Cookery book born of necessity

FOOD tells us a lot about who we are, and has the ability both to entrench our identities and to comfort us.

Enter the least comforting time, hard lockdown, and people started baking and cooking and sharing their recipes and stories on a private Facebook group.

The conversation was intense and as people baked sourdough bread, reached back to their roots with comfort food and stories about their cultures, a book was born of the recipes.

At first the group, which has over 3 000 members, shared their stories, and became a community.

The plan to start curating the book set a deadline of June 2020, and asked people not to post their recipes and pictures outside of it so as not to lose their exclusivity.

They found a publisher of this beautiful volume of recipes and pictures in Annake Muller Publishing, and they were off, with Ingrid Jones curating it.

With the recipes came stories of the past, memories of how food reminded people of where they, and their ancestors come from.

It introduced people from very different cultural backgrounds to food they had never tried before, or had eaten, but didn't know the story behind.

Of course we didn't only cook meals, we started to make our own preserves and jams, many started to grow their own vegetables and to look at fruit that they could source locally and sustainably, without having to go out into the scary streets of total lockdown when only essential shopping trips were allowed.

We couldn't go out to eat, so we learned the art of cooking for ourselves.

Even I ventured into the kitchen to make home-make challah bread. Like many others, I should have read the recipe more carefully. It was for a family of six from a recipe passed on by an Orthodox Jewish friend, and it made 10 loaves.

More importantly it gave many, huddled in their lock-downed state, a chance to share meaningfully in something they had not focussed on when in the office all day.

It became a sort of food confessional. The resulting book tells a story of how members of the group reached over the seasons to mark special occasions and share with others the meaning of feasts and festivals.

Beautifully illustrated and homegrown or home-cooked, this recipe book tells a much broader story of how people came together in order to share the familiar and the comforting, during a terrifying time.