How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty

A moving culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family--sustenance and survival--from a chef, award-winning journalist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

When you’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.

Bonny Reichert avoided everything to do with the Holocaust until she found herself, in midlife, suddenly typing those words into an article she was writing. The journalist had grown up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation and ultimate survival in Auschwitz-Birkenau, but she never imagined she would be able to face this epic legacy head-on.

Then a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw set Bonny on a journey to unearth her culinary lineage, and she began to dig for the roots of her food obsession, dish by dish. Stepping into the kitchen to connect her past with her future, the author recounts the defining moments of her life in a poignant tale of scarcity and plenty: her colorful childhood in the restaurant business, the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef, and that life-altering visit to Poland. Whether it’s the flaky potato knishes and molasses porridge bread she learned to bake at her baba Sarah’s elbow, the creamy vichyssoise she taught herself to cook in her tiny student apartment, or the brown butter eggs her father, now 93, still scrambles for her whenever she needs comfort, cuisine is both an anchor and an identity; a source of joy and a signifier of survival.

How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, this is one woman’s search to find her voice as a writer, chef, mother, and daughter. Do the tiny dramas of her own life matter in comparison to everything her father has seen and done? This moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery sets out to find the answer.

Bonny Reichert is a National Magazine Award-winning journalist. She has been an editor at Today’s Parent and Chatelaine magazines, and a columnist and regular contributor to The Globe and Mail newspaper. When she turned forty, a now-or-never feeling made her quit her job to enroll in culinary school, and she’s been exploring her relationship with food on the page ever since. Bonny was born in Edmonton, Alberta, and lives in Toronto with her husband and little dog, Bruno. Her three almost-adult children come and go. She holds a Master of Fine Art in creative nonfiction and teaches writing at the University of Toronto’s School of Continuing Studies and King’s University in Halifax. In 2022, an excerpt of How to Share an Egg won the Dave Greber Book Award for social justice writing.