There exists a cookery book that was written by a woman on the brink of starvation in a Japanese internment camp in China during the Second World War.
“You would expect from a wartime recipe book – all rations and digging for victory, or subsistence on rotting vegetables and donkey meat in a Japanese internment camp. However, this is a book written as if the war wasn’t there at all. As if everyone was back in their warm, safe homes with their families and friends, the larder full and the table heaving with fresh, just-cooked food. It gives advice on how to make good things last longer, how to live and eat to the fullest. The pages are jam-packed with recipes with old-fashioned names: cream puffs and popovers, butterscotch and blancmange, galantine of beef and anchovy toast, jugged hare and ulligatawny soup. There are dinner-party menus, children’s menus, cocktails, ice creams, sweets. Its a book for making the best of times in the worst of times, a book that makes you believe that if you could fill your mind with cream cake or anything delicious, then you could transform the bitterest experience into something sweet and shut out the things that you need to forget.”
- page ix, Lilla’s Feast by Frances Osborne (more…)
