Food for Thought: Cooking as a Coping Mechanism in 'Miriam's Kitchen' Violet Shattuck College

Examining the foods and traditions associated with Judaism, accounts of life during the Holocaust are not unexpected in Elizabeth Ehrlich’s Miriam’s Kitchen; however, their appearances in a chapter titled “Cake” is surprising. The cheerful connotation of cake is in direct contrast to the horrific nature of the Holocaust. In the wise words of Mary Poppins, just a spoon full of sugar helps the medicine go down; for Miriam, the act of baking—the stark differences between her experiences as a child and the sweetness of the product of her efforts—help to ease the pains of her myriad of awful memories.

With chunks of italicized text, “Cake” is immediately distinguishable from the rest of the book. Unlike the other chapters, this one strays from the author’s own experiences and takes on Miriam’s experiences, even adopting her point of view for the italicized sections. By interjecting sections of text describing Miriam’s baking habits with narrative detailing her childhood, Ehrlich is able to create a balance between the harsh realities of Miriam’s past and the life of domesticated bliss that she chose to live in her later years. After an unsuspecting paragraph explaining Miriam’s process behind making Pesach kompot, an inundation of...