© Bruno Jobst

Name: Marina V.
Mother tongue: Croatian
Occupation: Librarian
My object: recipe book
My story about it:

A green, hardcover Lipa mill-notebook containing the recipes of my mother. The calligraphy of a teacher, titles highlighted in red, twice underlined, left as heritage to her daughters. The greatest housecraft stories. Recipes that my mother had carefully collected from senior housewives: her grandmother, her mother, her aunts, mother-in-law, sisters, friends. Changing in style – learning, through years and experience, to leave out unnecessary details.
Each recipe – a story of the creator of the culinary magic that is quietly passed over to the next housewife. Each recipe – a picture – of family meals, Sunday get-togethers, birthday cakes, Christmas Eves.
The green notebook – the glue of the family, long resettled relatives and the festive nut cake…tiny Christmas cookies, the scent of cinnamon, vanilla and the endless sound of beating of the cream…
Turning the pages of forgotten gatherings, I return to childhood and youth through smells and tastes.
These sentences, hardly recognizable in smeared traces of the past, bound in a green memory book of a family, in the mosaic of women’s stories, will once be read by my daughters, too.
Who knows, maybe they will write their own, like I did.