My grandmother’s cookbook is an old exercise book, bursting at the seams with clippings, shopping lists and letters, tied together with cardboard and a piece of string.
It contains page after page — the early ones in Hungarian, the later ones in English — of recipes in her neat script, many carefully inscribed with the name of the woman who shared them: “Cheesecake Susan”, “Florentine Mrs Konrad”, “Magda’s Matzo Cake”.
I found the book after my grandparents passed away, as I helped to sort through their things.
It was right at the bottom of a garbage bag crammed with cut-outs of recipes from newspapers and women’s magazines dating back to the 1940s.
The recipes made a curious collection of Australiana: peach melba, cheesecake pie, fish chop suey, rabbit and banana loaf. They were especially odd given that nothing my grandmother made for me ever resembled “Australian” food.
Finding Evi’s cookbook was like rediscovering my grandmother all over again, in unexpected ways.
Even though I am schooled as a social historian, I’d never really thought of cookbooks as historical artefacts, or as sources for understanding the intimate world of women’s everyday lives.
Read the article by Ruth Balint on the ABC History Listens program.