Miriam's Kitchen is an insightful memoir - and a book that seeks to make the connections between food and family recipes...and what they teach us about ourselves.
I've been reading an excellent book recently, "Miriam's Kitchen," by Elizabeth Ehrlich ( Viking; 1997). The author describes her grandmothers' kitchens as "busy, onion-scented, Yiddish- accented" refuges, where she grew up, learning far more about life than about the intricacies of Kosher cuisine.
As an adult, with a growing family of her own, she developed a deeper appreciation of her own roots - her family's extended history and how she grew into the person she was to become - by going back to these recipes and learning from her mother-in-law how to cook traditional Jewish foods. In the process, she also leanred a great deal about herself.
It's not a cookbook, but a book of recipes...recipes for living. Recipes for learning to make the connections between one's history and ethnicity and food.
Miriam, her mother-in-law was a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust. As an old woman - and immigrant to America - she carried her culture and her childhood memories of family within her traditional dishes. As the book notes, each day Miriam cooked her family's meals, certain that her work creating them mattered in ways that went far beyond the filling of collective stomachs...they mattered in ways that sustained her family's souls, as well.
It's a terrific book - if you see it on the bookshop shelves, pick it up.
