Review: Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook

Miss Graham’s Cold War Cookbook by Celia Rees
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Edith Graham, a teacher, goes to Germany after the end of WWII to help rebuild schools and reform the Nazi education system. Her cousin Leo was something hush-hush in SOE and has not only encouraged but actively lobbied for Edith to go. Leo has asked her to keep her eyes and ears to the ground for any hints of Nazis in hiding, especially Kurt von Stabenow, a former lover of Edith's who was involved in the torture and murder of prisoners for medical research purposes, and his wife Elisabeth. Then two acquaintances also ask Edith to search Germany for Kurt, they tell Edith that the British establishment is less concerned with punishing Kurt (and others like him) and more concerned with harnessing his knowledge and research for their own purposes as the world slides into the Cold War. These women, Vera and Dori, want to know what happened to four British female spies who were captured almost as soon as they landed in enemy territory and never seen again. Vera and Dori suspect that there was an enemy agent deep in SOE and they want justice for these women, they want Kurt put on trial for war crimes and hanged.

Soon Edith, an innocent aboard, is mixed up in Cold War politics as the victorious allies each try to leverage the Nazi scientists' knowledge. She sees the pitiful state of the defeated German people, and all the displaced persons fleeing Eastern Europe from the Russians, the black market dealings and the people ready to exploit. Pushed and pulled by friends she makes, each of whom has an ulterior motive, Edith covertly reports back to Dori by way of a cipher hidden in recipes which she sends back home, using her existing alter-ego Stella Snelling who wrote war-time recipes for a newspaper.

I wanted to like this book, and parts of it were very well written and engrossing. However, it felt as if there were too many ingredients, or (to take the cookery motif further) as though this had started off as one thing and then evolved into something else. For example, every chapter starts with a recipe, gleaned from Edith's interactions with Allied occupiers, German people and refugees from the East. These are supposed to be a code, but the code was never clearly explained and it appeared highly coincidental that Edith was able to send a coded message about current events using a recipe which she had just obtained - ie she just received a Latvian recipe the week she wanted to send a message about a Latvian refugee. There was a 'romance' with a Jewish Allied soldier which just didn't ring true, he and Edith seemed to fall in love almost at first sight. Also the story was framed by events in 1989 which were intended to be cryptic. The problem was that I had totally forgotten the opening chapter by the time I got to the end of the book and had to reread it, so all the casual misdirection was totally wasted and, if I had kept the opening chapter front and centre it would have made it simpler for me to know who Edith could trust, thus destroying the suspense of the rest of the book.

Overall, I don't think the book needed the recipes or the 1989 wrap-around, and I had some questions as to why wait until 1989, the scenes in Germany were completely harrowing and didn't need the additional quirks.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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