Food talk

Thanksgiving 2024. Initially this first post-Thanksgiving foodie essay was going to be lighthearted. We’ve all eaten way too much.

For most of us, Thanksgiving Day food is just so good, it’s hard to say no to one more helping of sweet potatoes, or to that second helping of pie. And yes, that’s my guilty conscience speaking!

So that was what I was going for in this “between-holidays” post. Our bathroom scales give us enough grief as it is.

Perusing my notes for future Hillel-Stammtisch topics, I stumbled across one that made me stop short. In 2012, a friend of Center for White Rose Studies pointed me to an essay by Dr. Myrna Goldenberg, entitled “Food Talk: Gendered Responses to Hunger in the Concentration Camps.” Sounds boring and oh-so-scholarly, doesn’t it?

Scholarly, yes. Goldenberg dug deep into memoirs and survivors’ accounts of food in the KZ-Lager. She was born in 1937 and survived those camps herself. It’s clear that even when she cites others’ memories, her own aren’t far below the surface. You’ll likely read little snippets here and there from Dr. Goldenberg’s work as this topic takes on new meaning. Believe me, it’s too much to dump on you all at once.

But in this first post after Thanksgiving, a few simpler thoughts that will bring a bit of perspective to my favorite holiday of the year. The darker, more complex contemplations can be saved for another day.

First – no matter how hard things get, our providers can and will find ways to turn nothing into something. Goldenberg cites Norbert Troller’s description of husbands and teenage children going to the women’s quarters for meals. Everyone would have contributed his or her rations for the meager meal. Troller recorded, and Goldenberg related, that a certain Frau Windholz was known for her “incomparable” ghetto torte. The recipe, you may ask? “Bread, coffee [would have been ersatz coffee], saccharine, a trace of margarine, lots of good wishes, and an electric hot plate.”

An alternative, merely known as ghetto cake, was fancier. Dry breadcrumbs, coffee with the grounds, saved sugar, alt. saccharine, alt. penezeln [?], paper-thin slices of toasted bread, with or without margarine, with garlic, or slices of toasted bread with a dusting of powdered sugar.

Note: This was in the ghettos, not the concentration camps, and for certain not in the extermination camps. In the ghettos – Łódź, Warsaw, Krakow, Lvov, Lublin, among others – European Jews were “given” a very small ration. Similarly in Theresienstadt (Terezin), technically a concentration camp, but one the Nazis used to demonstrate to the International Red Cross how wonderful things were. (Sarcasm.)

Officially, rations in Łódź consisted of the following per person, when things were good: One egg, 1.5 pounds of meat, 12 pounds of potatoes, 6 pounds of bread. Per month. As many have written and said over the last eighty years, official rations rarely made their way to Jews imprisoned in the ghettos.

Occasionally women would receive a tiny ration of skim milk. Ruth Kluger, eleven years old when she was imprisoned in Theresienstadt, remembered that they would pretend they had been granted a ration of whipping cream. They would spend hours whipping that skim milk into whatever froth they could muster. With a fork. If they could just get it to foam, they were happy.

Women tasked with feeding their families on miserly rations soon practiced what Susan Cernyak-Spatz recalled they defined as “cooking with the mouth.” As they watched themselves and their families die of starvation, they would share reminiscences about menus, table settings, rituals of cooking, favorite recipes.

What held me fast as I re-read Dr. Goldenberg’s words: These mothers and sisters and daughters became so obsessed with “cooking with the mouth” that they would argue about whether a specific recipe called for three eggs or six, whether the milk in a recipe was to be added hot or cold, or whether it was water, not milk. Sometimes they would wake a friend up in the middle of the night to ask for a recipe. “Do you remember your mother’s recipe …? Tell me. It's a very important thing.”

Dr. Goldenberg said that this practice had one meaningful effect: “Keeping a dead relative alive through her recipes.” As long as a recipe could be remembered, could be argued about, could be visualized, the person connected with that recipe still lived.

When I bake my mother’s famous chocolate syrup cake, I’m not just baking the best cake on the face of the earth, I am baking the cake my mother would bake as her “I’m sorry” when she and my dad had argued. When I cook my grandmother’s simple version of Spanish rice, it’s not just a great side dish, or sometimes a main course if I add chicken or fish to it. It was my grandmother’s way to cook a healthy meal when she was practically out of money. And when I make French toast “Minnie Lea” style, adding sugar to the eggs and no powdered sugar afterwards, I always but always remember how good that tasted in my great-grandmother’s tiny kitchen in the country, with its wood-burning stove, pie safe, and food that sticks to your bones.

Myrna Goldenberg’s narrative of the coping mechanisms women used to survive food-less days – remembering recipes, visualizing place settings, talking about cooking rituals – can be brought forward to our 21st century as we cook and fry and poach and bake and boil.

The recipes Susan Spatz would have heard in those bleak days? Are the same recipes in Henriette Davidis’ cookbook which are being presented here for Jewish students in Hillel and German Studies students in Stammtisch to share. It’s common heritage (except for the pork and Jägerschnitzel, of course).

It’s my sincerest hope that as these recipes become part of our common history once again, that we will honor the women and providers of the ghettos and concentration camps, those brave souls who turned coffee grounds into cake, who pretended that skim milk was heavy cream, who kept one another alive with remembered food.

Their legacy inspired this project. May their lives – and in far too many cases, their senseless deaths – motivate us to come together, keeping their memories, keeping our own families’ memories, alive.

Food is powerful. Use that power for good.

Questions? Comments? Speak your mind below. Before doing so, please log in using the email address that corresponds to your orders or newsletter subscription. Note: MARKDOWN is the app's label for formatting shortcuts.

If you learned something this post and would like to leave me a tip, I would be grateful! Buy Me A Coffee!

Image credit: Top photograph--Shopify, public domain for platform users. Bottom photograph--NSDAP propaganda postcard, Warsaw Ghetto announcements. Public domain.

No part of this post, Web site, or translations contained herein may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the copyright holder, except for the “fair use” of quotations that are properly cited and credited, including identification of the translator if applicable. No part of this post, Web site, or translations contained herein may be included in any Large Language Model without proper licensing from the copyright holder, Denise Elaine Heap.