Food is among the greatest human connectors. In her latest book, How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty, chef and award-winning journalist Bonny Reichert weaves together vignettes about her family, her life and, most importantly, her intergenerational trauma, skillfully using food as a focal point and way to tie the past and present together.
As the child of a Holocaust survivor, Reichert’s trauma stems from the horrors she knows her father lived and breathed. Although her father chooses not to dwell on the past, Reichert is still haunted by his experiences. As a child, she imagined herself enduring his hardships. “The more I could put myself in his skin, the more I soaked up his suffering, the less hurt he would be,” she recalls.
After years working as a journalist and then as a chef, Reichert experiences a pivotal aha moment while enjoying a simple bowl of borscht on a pilgrimage to Poland with her family to visit the tomb of her great-grandfather. “I want to go forward but I have to go back,” she realizes, in order to heal. “Back to a time before the borscht in Warsaw, before the talk of writing the book, even before I found the blue-green numbers inside Dad’s arm.”
And go back she does, relaying how after the war, her father moved to Canada and opened and operated several restaurants. Between this exposure and her maternal baba’s delicious home cooking, food was always a central part of Reichert’s upbringing; food waste an “anathema to all of us, an attitude bred right into our bones.” Her baba especially embodies the importance of food in her family. On weekends, she’d come to the house bearing enormous amounts of food wrapped in parcels and packages she called pekeleh, which means bundles, and also burdens, in Yiddish. She’d cook cheese blintzes “fried to a crispy gold and ready to be smothered in syrupy strawberries and sour cream”; wild blueberry varenikes “ready to squirt their purple juice into your mouth”; and chicken necks, “boiled until the bones were soft and the meat fell off in strips.”
Reichert’s story extends far past childhood, with literal and metaphorical culinary journeys in spades. How to Share an Egg is a beautifully written, eye-opening memoir that movingly shows how food—and writing about it—can bridge divides and heal generations.