14/04/2026
Have you checked out LIKE WAFERS IN HONEY yet?
This debut novel from food writer Leah Eskin of the Chicago Tribune combines the historical sweep and emotional power of The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer and the resonant use of food and recipes of Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel.
The story opens on the mountaintop town of Pitigliano, Italy, once called Little Jerusalem for its vibrant, centuries-old Jewish community. But the year is 1943. Mussolini has enacted anti-Jewish laws across Italy, and the family of Stella Fortuna struggles to maintain any sense of their former life.
In a separate timeline, Edda Servi Machlin is a housewife in 1960s Westchester trying to make sense of a new culture, as well as the “spaghetti and meatballs” food that passes for Italian cuisine. With caustic wit, we see twentieth-century America through an immigrant’s eyes, someone who can never return to her former home because it no longer exists. Someone who comes to understand that it might be up to her to preserve the indelible flavors of an Italian-Jewish way of life that is in danger of extinction, as her family once was.
In between these two remarkable stories are more than forty recipes (updated for today’s cooks), all inspired by the life and example of Edda Servi Machlin, author of The Classic Cuisine of the Italian Jews.
