My Berlin Kitchen: A Love Story (with Recipes)

Readers of Weiss’s popular cooking blog, thewednesdaychef.com, know some of her personal history: a childhood split between her father in Boston and her mother in Berlin, her young adulthood working in publishing in New York City, the broken engagement and subsequent move to Berlin, followed by falling in love all over again with the city and the man who would eventually become her husband. This memoir fills in some of the blanks, exploring the loneliness and alienation of a child who never quite feels at home wherever she is, the postcollege time in Paris when she learned that “there was no shame in realizing that living in Paris was far less magical than visiting it,” and the debilitating heartbreak when an important relationship fails. But there is plenty of joy, too: summers at her grandparents’ Italian farmhouse, falling in love, and, always, the pleasures of the kitchen. Each chapter closes with a recipe for a dish referenced in the text, most of which represent one of the places Weiss has called home: German dishes like Pflaumenkuchen (yeasted plum cake) and Erbsensuppe (pea soup), Italian specialities like Peperoni al Forno Conditi (roasted pepper salad) and Bracioline di Antonietta (grilled beef skewers), French fare including Braised Endives and Poulet Sauté à la Paysanne Provençale (a rustic chicken dish), and a few American dishes, like her father’s recipe for something called Depression Stew.