IN HER POIGNANT NOVEL, Eskin draws from the shadows of history to vivify the dramatic life and work of Edda Servi Machlin, the immigrant New York suburban housewife who wrote the cookbook The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews. Richly imagined, in delicious prose, Eskin’s novel braids the story of Machlin’s acculturation to America in the Eisenhower years with that of young Stella Fortuna, who was forced to flee her Tuscan town when Nazis arrived to deport Jews. Brilliantly embedded into this shapely novel are more than 40 of Machlin’s recipes, which Eskin stylishly adapted for today’s cooks, equipment and sensibilities. —The National Book Review
IT IS 1943, and Italy is in turmoil. Stella Fortuna Servi, a young Jewish woman living in the Tuscan town of Pitigliano, struggles to cope with the dramatic changes in her life. Although her family’s roots in Pitigliano go back centuries, they are now confronting persecution by the Fascist regime, which is allied with Nazi Germany. Her father’s prosperous business is destroyed, and his role as rabbi becomes increasingly difficult, even desperate. Stella’s story is a gripping chronicle of sacrifice and courage, as Stella and her family try to evade capture. In a parallel narrative, Italian Jewish immigrant Edda Machlin adapts to a new life in post war suburban New York. Machlin is based on the cookbook author Edda Machlin Servi (1926 – 2019), and the classic recipes that she compiled and promoted are interwoven throughout the novel.
Like Wafers in Honey is fast-paced and taut with dramatic tension. Leah Eskin’s characters are sharply delineated, each one adapting to the intolerable in a distinctive way. Stella’s father performs a range of jobs for his non-Jewish neighbors, but his remuneration is never enough. One woman sees him as “her bookkeeper, her mediator, her scribe, settling a warm brown egg in his palm.” Barely able to support his family, and warned that they may be deported to an unknown fate, he is reluctant to leave those who need him. Stella and her siblings undertake a journey, disguising their identities and seeking temporary shelter. She no longer knows whom she can trust, as anyone might betray her.
For Edda, a fortunate survivor, the haven of Westchester and New York City is marked by different difficulties. Her husband, Eugene, is supportive and loving, but Edda feels alienated by her new environment. Many of Eugene’s friends, some based on historical figures, are involved in the movements for social change that defined the 1960s. Both timelines are strengthened by accurate details, although Edda’s memory of chanting her parsha, Torah portion, for a bat mitzvah ceremony would not have been part of Jewish ritual in that era or place. Asked by the members of her synagogue’s sisterhood to bake hamantaschen, Edda balks. Neither Ashkenazi nor Sephardic, she identifies with the Italkim from her homeland. Readers can compare these “dry triangles,” to the fried orecchi di Aman (Haman’s ears) that she prepares; the recipe includes oil, rum, and grated lemon.
Eskin’s prose style is built around exquisitely accurate metaphors, many based on feminine creativity. Hiding in the forest, Stella feels embraced by the pine trees, their “green needles and resin scent as comforting as Nonna’s quilt.” When she and her brother take refuge in a cave filled with doves, she feels the birds’ “almond eyes” staring at them. A recipe for Il Bollo, anise “bread birds,” follows this passage. Not only the landscape, but people themselves are imagined as the products of artisans, as in the act of knitting. “The knits, their faces open and attentive, were children. The purls, gazing away, were adults … The fabric formed a family, a tribe, a people bound together. Cut one stitch, unravel the whole.”
By the novel’s end, the two narrative strands become one. Stella Fortuna’s luck and fortitude endure, and Edda finds purpose in teaching others about the foods that nurtured her. —Emily Schneider, Jewish Book Council
IF YOU THINK YOU KNOW all about Italian food, but you don’t know about the cookbook author Edna Machlin Servi and all she did to introduce Americans to Italian Jewish cuisine or you think you know Italian history but don’t know about the Italian Jews who did and didn’t escape WWII, the Nazis, and the Italian fascists, you have much to learn. Start by reading Leah Eskin’s extraordinary book Like Wafers in Honey. In lyrical and precise language, Eskin spins two narratives - one of wartime loss and escape in the Italian countryside, the other of an Italian housewife in suburban NY in the 1950s - and brings them together in a compelling narrative that fills gaps in the story of Italian Jewry and cuisine. Leah Eskin is a distinguished cookbook author, memoirist and columnist with a magically evocative way of writing about food. Now she shows she’s a talented novelist too. Even better, the book contains recipes! —Karen Dukess, bestselling author of Welcome to Murder Week and The Last Book Party
EDDA SERVI MACHLIN WROTE The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews, one of the twentieth century's most important Italian cookbooks. For years after it went out of print, she self-published it and several sequels, which we carried directly from her. All of those books are now gone, as is Edda herself. We have been waiting, without quite knowing it, for something like this book to appear.
Leah Eskin, a longtime food writer for the Chicago Tribune, builds her debut novel around two timelines. In the first, set in 1943, a young woman named Stella Fortuna flees Pitigliano, the Tuscan hilltop town once known as Little Jerusalem, as the Nazis arrive, carrying almost nothing through months of hiding in the countryside but the memory of her family's food.
In the second, Edda Servi Machlin herself appears, navigating suburban Westchester in the 1960s with a sharp eye and sharper opinions about what passes for Italian cooking in America, and coming gradually to understand that preserving the flavors of Italian-Jewish cooking may be something only she can do.
More than forty recipes, drawn from and inspired by Edda's work, are woven throughout.
This is a quiet book—a simple story, honestly told, an introduction to a vanished world and the woman who spent her life refusing to let it disappear. For readers drawn to the intersection of food, memory, and history, and especially for anyone who has wondered about the woman behind those cookbooks. —Kitchen Arts and Letters
LIKE WAFERS IN HONEY is the debut novel from food writer and longtime Chicago Tribune columnist Leah Eskin. It tells the story of a Jewish family in Pitigliano, Italy—known as Little Jerusalem—in the 1940s, interspersed with the real-life story of Edda Servi Machlin, who wrote The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews in 1981. It’s a fascinating novel, and filled with the kind of delicious detail only a food writer could provide. —Stephanie Butnick, Golda: Your Jewish Lifestyle Guide