In a small apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Israeli-born chef Alon Shaya stands over a pan of chanterelle mushrooms, coaxing out their deep, woodsy aroma. Beside him, Celina Hecht leans in, her frail frame drawing closer to the stove as the scent rises, transporting her back to the Białowieża Forest on the outskirts of Białystok, Poland. There, as a young girl in hiding during the Holocaust, she and her twin sister, Fella, foraged for those mushrooms while danger lurked just beyond the trees.
For Hecht, the emotions evoked by the sizzling pan are complex – fear and hunger and longing intertwined with brief memories of freedom. She recalls summer days spent gathering mushrooms and wild blueberries with other women and children, most of whom did not know the secret she and Fella were concealing: their Jewish identity.
Shaya has his own connection to chanterelles. Native to Louisiana, where the chef lives and cooks, the delicate, golden-hued mushrooms appear regularly on the menus of his restaurants, many of which are located in New Orleans. But the bond between Hecht and Shaya runs deeper than a shared love of fungi. Both understand, in different ways, the power of food memory – the way an aroma or a taste can collapse time, closing the gap between past and present.
Food memory
For Shaya, it is a concept that has earned him worldwide acclaim and notoriety: The dishes of his Bulgarian-Israeli grandmother, once a source of embarrassment during his childhood in suburban Philadelphia, eventually became the foundation of his cooking.
For Hecht, food memory is also a lifeline to her childhood – one marked by dislocation and loss, but also punctuated by the kindness of strangers and the power of belonging. In recreating the flavors of Hecht’s past, Shaya is carrying out what he has long considered his mission as a chef: reclaiming identity through food.
It is also at the heart of his new book, Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival. Part cookbook, part historical narrative, it weaves together stories of survival – including Hecht’s – with recipes inspired by them. The dish she and Shaya are preparing – mushroom, bacon, and goat cheese salad – appears in the chapter about her, alongside chilled blueberry soup with pine nuts, rosemary, and crème fraîche; and potato dumplings with bacon and onions.
The prominence of pork is not incidental. Hecht and her sister spent the war years hidden with a Polish Catholic family, the Kaczyńskas, who raised pigs and cooked with pork regularly. To protect themselves, the girls adopted not only the family’s Catholic identity but also their eating habits, the laws of kashrut giving way to the demands of survival.
Rescued recipes
Memories of a Good Meal grew out of Shaya’s Rescued Recipes initiative, in which he partnered with Holocaust survivor Steven Fenves to recreate dishes from Fenves’s family’s cookbook, which was smuggled out of their apartment by the family’s beloved housekeeper as the Nazis, and their neighbors, descended on it.
Until Fenves’s death in 2025, he and Shaya traveled across the US, hosting live cooking demonstrations and storytelling events that brought his memories to life.
“I felt like with Steven, we were just scratching the surface,” Shaya said in conversation with The Jerusalem Report. “His was one of millions of World War II stories waiting to be told. The book was really born out of my own desire to learn more and to share that knowledge with other people.”
To do so, Shaya partnered with cookbook author and food archivist June Hersh, whom he met through his work on Rescued Recipes. Together, they set out to assemble a collection of narratives that reflected the breadth of wartime experience.
“We wanted the book to touch on different facets of the war, particularly those that are less well known,” he explained. “June has an encyclopedic knowledge of this period, so we started there.”
They initially gathered dozens of potential testimonies before narrowing them down using a single guiding criterion: food.
“We were looking for stories where food really made a difference in someone’s life during that time,” Shaya said.
They ultimately selected 10, which included a Japanese-American internment camp survivor; a Navajo code talker; and a French pastor and his wife, who led their community’s efforts to shelter – and feed – some 5,000 Jews, most of them children.
From there, the pair traveled across the globe to meet their subjects – many now well into their 90s – or, in some cases, their children, listening to accounts of survival and tracing the role food played within them, which Shaya then developed into recipes for the book.
From memory to dish
However, translating a food memory into a composed dish is not as simple as compiling a list of ingredients and instructions. That is where Shaya’s chef skills came in. While some of the recipes in the book draw directly from dishes people remember eating, most are interpretive, shaped not only by what was consumed in moments of crisis but also by what those moments came to represent.
“When you have partisan fighters surviving on potato peels, that’s not going to be the recipe that appears in the book,” Shaya said. “Instead, it becomes the inspiration for Smashed Potatoes with a Vodka Cream Sauce, which showcases not only the way potatoes were a form of sustenance for them but also how it was used to make vodka, which they would drink to keep warm, to celebrate the blowing up of a German ship, as a trading item.”
In the chapter titled “A Story of Breakfast: Salvation in the Dominican Republic,” Shaya and Hersh trace the story of European Jewish refugees who fled persecution and were resettled in the coastal town of Sosúa, where former lawyers, accountants, and merchants were forced to remake themselves as farmers and laborers. Guided by descendants of the original settlers and one surviving member, the two are led through the island, where the legacy of that unlikely experiment still lingers.
Around a shared dinner table on the final night of their visit there, the menu tells the familiar immigrant story of adaptation: traditional dishes reshaped by local ingredients and conditions – potato latkes reimagined with plantains; schnitzel made from red snapper; and a chocolate-and-apricot tres leches cake.
Fusion of flavors
This coalescence of cultures defines not only the book’s recipes but also Shaya’s own cooking. His James Beard-winning approach is built on that same fusion of homeland and home, blending the flavors of Israel with the ingredients of New Orleans in dishes like blue crab hummus and duck matzah ball soup.
Back in Hecht’s kitchen, the mushrooms continue to sizzle as their aroma wafts through her home. The past feels close enough to touch, which for Shaya is exactly the point. “Making her apartment smell like that moment in time when she was a 13-year-old girl, when her family was taken away but she was able to not only survive but find moments of joy. It really is the most meaningful thing I can do as a chef,” he said.
This is the quiet ambition of Memories of a Good Meal – to take distant events, particularly those beginning to fade from collective memory, and transform them into something that can be touched, tasted, and, most importantly, shared.
“I hope that readers will find their own way to love this book,” Shaya said, “whether that’s through the stories, the recipes, or both.
“But however they come to it, every chapter is meant to be a conversation starter – a way for people to ask what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it from happening again.”■