Recipe for Plum Strudel (On reading In Memory’s Kitchen, A Legacy From the Women of Terezin)

Listen for a mother’s kind kitchen-aproned voice.

She recites her strudel dessert recipe of choice.

With one egg, fat and flour make ‘a dough’;

Under a heated pot to rest then it must go;

Use some milk to soak three rolls;

When very soft put them in a bowl;

Stiffly beat four egg whites into snow.

And have these ingredients ready in a row:

15 decagrams butter, one spoon of cinnamon;

30 decagrams sugar and the rind of lemon.

Add to the bowl and batter together well.

(Batter the mixture till you hear it yell!)

Stretch the dough but keep it thick;

Then spread it on your nut mix;

Sprinkle prune plums – noodle shape is nice

- about one-and-a-half kilos will suffice.

Roll the strudel and bake in a hot oven.

It comes out high, beautiful, neatly woven.

In Terezin, the starving women are ‘food obsessed’.

They savour the recipes their families possessed.

Mina Pachter says the love of cooking they share

Is purely platonic - their camp cupboard is bare.

‘Sie kochen zusammen oft nur platonisch

Zusamen geschmolzen die Vorrathe sind.’

For Cold Stuffed Eggs Pachter, her mind surges;

‘lasse der Fantasie freien Lauf’, she urges.

There are no words

to bring the women’s hunger

to our realisation;

It would take a descent

to a new harsh language
of lapsed civilisation.