Food was a comfort for Auschwitz survivors. A new cookbook showcases their recipes — and resilience

[TdeV]

(JTA) — Eugene Ginter was 12 days shy of his sixth birthday when he was liberated from Auschwitz in January 1945. Emaciated and alone, Ginter landed first in a hospital and then in an orphanage in Krakow, the Polish city where he was born. Several months later, miraculously, he was reunited with his mother.

Her first order of business was to help him regain weight and health, but he had no interest in food after being deprived of it for so long. So she created a rich sandwich made of things she knew he liked: black bread thickly coated with butter and finished with grated dark chocolate.

Eight decades later, that “Chocolate Sandwich” is the first recipe in “Honey Cake & Latkes: Recipes from the Old World by the Auschwitz-Birkenau Survivors,” a new cookbook that showcases recipes that connected survivors to the worlds they lost and gave them comfort as they built new lives after the Holocaust.

https://www.jta.org/2022/08/30/food/food-was-a-comfort-for-auschwitz-survivors-a-new-cookbook-showcases-their-recipes-and-resilience

[Anna N]

I am a bit confused by the word “new” in the title of your thread. This book was published in 2007. 

[TdeV]

"Like the “Holocaust Survivor Cookbook,” released by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust authority in 2007, “Honey Cake & Latkes” is more than a collection of recipes. It also contains inspiring stories from the survivors as well as archival and contemporary photographs showing their resilience."

 

This references two cookbooks, one just published. “Honey Cake & Latkes” was started ("took root") in 2020.

[Anna N]

I see that now. Thanks for correcting me. 

[weinoo]

Interestingly enough, both cookbooks nominated for cookbooks of the year in the category of cookbooks recalling misery.

[Maison Rustique]

I have this one which you also might enjoy. Fascinating and heart-wrenching.

[drago]

This is a similar and excellent book about the last vestiges of Jewish Cooking in Northern Transylvania, the English translation was published in 2020.

https://www.amazon.com/Recipes-New-Beginning-Transylvanian-Stories/dp/3946993907

Having realized that, with the exception of cholent and flódni (a Jewish multilayered poppy-seed pastry), she knew nothing about Transylvanian Jewish cuisine, Kinga Júlia Király set out on a three-year project to fulfill her own cravings for authentic flavors—but, more profoundly, to learn about prewar recipes and customs and to find out what remained of kosher households in Northern Transylvania. She conducted some three hundred hours of participant-observer interviews, sometimes spiced with cooking sessions, with ten survivors who had experienced the Holocaust as teenagers or children. At the heart of Kinga Júlia Király’s work are the simplest things, the minutiae of everyday life. Tiny details, which, in the recording, are transformed into something of huge significance. She created handholds of remembrance for the last surviving members of a minority.

https://hlo.hu/new-work/new-release-kinga-julia-kiraly-recipes-for-a-new-beginning.html