A treasured family cookbook gets a new life

If your house were on fire, what would you grab on the way out the door? For some people it might be a treasured photo album, but for me it would be the handwritten cookbook my grandmother gave me when I got married because it is a tangible and irreplaceable part of my family’s history. For Holocaust survivor Steven Fenves, the cookbook that his mother painstakingly maintained was another such familial link, one that had much more significance than most because of what happened to his family.

Although Fenves didn’t know it at the time, his family’s former cook raced into their house alongside looters who took everything of value while he, his sister, and their parents were forced into a Jewish ghetto. The cook, Maris, grabbed the thin volume of recipes and held onto it until after the war. She gave it to Fenves and his sister years later, and the book eventually made it to the U.S. Holocaust Museum, where it was part of an exhibit that caught the eye of chef and cookbook author Alon Shaya.

Shaya set about to recreate the recipes contained in the Fenves family cookbook and serve them to Fenves, the only remaining person who would know if the dishes were made correctly. “A lightbulb went off in my head that said, ‘Wow, here is an opportunity to get a first-person recollection of these recipes and to be able to just talk with him one-on-one about his memories of the book and the recipes,’” Shaya said. He worked remotely with Fenves during the early days of the pandemic, then eventually met him in person.

Fenves translated 17 of the recipes for Shaya, who set about to reconstruct them with input from Fenves when he didn’t understand the instructions or ingredients. They worked through 10 of the recipes. Since it would be a monumental effort to turn the entire family cookbook into a contemporary volume, Shaya has changed his goal for the project. He plans to take the cookbook on a talking tour to select U.S. cities, perhaps cooking a few dishes from it at the events, which will be fundraisers for the Holocaust Memorial Museum.