Frances Osborne: Lilla's feast

Reviewed by PHILIPPA JAMIESON

Imagine spending three years in a prison camp in China, held by the Japanese during World War II, with freezing winters, blazing summers and torrential rainy seasons, dwindling food rations, cramped conditions and appalling hygiene.

As the starving prisoners dreamed of food, one woman in the camp typed out recipes on tissue-thin ricepaper, which were gathered into a book that is now held in London's Imperial War Museum.

That woman was Lilla Eckford, born in 1882 in Chefoo, one of the "treaty ports" of northern China, in a community of traders and missionaries, expatriate Westerners from various countries who were free from the restraints of Chinese law.

Lilla and her twin Ada grew up in a prosperous business family in a world with servants, sumptuous banquets and balls. They went to a finishing school in Europe, and from their mother they learnt all the tips and tricks of cooking and entertaining.

When Lilla married, fate took a turn for the worse, and her cooking skills came in handy — both to appease her husband and to cope on a greatly diminished budget. The story follows her to India, and back and forth between England and China, chronicling the ups and downs of her life, her marriages, childbirth and financial fortunes.

Frances Osborne has written a moving account of her spirited and determined great-grandmother. Initially I was irritated by the author's conjectures ("she must have felt" or "she would have known"), but this feeling faded as those very speculations brought the book to life, inviting the reader to imagine the very different worlds Lilla inhabited in her 100-year life span.

It did puzzle me that, although Lilla's recipes are at the heart of this memoir, only four of them are printed here, reproduced as
facsimiles of the originals.

But the author writes evocatively about food throughout: "vermicelli that slithered down her throat like snakes", "pastries which dissolved into a featherweight crumbling crunch at first bite", or in the prison camp, "SOS" — same old stew.

Osborne has a particularly good sense of place, and has done an admirable job of placing Lilla's story in the wider context of history: the Boxer uprising, the Japanese invasion of China, and the Communist takeover. She also gives just enough of a glimpse into herself that we can see some of her journey in writing the book and discovering her family history.

* Philippa Jamieson is a Dunedin writer

* Doubleday, $59.95