So kocht man in Wien!” (
That’s How You Cook in Vienna!) in the German historian Karina Urbach’s family home.
There was the original, written by her grandmother, Alice, first published in Vienna in 1935. Some 500 pages long, the book is encyclopedic, an amalgam of traditional Viennese recipes with advice for the modern housewife. There was also a spurious later edition, containing about 60% of the same recipes but published under a different name: Rudolf Rösch.
In 1938, Alice Urbach was running a bustling cookery school at Goldeggasse 7 in Vienna near the Belvedere Palace when the Nazis came to power in Austria. She survived the Holocaust in England, running a boarding house for Jewish refugees in the picturesque Lake District. Before her flight into exile, as was the fate of Viennese Jewry, Alice was robbed of her possessions. For an insulting fee, one of the items she was forced to sign over was the copyright to “