Thursday, March 17, 2011
Wednesday, March 09, 2011
A Holocaust Victim's Recipe
It isn’t often that I find myself moved to tears as a result of reading an academic article. But the other day on the bus, reading on my way to Hebrew U, I had some trouble composing myself.
I’m taking a class on Jews and food. And at our class meeting, we were to discuss some articles on the Holocaust. Jews who were packed into Terezin—the concentration camp near Prague—put together a cookbook of recipes they remembered from before they were incarcerated in unspeakable conditions, for most of them as a stop on their way to death by hunger, disease or gas chambers.
A woman named Mina Pachter entrusted the cookbook to a friend just before she died of starvation, and instructed him to deliver the book to her daughter. The man survived, and after several decades, Mina’s daughter Anna received the book.
The book is a full of fantasies. It is the written version of an activity that starving women in Terezin would take part in, in which they would imagine, if they could have any food in the entire world, what would it be? And it turns out to be foods full of sugar and butter and memories of a recent past in which they lived the lives of normal human beings.
The article I read included a recipe from Mina Pachter for caramels:
And then it occurred to me, that I was sitting on a bus in Jerusalem, on my way to class at a university of the state of Israel, peering into the imagination of a starving, dying woman, who maybe imagined a place in which Jews took charge of their own destiny, or at least could make some candy for the daughter she never saw again.
I’m taking a class on Jews and food. And at our class meeting, we were to discuss some articles on the Holocaust. Jews who were packed into Terezin—the concentration camp near Prague—put together a cookbook of recipes they remembered from before they were incarcerated in unspeakable conditions, for most of them as a stop on their way to death by hunger, disease or gas chambers.
A woman named Mina Pachter entrusted the cookbook to a friend just before she died of starvation, and instructed him to deliver the book to her daughter. The man survived, and after several decades, Mina’s daughter Anna received the book.
The book is a full of fantasies. It is the written version of an activity that starving women in Terezin would take part in, in which they would imagine, if they could have any food in the entire world, what would it be? And it turns out to be foods full of sugar and butter and memories of a recent past in which they lived the lives of normal human beings.
The article I read included a recipe from Mina Pachter for caramels:
Brown [caramelize] 30 decagrams sugar without water. Pour in 1/3 liter coffee extract [very strong coffee], 1/8 liter cream and bring it to a boil. Add 8 decagrams tea butter [best quality butter] and cook until the mixture is thick. Pour boiling into a buttered candy pan. With the back of a knife divide it before it completely cools. Then break it into cubes and wrap in parchment and also pink paper.
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