Name/TitleThe Recipe Book
About this objectSet of indexed ingredient cards held within a small box covered with red and white checkered fabric and white lace trim, and accompanied by a manila notebook containing colour images and a typed description near the centre. The work was inspired by recipes recited by women (including the donor's grandmother, to whom the work is dedicated) in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The typed section of the notebook states: "My Grandmother, Vera, just turned 16 in February 1944, when she got deported. When she left her hometown Szeged [in Hungary], she took two objects with her: a notebook with collected poems and an album titled 'Two Thousand Years of Painting' edited by Sándor Bortnyik, Iván Hevesy and Mário Rabinovsky. Due to the size and weight of the album she had to leave it in the Jewish ghetto in Budapest; soon then she was on the train towards Bergen-Belsen camp. In Bergen-Belsen she erased the poems from her notebook and started to collect Hungarian, Yiddish and German recipes. Onlt two fragmented poems remained, 'Twenty Years After' from János Vajda, and Goethe's Wanderers Nacht, translated by Árpád Tóth.
"Collecting recipes in barracks were not unusual. Men collected prayers, which had a conscious cultural anthropological purpose. According to my grandmother they didn't collect recipes for such a reason, nor because they felt they belong to the kitchen therefore that would be the part of their lives that should remain in traces. They were starving and they thought that they will never have 1 kg of flour or eat an apple. Therefore, the practice of imagining cooking in their head, having all the ingredients, were the practice of free association, the practice of surviving and escaping hunger.
"For years I wanted to visually represent this aspect of the recipe collection. First I created an archive, where I collected all the ingredients from each page. I had a database of each page with all its ingredients, and I also had a database of which ingredient appears on which page. Then I photographed each ingredient on film. Each page has a collage. The collage are created from the film fragments of ingredients that appeared on the particular page. You can recognize the ingredients but you can't quite grasp them."
MakerBiró, Eszter
Maker RoleCreator and Author
Edition201/300
Date Made2015
Period2010s
Medium and MaterialsOrganic, paper and textile
Place MadeHungary
Inscription and MarksNotebook: front cover, in pencil: For Granny...
Notebook: back cover, in pencil: Eszter Biro, 201/300
MeasurementsH: 92 x W: 90 x D: 73 mm (recipe box)
H: 210 x W: 450 x D: 7 mm (notebook)
Subject and Association KeywordsArt & design
Subject and Association KeywordsSecond World War
Subject and Association Keywordscookery, cooking, recipes
Subject and Association KeywordsFemale friendship, sisterhood
Subject and Association Descriptionhttps://issuu.com/eszterbiro/docs/biro_eszter_receptkonyv_offset_issu:
In order to endure the horrors of the concentration camps, it was essential to recall memories and keep one’s religious-cultural traditions; therefore many tried to practice their religion – even if it meant risking their lives, – and collected prayers and stories. Some of the women tried to escape the starvation by returning to their memories of the times they spent in the kitchen and recalling recipes. Vera erased the poems from the notebook brought from home and replaced them with recipes. The soups, meat-dishes, marinades, fillings, garnishes, cakes, and biscuits became unreachable dreams, just like the ingredients: freshwater or a bag of flour. In many cases the recipes in the collection have imprecise measurements or missing ingredients, making them almost impossible to prepare, and often there are poem-fragments next to them from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and János Vajda. Eszter Biro handled the recipe book as a kind of symbolic archive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bergen-Belsen_concentration_camp:
Bergen-Belsen (pronounced [ˈbɛʁɡn̩ˌbɛlsn̩]), or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp. Initially this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to hold Jews from other concentration camps. After 1945, the name was applied to the displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most commonly associated with the concentration camp. From 1941 to 1945, almost 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there. Overcrowding, lack of food, and poor sanitary conditions caused outbreaks of typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, and dysentery; leading to the deaths of more than 35,000 people in the first few months of 1945, shortly before and after the liberation. The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945, by the British 11th Armoured Division. The soldiers discovered approximately 60,000 prisoners inside, most of them half-starved and seriously ill, and another 13,000 corpses lying around the camp unburied. A memorial with an exhibition hall currently stands at the site [continues].
Named CollectionGlasgow Women's Library
Object TypeArtwork
Object numberGWL-2018-15
Copyright LicenceAll rights reserved