Like Wafers in Honey: A Novel

For a limited time we have copies signed by Leah Eskin.

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.

Hardcover.