Gina Kaus: Collection of recipes
Gina Kaus: Collection of recipes
Sie speisen gut und billig im Wiener Cafe-Restaurant ‚Johann Strauss‘ – Broadway und 103. Str. West. [...] Palatschinken – Kaiserschmarrn – Germknödel etc.
[You eat well and cheaply at the Viennese Cafe-Restaurant Johann Strauss on Broadway und 103 Str. West. [...] Palatschinken – Kaiserschmarrn – Germknödel etc. (ed. trans.)]
Advertisement in the newspaper Aufbau, 5 November 1943
Gina Kaus’s collection of recipes represents her clinging onto a piece of her Austrian home that is in the process of being lost. The variations on very different recipes from the German-speaking areas, most of them handwritten, reflect the preservation of the known and accustomed in the middle of a new, alien environment: exile. The loss of her native tongue and the adjustment to unfamiliar living conditions become especially apparent in the language used by Gina Kaus in her notes: in places she integrates English turns of phrase into information otherwise conveyed in German.
At first glance the instructions for preparing Gugelhupf, Bishop’s Bread or risotto with meat seem like perfectly normal recipes, ones still known to us today, but in the 1930s and 1940s they were absolutely not self-evident in the U.S.A.. Strange units of measurement, a lack of ready access to the necessary ingredients, language barriers, the limited availability of recipes from home – these things made preparation more difficult or even impossible. In part, it was above all the networks connecting the exiles which offered the possibility of holding fast to the familiar. Aufbau, the newspaper for German Jewish exiles (founded in New York in 1934 ), is one such example. Thus in its pages could be found advertisements for cafés, restaurants or cake shops which, in the American city, offered German or Austrian specials made according to original recipes.
(Author: Rebecca Hackel)
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