Concentration Camp Cookbooks
After a while it got so that you had to be a little cautious about talking about good food because guys were getting on edge. They’d bust you if you mentioned something [about food]….Food was the biggest thing.(1)
Without a doubt, the smallest genre of cookbooks has to be those written in World War II concentration camps. As far as I know, only two have been published: Recipes Out of Bilibid, collected by Col. Halstead C. Fowler while he was in a POW camp in the Pacific, and In Memory’s Kitchen, collected by Mina Pächter while she was in a German concentration camp near Prague. The introduction to In Memory’s Kitchen mentions several unpublished books in Israel, and Art and Lee Beltrone’s A Wartime Log lists a few recipes created by POWs in Europe.
That cookbooks were written in the midst of hunger and need may at first be surprising, but it shouldn’t be: food was already on everyone’s minds, and remembering recipes and dishes was a way to bring back the days before the war. As Dorothy Wagner writes in the introduction to Recipes out of Bilibid, talking about food “strengthened their resolution to survive, if only because it made more vivid, not what they sought to escape from, but what they were resolved to return to. It brought close to them the homes waiting faithfully for them, homes in which the primal need to nourish the body was recognized as a perpetually renewed adventure, a challenge to the imagination, an invitation to cheerful sociability.”(2)
Looking through these books one can see that there are two kinds of recipes. The first kind, which makes up the entirety of Recipes Out of Bilibid, is recipes which are unchanged from the outside world. They call for ingredients like clams, crab meat, Parmesan cheese and cherry brandy, things which are unlikely to turn up in a POW camp. The recipes in this book were contributed by men who were away from their families, men for whom cooking was usually not a daily task. They were recreating the dishes from home as faithfully in their minds as they could, knowing that they would never be able to make things like pickled anchovies or brandy pottage in the camp.
The second type of recipe is those dishes adapted to wartime life, and many of the recipes of In Memory’s Kitchen are normal recipes with adapted ingredients. This book was made with contributions from the Jewish women in the camp, women who did the daily cooking for their families before the war and who still made some dishes in the camp. For example, the recipe for “Torte (Very Good)” may make a dish similar to a regular torte but it uses uses four large potatoes or carrots for the bulk of the dish and includes coffee substitute as an ingredient. There is also a recipe for “War Dessert” that, again, uses potatoes as its main ingredient, along with only two spoonfuls of flour and a handful of other items. On the other hand, there are also recipes that would have been impossible to make in a concentration camp, like “Rich Chocolate Cake,” which is mostly butter, sugar, eggs, and cream.
In the end, cookbooks like these served two purposes. They functioned like normal cookbooks, listing dishes it was possible to make in camp. They also served as physical reminders of what life was like before the war. If the prisoners couldn’t have the food itself, they could reconstruct it in their minds from the basic ingredients. Food means far more to us than just nutrition, and the more I study food history the more amazed I am at just how complex our relationship to it is. In the midst of extreme hunger these prisoners didn’t just talk about what foods they wanted to eat, they argued over the best way to prepare that food. In doing so, they argued over just how to define normalcy and how to define home.
(1)Quote from an American soldier held in a German POW camp during W.W.II, in A Wartime Log, by Art and Lee Beltrone (Charlottesville, VA: Howell Press, 1994), page 124.
(2)From the introduction to Recipes Out of Bilibid, compiled by Dorothy Wagner (New York: George W. Stewart, 1946), page ix.