memories of the past, their dreams of the future, by writing these recipes down. A previously unknown kind of Holocaust literature, it presents itself, as its title implies, as a form of memoir, with all the flaws (inaccuracy being chief among them) and virtues (a vivid evocation of states of mind) of the genre. And there isn't a more telling example of the ravages of the Nazi death camps than the fact that these hungry, terrorized women of Terezin could not remember accurately recipes they had prepared countless times in their lives. What a testimony that was to the power of food to nourish the soul as well as the body, and to the force of hope, for defying logic and experience they believed this "cookbook" might survive. That it did is a gift to us all.
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