Cooking as care and emotional expression

Cooking in the novel is both practical care and Stefania Tchornenko’s language of attachment: by selecting, preparing, and serving food, she tends to Adèle and Petro, steadies herself, and seeks evidence that her presence is wanted. The work’s emotional force lies in its double character. It is freely infused with love, but performed within a household hierarchy that can call intimate labor training, duty, or service.

Care Made Practical

Stefania’s care takes the form of repeated, specific tasks rather than abstract devotion. During Adèle’s periods of weakness, she prepares food and remedies: fresh meat juice mixed with egg yolk and hot water, baked pigeons bought from Pinkas Ritter at the city market, and the Maria-Theresienbouillon associated with treatment for weakness. She also attends to Adèle’s other needs, including changing a pillowcase wet with tears and making cool cucumber-juice compresses. Cooking sits within a larger practice of watching over Adèle’s body and responding to distress.

The domestic routine extends beyond Adèle. Stefania prepares meals, shops for provisions, and carries Petro’s lunch to whichever religious building he is working in. In the household, her food work is inseparable from its upkeep: she describes changing buckets beneath leaks, cleaning, and preparing meals as parts of the same daily round. The food that reaches the table depends on labor that is largely performed out of sight.

Her attention also reaches back to small, intimate acts of provision. On a trip with Adèle and Petro, she arranged for Adèle and herself to receive soft-boiled eggs at the hotels while Petro received none; she also went to the market each morning for fresh cream for Adèle’s coffee. These details make care a matter of choosing, sourcing, and distributing food, not simply cooking it. They also show how Stefania’s service follows Adèle into settings beyond the home.

Food as Emotional Language

When Stefania cannot find peace, she turns to kitchen work. Straining and reducing, grilling, roasting, and stuffing give her a sequence of actions to follow; as she cooks, she describes her heart opening again and life continuing. The kitchen becomes a place where distress is not resolved by explanation but temporarily made bearable through work.

Serving makes that emotional logic explicit. Stefania imagines herself through the qualities of what she prepares: fragrant like roasted garlic, savory like good meat, sharp like pepper, delicate like milk pudding, nourishing like roast duck. She gives herself through the dishes and wants the people she serves to eat. When they do not, she interprets their refusal as rejection of her. Food is therefore more than a gift: it becomes, for Stefania, a test of whether her care—and she herself—has been accepted.

That investment can produce exuberant labor as well as routine obligation. One night she spends hours making fragrant cabbage pastries and grilling makaguigui, also preparing gingerbread mixture. Early on Sunday she dresses, packs the sweets into a basket, and sets off on her Dürkopp Diana, so eager that she forgets Adèle’s chamber pot. The episode makes the intensity of her food-giving visible in a concrete reversal: in the rush to carry treats outward, she neglects one of the ordinary duties that usually organizes her service.

Feeding, Service, and Unequal Recognition

Food is prepared within a relationship in which affection and authority are difficult to separate. When Adèle explains to Ernest Thorn how she and her father have trained Stefania, she presents the process as requiring closeness, understanding, and a tender atmosphere, while also describing the boundary between a compliant servant and a mistress who is too lenient. Her account makes domestic service sound like both affectionate education and deliberate management. Stefania’s skill at cooking is praised within that framework, but the framework assigns the household the power to define the terms of her labor.

Stefania’s own account is more conflicted. She says she swallows her bitterness and continues her tasks because she is there to make Adèle’s life easier, not to enforce justice. The meals she prepares are acts of attachment, yet they also belong to a routine in which she is expected to keep working despite hurt. Her care cannot be reduced either to freely chosen affection or to imposed service: the narrative shows how both occupy the same kitchen and the same actions.

At Adèle’s birthday gathering, Stefania’s cooking draws attention from the guests. They praise the Sachertorte, chaudeau, and small crayfish pastries, while Stefania reflects that she does not know whether Adèle, the person being celebrated, or herself, the servant, is receiving more praise. The guests’ appetite briefly makes her work visible, but the recognition remains entangled with her assigned status. Once they have eaten, she returns to the thought that her role is to prepare, cook, bake, wash, clean, and mend.

Reciprocity and Significance

The novel also gives a glimpse of recognition from within the household. After Adèle’s birthday celebration, Petro takes a laden tray from Stefania and helps carry it to the kitchen. He tells her that without her none of it would have been possible and that the house would not be the best of homes; he calls her family. His words momentarily name a belonging that the division between master and servant otherwise obscures. Stefania protests that he has drunk too much and sends him back to the guests, so the acknowledgment does not dissolve the boundary between them.

Through these episodes, cooking joins sensory and social worlds: market purchases and household provisions become meals, meals become care, and care becomes a measure of belonging. Yet the exchange is not equal. Stefania pours herself into feeding others and takes their willingness to eat as a sign that she is wanted, while the household can value the results without consistently recognizing the labor that produced them. The recurring kitchen work thus expresses both the depth of her love and the cost of making that love part of her service.