Looking Back Through the Kitchen Window

This is a book on my travel from East to West. It is also an imaginary trip back to my childhood, as well as a culinary trip, as it is accompanied by memories and happenings related to the taste and scents of certain foods. This trip took me to the faraway city of my childhood, „beyond the forests“, into a mysterious land that once bore the sign of immutability.

Dagmar Dusil’s Looking Back Through the Kitchen Window is an altogether winning book, which we should keep handy and be able to pick up one recipe or another to match the spirit of the moment and of conviviality, to savour our revisiting other times and places. The recipies and memories here come from Austrian-Hungarian and Transylvanian-Romanian traditions intwined; added to the mix are the author’s particular family traditions, bringing in some features of Czech and Italian cuisine. The very first recipe in the book is that of … mămăliga, with its variant polenta! Ioana Ieronim (Observatorul Cultural)

The cookbook that Dagmar Dusil offers us is an interesting, even thrilling story, it follows the journey of a family from Eastern to Western Europe and back, from the prosperous West to the childhood lived in a Transylvania flooded with history, scents and sentiments. Anni Lorei Mainka (Deutsche Welle)

Dagmar Dusil chose to tell us about the exceptional beauty of life in a once fairytale-like city of several ethnic groups… Her story, with its lyrical touches and underlying tensions of the time under control, succeeds to summon moments of charm and grace and a zone of tranquillity against the background noise of the communist era. Dusil’s narrative focuses on her family’s private life and on their kitchen with its German-Romanian-Hungarian- Austrian and other recipes. Flori Balanescu (Preface to the Romanian edition)