Bread and Milk

Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist, translated by Saskia Vogel, Coach House Books

Despite bringing people together, sparking fond memories, serving as a gift or apology, and being an undeniable human necessity, food is often overlooked in the routine of daily life. Yet it's not so much about the food we eat, but rather the smiles shared around the dinner table or the ice cream parlor where you decided chocolate was better than vanilla. Food is a conduit for love and community, a way for people to experience a world of old memories and new opportunities. Food is associated with what is around us, but what about the relationship between food and ourselves? 

In Bread and Milk, Karolina Ramqvist dives headfirst into the complex relationship between a woman and what she chooses to eat. She examines the childhood dishes she once enjoyed and despised, using food as a tool to dissect familial relationships, societal concepts of the traditional woman, the struggles of navigating motherhood, and the confusion accompanying growing up.  

Through her masterful weaving of past and present narratives, she redefines what food can mean to a person, emphasizing its importance in growth from adolescence into adulthood. She presents food to the reader in new ways, challenging preconceived notions of what it can be; food is a sign of love, food is memory, food is communication and comfort and a display of social norms. It is identity and history and environment and an escape from the self. Through her own rocky relationship with food, Ramqvist reflects on her childhood with a fresh, unique perspective that keeps a reader engaged through the novel’s entirety. 

Ramqvist infuses her descriptions with an understanding and appreciation for the art of cooking that invites the reader into the culinary world of her childhood, asking them to sit with her at the big white table in her dining room, to stand at the stove in her grandmother’s kitchen, and to eat with her in front of the TV of her second childhood home. Her mouthwatering details invoke a collection of sights, smells, and tastes that will stick with a reader long after the last page. You might not want to read this book on an empty stomach. Her brilliant prose digs deep into the universal experiences had in childhood and adult life, beautifully and profoundly voicing thoughts and feelings that many people are unable to articulate. 

Ramqvist creates an engaging reading experience through an intergenerational narrative that entwines her own life with her mother’s and grandmother’s. She speaks on the difficulties her grandmother experienced in discovering the “postwar woman” in Sweden and finding her love for cooking for other people. She describes her mother’s own issues with showing affection and the unconventional eating habits passed down through her family. Ramqvist finds herself in the middle of it all, questioning the “traditional” roles women are expected to fill and challenging the idea that cooking is an outdated societal task women must carry out, presenting it instead as an expression of love and womanhood. By wrestling with historically defined conceptions of what the relationship between a woman and food should look like, Ramqvist offers insight into a world where eating is not non-feminine, but rather one of the most loving and special things a woman can do. 

It is impossible to read Karolina Ramqvist’s powerful and vulnerable memoir without reexamining your own relationship with food and the people in your life. She asks what the presence and absence of food in a person’s life means, imploring the reader to look more closely at the food they eat and what those interactions can teach us about ourselves. Food is love, and through the exploration of childhood, grief, marriage, parenting, alienation, and self-discovery, Ramqvist eloquently pens that love is also food.