DIE GERMANISTIN: Riveting Forays into German-Language Literature by Sheridan Marshall. COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY by Teresa Präauer, translated by Eleanor Updegraff
I was glad to have had a delicious early dinner on Monday evening – a chicken korma cooked by my husband – before heading to the Austrian Cultural Forum to attend the book presentation for Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century, translated by Eleanor Updegraff for Pushkin Press. Präauer’s novel is a literary feast that takes us on a sensuous journey through our food memories. Her writing makes you hungry, both for the actual dishes she describes and the personal recollections of food that this conjures, as well as for more of her delightfully wry brand of literary wit. Fortunately, Präauer is a writer in her prime, and there will undoubtedly be more literary treats in store for her readers, culinary or otherwise.
Cooking in the Wrong Century is the first of Präauer’s novels to be translated into English, and she described how pleased she is that her novel is now available and accessible for her many friends who do not speak German. Eleanor Updegraff has done a beautiful job of translating Präauer’s prose, and the discussion on Monday evening was full of insights about the particular challenges of communicating gastronomic experiences across linguistic borders.
Cooking in the Wrong Century is about a dinner party that starts three times, with the host standing in the kitchen contemplating how the evening will turn out for their guests, as the reader is given the opportunity to experience multiple possible versions of the same gathering. At the same time, the book mocks the social format of dinner parties, and literature about dinner parties. Präauer’s readings on Monday evening were hugely entertaining, accentuating the knowing sense of self-awareness that infuses her writing.
The book pauses every so often and invites readers to remember the first time they tasted certain flavours. Präauer relishes these moments as opportunities for us to share stories, in the way that Proust’s madeleine is a prompt for remembrance and an invitation to reflect. She identifies how our memories of certain tastes – such as dishes once cooked by our grandmothers – can trigger strong emotions and give rise to reflections about what we gain and lose in life.
Präauer also encourages us to consider the origins and preparation of the food we eat, drawing our attention to the social history of food production and prompting us to think about the social differences between the people who are washing, serving, or consuming food. The dinner party guests are preoccupied with justifying their food choices, and with the morality of food origins and purchasing, often agonising over small decisions about what to buy. Präauer gently satirises her characters’ ineffective moral stances in this regard – as in the humorous episode in which her characters take to the internet to try and find out whether there might be any potential political sensitivities around serving quiche – while acknowledging that she is grateful for socially conscious consumers.
Cooking in the Wrong Century is full of word-play, poetic lists, and puns, that posed challenges for Eleanor Updegraff as she was translating the novel. The regional specificities of food and language in Austria, Germany and Switzerland required a nuanced approach to the translation, and the need to be attuned to different food vocabularies. Updegraff was conscious that she did not want to import the book wholesale into a UK context by, for example, using regionally differentiated words from British English dialects. She sometimes retained Austrian terms in the text, using English paraphrasing to describe them, and sometimes relied on linguistic differences between British and American versions of English. Moderator Andrea Capovilla commented that she had been impressed by Updegraff’s skill at finding apt translations when reading the novel.
As the book presentation drew to a close, and Teresa Präauer encouraged the ACF guests to gravitate towards the glasses of wine waiting at the back of the room, she left us with a final morsel of food for thought with her suggestion that hospitality is always a performance, albeit one enacted with varying degrees of self-consciousness. Präauer was keen to point out that she herself is a better guest than she is a host!
By Sheridan Marshall
COOKING IN THE WRONG CENTURY by Teresa Präauer, translated by Eleanor Updegraff (Pushkin Press, May 2025)
Sheridan Marshall works as a translator from German into English, and as Editorial Consultant for New Books in German. She was Deputy Editor of The Austrian Riveter.
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