Cooking and Food as the Language of Love

Cooking and Food as the Language of Love is the practice through which Stefania Tchornenko makes care tangible. Meals and domestic service sustain Adèle Anger, Petro, and their household, but they also give Stefania a way to express attachment when her place in the family is uncertain and her feelings are difficult to name. The same cooking that makes her indispensable can conceal the labor behind other people’s comfort; at the novel’s close, it also becomes the foundation of a hoped-for life beyond service, without severing her devotion to Adèle.

Care Made Material

For Stefania, affection takes the form of precise, repeated work. On Adèle and Petro’s honeymoon, she arranges for Adèle to receive soft-boiled eggs, seeks out fresh cream for her coffee, and tends to her hair and clothes. She also prepares Adèle’s baths with scented salts, oils, and herbal infusions. The journey reveals the intimacy of Stefania’s care, as well as Petro’s resentment: he has agreed to Adèle’s insistence that Stefania accompany them, yet acts as if Stefania’s work is invisible. The care that makes Adèle’s comfort possible is folded into the experience of the honeymoon without being acknowledged as its cause.

This pattern continues at home, where Stefania’s tasks include preparing meals, keeping house, carrying Petro’s lunch to wherever he is working, and making food for Adèle, whose anemia leads Stefania to prepare apples studded with iron nails. She also changes the buckets catching rainwater from the leaky roof. Such details place cooking within a wider, often unrecognized burden of household labor: feeding the family is not an isolated gift but one part of the service that organizes Stefania’s days. Her devotion therefore has a double character. It is a freely felt attachment, but it is also labor performed within a relationship whose unequal terms are made explicit when Adèle describes the raising of a servant as a form of training.

Cooking as Emotional Practice

Cooking also gives Stefania a way to regulate distress. When she cannot find peace, she turns to the kitchen and to a sequence of actions—straining, reducing, roasting, and frying. The transformation of ingredients into food restores a sense of continuity: after a painful period, the work allows life to go on. In her account, this response is bodily and practical before it is explanatory; the kitchen becomes a place where feeling can be redirected into a task with a result.

Food also becomes a measure of whether her care is welcomed. Stefania imagines herself in the qualities of the dishes she serves: fragrant with roasted garlic, savory, peppery, delicate, and nourishing. She gives herself without reserve and wants the people she feeds to eat. When they do not, she interprets their refusal as rejection of her. That equation makes the emotional stakes of cooking unusually high. A meal is nourishment, but for Stefania it is also an offered self, and an untouched dish can feel like proof that the offer has failed.

This attachment is not sentimentalized as effortless. Stefania’s work can turn care into exhaustion and self-erasure. She describes swallowing bitterness and continuing her duties because she sees facilitating Adèle’s life as her task, rather than correcting injustice. The kitchen is thus both a source of agency—one of the places where Stefania’s knowledge and skill matter—and an instrument through which an unequal domestic order is maintained.

Skill, Hospitality, and Recognition

Stefania’s cooking is conspicuous in scenes of hospitality, where the household’s social standing depends in part on what she prepares and serves. When Ernest Thorn arrives unexpectedly, she improvises with the food available: potato-stuffed cabbages, crisped blood sausage, leftover grilled meat, ham, and aspic. Thorn praises the meal and approaches her in the kitchen, while Adèle later presents the household’s treatment of Stefania as a carefully managed education of a servant. Adèle argues that such training requires humane conduct and intimacy, but her account also exposes the boundary she wants to preserve between a considerate mistress and an overly familiar servant. The food earns admiration; the labor and skill behind it remain subject to the household’s hierarchy.

A later report about a meal for an archduke extends Stefania’s reputation beyond the home. The reported menu is specific and abundant: fresh spinach salad with radishes, tomatoes, cucumbers, mushrooms, kohlrabi, onion, parsley, olive oil, and lemon; tomato soup; cauliflower gratin; pancakes with pâté and mushrooms; and baked trout with potatoes. According to the account, the archduke had intended to visit Stanislaviv but remained at the table over the meal before continuing to Lviv. Stefania initially takes the story as a joke. Even so, the episode gives her cooking a reach beyond the household: a meal she prepared is credited with holding an important guest’s attention and delaying his departure.

The contrast between public praise and private recognition recurs at Adèle’s birthday gathering. Stefania prepares a wide range of dishes, including French-style green salad with garlic bread, apple and herring salad, stuffed tomatoes, lemon ice, orgeat, and a raspberry drink. Guests praise the desserts and pastries, while Stefania tries not to enter into their conversation. Once the guests have eaten, she returns in her own account to the repetitive work of preparing, cooking, baking, washing, cleaning, and mending, and to the expectation that she should keep silent. Petro, however, takes a tray from her and carries it toward the kitchen. He tells her that without her the evening—and their home—would not have been possible, and calls her family. His acknowledgment does not undo the servant role that Stefania describes, but it makes visible a kinship that her labor has long sustained.

Feeding as Relationship and Change

The novel links food to relationships beyond the household as well. Stefania remembers caring for the tench she later has to kill and cook. She had fed them bread crumbs and grown attached to them; their deaths sharpen the division between a living creature she had treated as company and the food she must prepare and serve. The scene complicates the language of care: feeding can foster attachment, while domestic duty can require Stefania to transform a dependent creature into a meal.

Her cooking also helps Felix change. As he grows and gains weight, Stefania fears that he may not manage outside the conditions in which he has been living. She credits her cakes, soups, meats, desserts, and fruit mousses as part of his adjustment to ordinary life. Food here is not only an expression of her feelings but a form of practical support, sustaining a child as he becomes less physically vulnerable and begins to speak. When Felix says “maman” to Adèle, food’s role in care converges with a newly spoken sign of attachment within the household.

At the same time, Stefania’s meals can become a way of imagining escape. When Velvele proposes a new life in the New World, she returns to planning food for an upcoming feast, as if a menu might help her regain composure. Her notes range from familiar salads to a raspberry drink, and the act of planning shows both the reach of her skill and the pull of the work that binds her to Adèle. Later, as the house burns, she imagines joining Velvele in a restaurant: he would bring capital and an understanding of what customers want, while she would cook food good enough to rival Franz Sacher’s restaurant in Vienna. She pictures people eating her cakes, meat, fish, and stuffed vegetables, then carrying her food and affection across Europe and over the ocean to Adèle.

That final vision does not imagine love as something she must relinquish in order to leave. Stefania imagines her food reaching Adèle even from far away, carrying care beyond the household that has depended on her service. Cooking remains both her intimate language and her professional capacity: the skill that has made her labor useful to others might also support a partnership and a restaurant bearing her name. The imagined future turns the repeated act of feeding into a possibility of independence, while preserving the attachment that has given that labor its emotional meaning.