Lilla's Feast: A True Story of Love, War, and a Passion For Food

by Frances Osborne (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2006

  $3.29

  Lilla Eckford, interned in a Japanese civilian camp in China during the second world war after an extraordinary early life,passed her time by compiling a book about the joys of food.Thisprecious cookery book, now in the possession of the ImperialWarMuseum, inspired Lilla's great-granddaughter, Frances Osborne, to investigate her enthralling story. Lilla's Feast spans the world from China to India and finally to England over a hundred years, and blends together personal history, world events, period atmosphere and family anecdotes into a brilliantly vibrant and poignant story.

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $11.16

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.29

  The tale of Lilla, the author's great-grandmother, begins with her birth in Chefoo in China in 1882, where she lived a charmed and Bohemian expat life, the younger of a set of 'heavenly twins' from a spirited, unvictorian family. Lilla's eventful life was to span five continents and three husbands, forming a panoramic picture of British colonial life in the Orient (during the Boxer Rebellion, Pearl Harbour, and the rise of Communism) and under the British Raj in India. Throughout her life, Lilla's personal obsession was cooking. It was also her way of showing devotion to her cold and remote husband. Food was her wonderland and her means of survival, her way to help make 'a man love you, long for you, and hold back tears when he is forced to leave your side'. It was while Lilla was in a Japanese prison camp that she began to dream up recipes and jot them down like a modern Mrs Beeton. Her brother, a talented illustrator, provided drawings. Empowered by imagination and strength of spirit, her cookbook was composed as if the war had never happened. Lilla's journey ends a hundred years on with her death in Tunbridge Wells - the peaceful conclusion to a sensuous, full life of passion, romance, and courage. Told tenderly and wittily by the author, in this family memoir Lilla becomes a living presence. The text will be liberally sprinkled with recipes, rare maps, letters and photographs from the author's personal archives.