The famous Wiener Küche had long been a collective culinary tradition of Jews and non-Jews alike. It was perhaps the perfect example, in an imperfect and Anti-Semitic city, of two formerly distinct groups moving towards each other and integrating while daily creating, cooking, and eating one cuisine. This is to be expected of people who lived so long and close to each other, when there still was an ‘us’ in Vienna before 1938, as fragile as it may have been. Any knowledge of this shared history was wiped out by genocide and mass flight – after 1945, there were almost no Viennese Jews left in Vienna to remind us. It required the memories and cookbooks of Jewish refugees and survivors across the world to rediscover the contributions of Viennese Jews to the famous Viennese Cuisine.
