Part I: Ingredients

• Breslau in the 1920s, 30s & 40s, a city with the third largest Jewish community in Germany
• Middle-class family of liberal pro-union Social Democrats
• Adoring parents who reject German ideas of child raising, preferring to “spoil” their offspring
• Jewish, atheist, pacifist father who tells stories of the senselessness of war, how during WWI he just fired his rifle into the air
• “Free-thinking” (non-Jewish) atheist mother who is devoted to her daughters

Part II: Preparation and cooking time, 17 years

1. Begin by emerging into this idyllic world in 1920, joining a sister Ursula already two years old.
   1. Play games with Ursula; use bottles as dolls, giving them all names; fight with toothbrushes.
   2. Add plenty of spicy fun and adventure: country explorations in the family car, picnics, and holiday trips, as well as costume parties and gatherings with family and friends.
   3. Fold in the development of your own mind and opinions and stir well with your stubborn nature.
   4. Insist on Jewish religious instruction in school at age 6—no substitutions!—a sour taste to your parents.
2. Follow Ursula’s methods: Join the Kameraden, a coed Jewish group modeled on the German youth movement—back to nature, healthy living, no smoking or drinking, just earthy ingredients.
   1. Start the stew by adding the sweet enjoyment of the natural environment to the pot.
   2. Thicken with skiing, swimming, camping, and mountain hiking trips.
   3. Stir the pot, while singing folk songs around the campfire and discussing political theory.
3. Lose your mother unexpectedly from a ruptured hernia when you are 11 but continue baking.
   1. Knead in love for your Aunt Klara, who moves in to help raise you and Ursula.
   2. Tepidly accept a substitution—a stepmother—when your father remarries in 1934, a year before the Nuremburg Laws would have forbidden his marrying a non-Jewish woman.
4. Observe anti-Semitism simmering with the Nazi party in the late 1920s and beginning to boil over with the election of Hitler in 1933.
   1. Get expelled from school in 1935 at age 14, together with other Jewish students, but keep seasoning with an apprenticeship as a typist in an office.
   2. See your parents put their business in your “Aryan” stepmother’s name. Keep it bland.
   3. Allow a little dirt to overflow and pour from the flowerpots on the windowsill onto the helmets of the Nazis parading in uniform in the street below. Giggle with Ursula, enjoying this special treat.
5. Commit to fighting Hitler and engage in resistance activities. Do not undercook.
   1. When the Kameraden splits into Zionist, socialist, & a pro-German/patriotic faction, move the socialist/communist group to the casserole pan on your side of the stove. Simmer lightly.
   2. Collect money for families of political prisoners. Sprinkle generously to the hungry.
   3. Do not fear, know you are doing what is right, what is necessary.
   4. Continue sautéing and steep with your determination.
   5. Keep braising even when Ursula gets arrested in 1935 at age 17, since she is released when your good-looking Aryan stepmother flirts with the Gestapo.
6. Become a courier with Ursula and collect illegal anti-Hitler newspapers printed on thin tissue paper from political groups who fled to Czechoslovakia when the Communist Party was outlawed.
   1. Cook slowly as you get more involved in the resistance.
   2. Smuggle the papers back into Germany inside ski poles.
   3. Deliver them to members of the underground KPO (Oppositional Communist Party) for further distribution.
   4. Keep covered: conceal these activities from your father, stepmother, and aunt.
7. Watch your Kameraden/KPO friends get arrested or flee the country.
   1. Keep brewing the mash.
   2. Figure that if you get caught, it will just mean a couple of years in prison. Time to spare.
   3. Continue your underground work, even as Ursula gets distracted with a new boyfriend.
8. Don’t fully grasp how dangerous this resistance stew is becoming.
   1. Maintain your idealism.
   2. Keep it secret when you find out that a guy to whom you delivered papers is arrested
   3. Turn off the oven and wait.
   4. Expect to get arrested. Do not flee.

Part III: Fermenting time, 3 ½ years

1. Await trial.
   1. Marinate for twelve months in solitary confinement.
   2. Devise an exercise plan to keep your brain fresh and prevent it from going stale and spoiling.
   3. Feed your body as best you can—no fresh fruit, but feast on dried figs that, before the trial, you are still allowed to buy at the prison commissary.
2. Protect your sister without understanding the need for you to deny any wrongdoing.
   1. Resign yourself to staying in this pot for a while.
   2. Figure you’ll get to cook elsewhere afterwards.
3. Get convicted of High Treason by the “People’s” Court in Berlin.
   1. Receive a 3 ½ year sentence.
   2. Miss saying good-bye to Ursula after the trial and her acquittal.
4. Learn how to survive the prison crockpot and keep the stew bubbling.
   1. Write letters to family, now scattered around the world:
      1. To Ursula, who escaped from the frying pan to Shanghai,
      2. To your parents in the United States on visitors’ visas, who tried to find help getting you out,
      3. To Aunt Klara, who waits for you, planning to begin the recipe anew when you finish serving your sentence.
   2. Serve as a witness at trials of fellow chefs.
      1. Travel to various prisons near the courts where the trials are held.
      2. Enjoy a delicious week sharing a cell with your friend Sophie after her conviction.
   3. Spend your time learning English, while planning for a future American menu.
   4. Work in the prison garden and grow fresh ingredients that nourish your dreams for the future, for a reunion in the United States with your family.
      1. Discover your love of the earth, if not your fellow prisoners.
      2. Feel good in your strong and tanned body, ready to feast your palate on a new cookbook.
5. Plan for leaving the final prison meal behind, uneaten.
   1. Ask Aunt Klara to bring you clothes for your release.
   2. Relish walking out from lockup into Klara’s arms.

Part IV: Aging time, 8 months

1. Reality check: they are not setting you free.
   1. Get loaded onto a train. No dining car.
   2. Arrive at the Ravensbrück Women’s Concentration Camp.
   3. Sort into barracks.
2. Endure the daily bitter taste that cannot be washed away.
   1. Adjust to diluted cuisine.
   2. Observe hope dissolving.
3. Send a final message to Klara.
   1. Tell her:
      1. Don’t worry.
      2. Someday the world will be all right again.

Part V: 80 years later

Niece Madelaine recalls this recipe, handed down by her mother Ursula, with many missing parts. It’s a familiar dish that was served at family gatherings, but with no one remembering all the details of how it was made. Now, Madelaine decides she no longer wants to serve this dish, she’s more interested in using the ingredients to formulate something new. She wants to welcome Helga back, but not to the old kitchen. She wants to create that world that is “all right again.” She searches for a new recipe.