Like Wafers in Honey: A Novel

Summary

They call her Stella Fortuna, “Lucky Star.” When Stella is seventeen, in 1943, a mysterious woman appears in her family’s apartment in the tiny town of Pitigliano, Italy. “You are in danger,” she says, while, oddly, holding a ricotta pudding. “Pack and go.” Grabbing newfound bravada—and the pudding—Stella steps out the door and into a seven-month journey evading the Nazis.

She and her three teenaged siblings hide in caves, sleep in barns, and find shelter among peasants. They face frostbite, hunger, and the knowledge that the rest of the family is locked inside a nearby concentration camp. Based on a true story, the book follows Stella as she learns to navigate by starlight, falls in (and out of) love, and sustains herself with the memory of meals past.

Meanwhile, in suburban New York, newlywed Edda is appalled by the spaghetti-and-meatballs dining culture of the 1960s. As she moves from sparkling hostess to celebrated cookbook author, she introduces first her friends, then the nation, to the fresh flavors and traditional techniques of Italian Jewish cooking, a cuisine many of us now know as authentic Italian.

A coming-of-age story set in Tuscany, a coming-into-her-own story set in New York, Like Wafers in Honey serves up a feast.

“My father, himself an Italian Jew, used Edda Servi Machlin’s recipes as a bridge to his culinary and personal roots. Machlin’s life inspired this beautiful novel by Leah Eskin: a survival story and a cultural archive. It honors a nearly vanished world through narrative and recipes, showing how memory, food, and storytelling can resist erasure.”—Yotam Ottolenghi, author of Jerusalem: A Cookbook and Ottolenghi Comfort