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Intimate Experiences: War and Food in Lee Miller

By Karina Elizabeth Vázquez

There are only a few steps between my living room and kitchen, so a section of the library stands directly opposite to a countertop stacked with cookbooks. It wasn’t until I began to think about what to write about Lee Miller (1907-1977), her work as a war correspondent, battlefield photographer, and her relationship with gastronomy, that I realized that two books sit opposite one another, one in the library and one in the kitchen: The Unwomanly Face of War (2017) by Svetlana Alexievich and Lee Miller: A Life with Food, Friends & Recipes (2017) by Miller’s granddaughter Ami Bouhassane. The texts engage in a necessary dialogue between what is expressed in testimonies from women of the Russian army collected by Alexievich and what is present in the lives of Lee Miller, the surrealist muse and photographer, the war correspondent for Vogue, and the brilliant chef. War is an extremely intimate experience, says Alexievich, and in their testimonies, women who participated in the war speak about what happened and didn’t happen to their bodies. During the war they didn’t feel like women; upon returning, their bodies had become dead, they had lost their menstruation, they had to deal with the scars, and they felt no desire. The burden of rebuilding daily life, following gender mandates, forced them to silence the trauma of that violent experience. What did Lee Miller feel in her body during the war? She too experienced silence. Upon returning from the war, she filed all her photographic material in the attic (rediscovered by her son, Anthony Penrose, only after her death in 1977). She instead found in the intimacy of the kitchen, in culinary creativity, a healing mechanism.

An overhead view of a history and photography book laying on a kitchen counter
Fig. 1.  A view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

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Biographers and critics have pointed out that Miller led several lives: as a model and surrealist artist of the 1920s and 1930s, a fashion photographer of the late 1930s, a war correspondent and combat photographer from 1944 to 1946, and a creative chef from the postwar years until her death. Miller’s photography and culinary art are not separate and share a common spirit. There is a continuity between the surrealism of her early years, her experience at the front—where, as photojournalist David E. Scherman has noted, she used her culinary skills and knowledge to search for non-perishable foods and herbs to add flavor to rations and cooking stews in helmets—and the imagination and attention to detail of her later cooking.

Bright recipe and photography books lay open across a kitchen counter
Fig. 2. An alternate view of the author’s kitchen/library, courtesy of the author.

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Two images that have the body as a common component come to mind when I think about the relationship between war and food in Lee Miller’s work. The first is the photograph Severed Breasts From Radical Surgery In A Place Setting, from 1929, where the luminosity of her lens captures the violence inflicted on the female body by showing a removed breast served on a plate, ready to be eaten. The image denounces beauty standards, medical discourse, and eating norms, which coalescence as if they were simultaneously a scalpel and a utensil that intensely intervene in the female body and feelings. It’s clear that, even in her time as Man Ray’s muse and fashion photographer, Miller was a correspondent in another war and a photographer on another battlefield.

The transformation of everyday life imposed by the world of war on women’s lives and bodies appeared through Lee’s lens in critical montages that indicate the same thing as the testimonies collected by Alexievich: for women, above all, war is murder and, furthermore, a hard daily labor in which feeding themselves and caring for others occupies most of the time and space that survives the violence. I think of “Homeless: Like The Women Of German-Invaded Countries, German Women Now Cook In The Ruins”, a photograph taken in Nuremberg in 1945. Cooking is an act that never occurs in a vacuum, even when it is the result of the violent destruction of the meaning that, for better or worse, orders our hours and days.

The second image is the recipe for “Cauliflower Breast,” which appears in one of the photographs accompanying the article “How to Make an Art of the Happy Weekend. The Personal Strategy and Beautiful Food of Lee Penrose,” by Bettina McNulty, published in House & Gardens in 1973 (and reproduced in Bouhassane’s book) under the title “Cauliflower Mayonnaise.” As Bouhassane points out, this time the breasts are served by invitation only, a clear indication that Miller is positioned differently than in that 1929 image: equally critical, but probably more tired and, as a result of that tiredness, willing to create differently. I visualize Lee Miller in her kitchen, imaginatively searching for opportunities to counter what her camera captured at Buchenwald. Cooking is also a form of remembrance; dishes can become memories. Once again, I turn to Svetlana Alexievich.For her, memories are not impassive narratives of the past, but creative acts that allow us to rewrite our lives. And I can see Miller, with her recipe books, concocting something simple and disruptive like an “Onion Upside-Down Cake, and later on, as Bouhassane recalls, laughing and disappointed after winning a culinary contest that had a bag of onions as a prize. Her relationship with the culinary world, before, during, and after the war, was a way of being present, of relocating herself as a mechanism of resistance.

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Karina Vázquez (Ph.D., University of Florida) teaches and researches Latin American literature, and cultures, visual studies, and critical pedagogy. She the Director of Community-Based Learning (CBL) in the Department of Latina American, Latino & Iberian Studies at the University of Richmond. Her teaching specializations include Spanish language and seminars on work and gender, food and culture, and graphic novels. In 2023, Dr. Vázquez co-curated the exhibition Jay Lynn Gomez: Domestic Scenes Reconsidered / Jay Lynn Gomez: Otra mirada sobre lo doméstico at the Joel and Lila Harnett Museum at the University of Richmond. Some of her publications on Latin American literature and culture, literary and visual representations of work, CBL, and food studies can be accessed through https://scholarship.richmond.edu/lalis/.

Food, Community, and Resistance in Hyperinflationary Venezuela

By Oriele Benavides

The Venezuelan crisis of 2014-2015, broadly characterized by a drastic drop in oil production and prices and harsh international economic sanctions, caused absolute disorder and intensified a diaspora that continues today. Effects included hyperinflation, beginning in 2015, that reached stratospheric levels when it hit 103,008% in 2018. At that moment, the government’s rhetoric presented the situation as an “economic war,” offering a framework that emphasized a polarized vision on the matter, while shifting focus away from its own responsibility in the managing of the crisis. The production and distribution of food was one of the sectors most affected by the crisis. In the collective memory, these harsh years are remembered via ingredients that came to represent time: the year of the mango, the year of the cassava, the season of the eggplant or the Chinese bean, and so on.

Two initiatives took place during this time that used food to draw commonalities in the face of destruction. These examples underscore the value of what French sociologist Claude Fischler calls “commensality,” the human tendency to eat together, which, according to Fischler, is “one of the most striking manifestations of human sociality.” They also point to a collective dimension that is activated to ensure the same existence of this “commensality.”

A handmade sign features red and black text promoting La Alpargata Solidaria.
Fig. 1. Image from La Alpargata Solidaria Facebook group. Image courtesy of the author.

The first, “La Alpargata Solidaria,” began in October 2015 in the Venezuelan capital of Caracas as a network of economic solidarity and responsible consumption. Its name refers to a Venezuelan proverb: “put on your alpargatas, because what’s coming is joropo.” “Alpargatas” are the local peasant’s footwear par excellence, a symbol of rurality in a country that has been drastically urbanized since the oil boom of the twentieth century. The joropo, on the other hand, designates the festivities of the countryside and its frenetic music and, by extension, its dance. The phrase “a ponerse las alpargatas porque lo que viene es joropo” thus refers to fast and intricate national music as a metaphor for ensuing difficulties and challenging and frantic dance as a way of naming tricks to overcome them.

An orange circular logo features two dancing figures.
Fig. 2. Image from La Alpargata Solidaria Facebook group. Image courtesy of the author.

The network, which at its largest reached about 180 families, was mainly organized around a monthly “collective consumption” that distributed vegetables from one of Venezuela’s oldest cooperatives, Cecocesola. The vegetables were weighed and sorted to be distributed equally among all participants. The consumo became an intense day of activity, lasting up to seven hours, with a parallel market of local products, childcare for caregivers, a music team curating the playlist, and a shared lunch prepared on-site using ingredients from the consumo, which varied according to Cecosesola’s monthly production. Even though the cost of the products purchased through Cecosesola was barely below the market price, I think it was clear to those of us who persisted in the initiative that the real reason for being there was to preserve the certainty that we were able to create something in community, even under the circumstances. Beyond, or rather around, the food crisis, the “Alpargata Solidaria” became a platform for care and solidarity at the beginning of the emptying of the city and rampant precariousness. The initiative lasted until the pandemic, which wiped it out, like so many other collective experiments.

“Aguantar la pela” is a Venezuelan idiom that has variants in other Spanish-speaking nations. It means to tolerate with fortitude the blows of a misfortune that is perceived as arbitrary and is expected to be temporary. Around the same time of the Alpargata, also in the heyday of the use of certain social platforms, a group with that name emerged. The “pelas” at that time were many, but again, this community began to organize itself through the sharing of recipes that substituted unattainable, missing, or scarce ingredients. In this way, a peculiar collective recipe book emerged, permanently nourished by the more than 70,000 participants, featuring a menu consisting of mostly vegetables and some cheaper proteins: plantain larded meats, carrot mayonnaise, cakes without flour or eggs, cassava, pumpkin or beet arepas, sardines cooked in every possible way, and many more dishes. In addition to addressing the decline in per capita calorie consumption and the absence of basic processed products such as sugar, flour, or oil, the site was characterized by a nostalgic and communal desire to recreate everyday flavors that had suddenly become inaccessible.

Jacques Lacan, who, like Sigmund Freud, resists the idea of a collective unconscious, nevertheless says that certain idioms concentrate forms of jouissance that are shared by a society. It does not seem trivial to me that the names of these two experiences are based on popular Venezuelan expressions. Their character reveals how colloquial language sediments the collective intelligence with which people resist precarity and violence, even if this resistance ultimately fails. They are gestures that, planted at the intersection of language and the symbolic dimension of food, encode a desire to continue living in community. Both “La Alpargata” and “Aguantando la pela” were ways of imagining (and enacting) survival that went beyond mere necessity, even if they were born out of extreme hardship. It was as if the language and communal practices around food outlined the situated strategies through which life—in all its excessive dignity: flavors, metaphors, companionship—is grounded and sustained.

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Oriele Benavides is a PhD candidate at Princeton University. With a background in Latin American literature and psychoanalysis, her research interests include Latin American novels, feminisms and social movements. Her work has been published in Mitologías Hoy, El Taco en la Brea, Mentekupa, and Latin American Literature Today, among others.

Anguish as a Form of Resistance: Ignacio Doménech’s Cocina de Recursos (Deseo mi comida) in Civil War Spain

By Yanet Acosta

A cookbook is much more than a simple collection of recipes.[i] In the case of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) by Ignacio Doménech, the cookbook is not only a tool of critique but also a form of resistance. It pushes back against the devastation of war, a devastation that leaves its mark not only on bodies, through the absence of food, but also on minds, through the torment of craving what can no longer be eaten.

Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) was published in Spain in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Its author, Ignacio Doménech, had been one of the country’s most renowned chefs before the war. He trained under the legendary Auguste Escoffier at London’s iconic Savoy Hotel and became a major figure in popularizing haute cuisine in Spain, thanks to the publishing house he founded upon returning home.[ii]

A chef displays a platter of fowl to a curious woman.
Fig. 1. Cover of Ignacio Doménech’s magazine, El Gorro Blanco. Image courtesy of the author.

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To fully grasp its significance—and, as we will see, the deep sorrow expressed by Doménech—one must consider the context. Throughout the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Franco’s propaganda repeatedly promised that their victory would put an end to scarcity. Yet the war’s end brought no such relief. Instead, food shortages worsened due to Spain’s international isolation and the abandonment of farmland. Agricultural production didn’t return to pre-war levels until 1950. As a result, the rationing system implemented by Franco’s regime in 1939 became increasingly severe. By 1941, rations were allocated based on social class and profession. In 1943, the system further tightened with the introduction of individual ration cards for every citizen.

Doménech’s critical stance on these developments is immediately evident in the book’s title, which includes the parenthetical phrase “Deseo mi comida” (“I crave my food”). This isn’t a simple grammatical clarification. It reads more like a desperate cry. This plea is not only a response to wartime scarcity but also the profound deprivation of the postwar years.

A man and woman and child eat at a circular table laden with food. A cat waits patiently at the woman's feet.
Fig. 2. The cover of Ignacio Doménech’s Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida). Image courtesy of the author.

The ensuing book is divided into two parts. The first offers a collection of recipes accompanied by the author’s own commentary. What’s striking is Doménech’s shifts between past and present verb tenses. While this might seem like a grammatical inconsistency, it’s actually a meaningful choice. Having authored more than thirty cookbooks—including Marichu, la mejor cocinera española (1919) and La guía del gastrónomo y del maître de hotel (1919)—as well as thousands of articles, Doménech had total command of the Spanish language. His use of tenses appears deliberate; the present refers to postwar Spain, while the past evokes the wartime experience. He also speaks directly of the postwar context. At one point he writes: “In these postwar times, any cook with good taste and imagination is forced to create a thousand little surprises in the kitchen.”

Many of the words in the first part of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) reflect the author’s profound pain. Doménech makes this clear in his own description of the book:

“Los imposibles anhelos de un cocinero que, en tiempos de guerra, ante las realidades del hambre que ya mascábamos y, sin poderlo remediar, soñaba a todas horas con los más suculentos manjares”

“The impossible longings of a cook who, during times of war, facing the reality of the hunger between our teeth, could not help but dream constantly of the most succulent dishes.”

His words carry a quiet defiance—a resistance not only to the hunger itself but also to the circumstances that produced it, the war, and his life in the postwar period. Remarkably, however, the cookbook made it past Franco’s censorship without obstruction. This was largely due to the subtlety of Doménech’s approach. Censorship at the time focused on direct attacks against the regime’s dogma, moral standards, the Church, or the state. His resistance, by contrast, was indirect, anticipating the tone and strategy that many later writers and journalists would adopt in their own quiet opposition.

In Cocina de recursos, both subtext and shifts in verb tense become tools of critique. Doménech also makes use of irony—especially when discussing the absurdities of rationing. For example, he writes:

“Todo es cuestión de tíquets, carnets, cartas de trabajo, cartas de racionamiento para asegurar algo de víveres en crudo o en guisados. De modo que por esto digo que debían racionarse también las ganas de comer, ya que unos individuos, por su sobriedad de toda su vida o por su constitución física, comen mucho menos que otros individuos que tienen mucho más apetito, con justicia la ración no puede ser igual”.

“Everything depends on tickets, cards, work papers, and ration cards to get some food, either raw or cooked. That’s why I say even hunger should be rationed — some people, because of their habits or their body type, eat much less than others who are much hungrier. So it wouldn’t be fair to give everyone the same amount.”

In the second part of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida), Doménech shifts his focus from recipes to food criticism, presenting a series of restaurant reviews written in the form of narrative chronicles. These accounts, dating from 1937 and 1938, are filled with anecdotes, encounters, conversations, and commentary—and unlike in the first part, here Doménech exclusively uses the past tense.

Yet one anecdote stands out as oddly contemporary, more reflective of the author’s present reality than of the period he’s supposedly describing. He recounts a conversation with a wealthy, titled gentleman who proposes a business venture: opening a restaurant that would traffic in black-market goods. During the postwar years, black market trading—or estraperlo—was rampant in Spain, making this episode feel particularly timely.[iii]

These and other insights show that Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida) is far more than a simple cookbook. It is a testament of suffering and an act of resistance. In a postwar Spain plagued by food shortages even harsher than those of the Civil War, Doménech’s work was a quiet but powerful protest, expressed through the language of cuisine.

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[i] Scholars like Susan Leonardi, Janet Floyd, Laurel Forster, Janet Theophano, Cara de Silva, Anne L. Bower, María Paz Moreno, Rebecca Ingram, and Lara Anderson have convincingly shown this. See Acosta, 2024.

[ii] Simón Palmer, 2012.

[iii]  This observation is echoed by Miguel I. Arrieta Gallastegui, editor of the most recent edition of Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida), published by Editorial Trea.

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References

Acosta, Yanet. “Cocina y crítica gastronómica de guerra y posguerra por Ignacio Doménech.” The Foodie Studies Magazine, nº 1 (2016): 4-19.

Acosta, Yanet. “Investigación contemporánea de las recetas manuscritas. El repositorio on- line de los recetarios domésticos históricos de Canarias.” Acosta &Ingram, Food Studies en español. Fragua, 2024.

Domenech, Ignacio. Cocina de recursos (Deseo mi comida). Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2011.

Moreno, María Paz, De la página al plato. El libro de cocina en España. Gijón: Ediciones Trea, 2012.

Simón Palmer, María del Carmen, “Ignacio Doménech, autor y editor culinario,” Cincinnati Romance Review, volumen 33 (2012), University of Cincinnati, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.


Yanet Acosta, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid, Spain and research affiliate with the Cátedra UNESCO for Communication, is also Director of the Masters in Communication and Food Journalism, The Foodie Studies. Awarded the Spanish Royal Academy’s Álvaro Cunqueiro Prize for Journalism in 2021, she is co-editor of Periodismo Gastronómico, Investigación y Comunicación Intercultural (2021) and Food Studies en español: Investigación actual en gastronomía y comunicación, with Rebecca Ingram (2024, Fragua). Current projects include the Digital Humanities recipe website and database, Recetarios domésticos históricos de Canarias (2021-present) and “#TetuánFoodie,” a collaboration with Laboratorios Ciudadanos, Madrid. A gastronomical journalist for more than two decades, she is also the author of the novels El chef ha muerto (2011) and Matar al padre (2017).

Curry Goes to War: Indian Army Field Rations in World War Two

By Pradeep Barua

The Indian Army participated in both  world wars in the twentieth century. During the First World War (1914-1918,) 1.3 million Indian soldiers fought for the British Empire. Another two million men joined the Indian Army and fought for the allies in World War Two (1939-1945).[i] In the latter case, feeding this massive army in various theatres of war, ranging from the jungles of Burma (Myanmar) to the deserts of North Africa to the frozen Apennines of Italy, proved to be a major challenge for the Army.

Alongside the challenges of the battlefield and terrain, the Indian Army was also a multi-faith army comprised of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. In addition to religious differences, Hindu and Sikh soldiers were subject to caste considerations. Food and rations had to be prepared along strict guidelines to adhere to caste and religious sensitivities. Two cooks or Langris were assigned to a company of soldiers (about 100 men). Depending on the company’s composition, the cooks would be Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, and of a particular caste as needed. The presence of the Langris ensured that food for the different religions and castes was provided for in the right way. The Indian Army also supplied stackable cooking pots, so soldiers could prepare their own meals in the field. This was especially important to high caste Brahmin Hindu soldiers who had to prepare and eat their own food in order to preserve their caste status.[ii]

Frontline British soldiers had access to 24-hour ration packs that included tinned bully beef, spam, steak, kidney pudding and sausages. These were not acceptable to Indian soldiers, and it was subsequently a challenge to keep them fed on the frontlines. To aid in this, dehydrated lentils, fish, vegetables, and fruit were provided to Indian soldiers engaged in combat.[iii] Indian soldiers, like their British counterparts, also foraged for fresh eggs, fish, and poultry as the situation allowed.

Whether it was lentils, fish, or meat, the favorite form of preparation was a curry. It was slow cooked in a pot and served on an enameled metal plate roughly 12 inches across.[iv] The slow cooking tenderized hard dehydrated lentils, dry fish, and even tough cuts of meat. Crucial to the curry was the addition of a blend of powdered spices that each Indian soldier carefully hoarded and carried into the frontlines. A base curry spice blend included turmeric, cumin, and coriander. To this, people added other spices such as chili, black pepper, cinnamon, or nutmeg depending on regional preferences. The curry was usually eaten with a flat wheat bread called the chapatti, which was made every day by the Langris. The curry and the chapattis became synonymous with Indian troops in various theatres of conflict. Many civilians in the combat zones, who were assisted by Indian troops, fondly recall the food that the Indian soldiers shared with them. In Italy, for example, villagers today remember with gratitude the curries and chapattis that Indian soldiers distributed among them to relieve starvation during the Italian campaign in World War Two.[v]

Food traditions of the Indian Army developed at the regimental level. The regimental messes evolved and enshrined curry recipes over periods of up to a century.[vi] This knowledge was passed on to the regiment’s battalion cooks. On festive occasions these dishes were cooked in the rear areas and transported to soldiers in forward positions.

What follows is a small representation of curry recipes unique to Indian Army Regiments:

Assam Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment fought mainly in Assam and Burma during the Second World War. An iconic dish is Machoor Tenga Jhool or Fish Sour Curry.

A bowl of red curry with seafood.
Fig. 1. Machoor Tenga Jhool or Fish Sour Curry. Image courtesy of author.

Jammu & Kashmir Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment also fought in Burma during the Second World War. Its iconic dish is Rogan Josh or Mutton Curry.

A bowl of brown curry with mutton.
Fig. 2. Rogan Josh or Mutton Curry. Image courtesy of the author.

Sikh Regiment:

The battalions of this regiment fought in all the major theatres of war that the Indian Army participated in during the Second World War. Its iconic dish is Sarson ki Saag aur Makki ka Roti or Mustard Greens Curry and corn flat bread.

A plate of green curry with a flatbread.
Fig. 3. Sarson ki Saag aur Makki ka Roti or mustard greens curry and corn flat bread. Image courtesy of the author.

Ultimately, the Indian Army regiments enshrined regional customs and traditions. Food served an essential purpose in maintaining these regional identities. The Indian soldiers’ curry rations played a vital role in ensuring that the Indian Army’s morale and well-being was in the best condition during the Second World War.

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[i] See Pradeep Barua, The Late Colonial Indian Army: From the Afghan Wars to the Second World War (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2021).

[ii] “An Army Marches on its Stomach,” National Army Museum, UK, https://www.nam.ac.uk/explore/army-marches-its-stomach

[iii] Kristen Ann Ehrenberger, “Dehydrated Rations for Indian Soldiers in the Second World War,” H-Nutrition, 22 June 2017, https://networks.h-net.org/node/134048/discussions/182894/dehydrated-rations-indian-soldiers-second-world-war

[iv] “Tales From the Supply Depot: Indian Army Enameled Plate,” 18 May 2015, https://hatchfive.wordpress.com/2015/05/18/indian-army-enamelled-plate/

[v] War and Chapati: The Role of Indian Soldiers in Italy during WWII, documentary produced by Assocoiazione Universarte and directed by Harvinder Singh, https://globalhistorydialogues.org/projects/war-and-chapati/

[vi] Regimental Zaikas: Indian Army Regimental Dishes (Bangalore: ASC Centre and College, 2019).


Pradeep Barua is Professor of History at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of several books on South Asia and military history including Gentlemen of the Raj, The State at War in South Asia, The Military Effectiveness of Post-Colonial States, and The Late Colonial Indian Army.

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