It's at this point that the author's tenderness for her great-grandmother gets its fullest expression. She writes about her being "gentle and neat" and
imagines her "edging the paper in, typing slowly ... and winding it out without a single crease." She also has an uncanny feeling for the time, evoked through the names of dishes that have long passed into obscurity -- beef tea, mutton broth, Scotch broth, mulligatawny soup, all recalling "nursery teas and old-fashioned kitchens."
During a three-year internment by the Japanese, Lilla's cookery book takes on a purpose of its own. Even when her hands are too cold to slide another rice-paper receipt into her antiquated typewriter, she manages to complete all her recipes and "household tips" by the time liberation arrives. Given that the internees had been contending with starvation, Lilla's book is testimony to a stubborn and heroic determination. She was a grand Edwardian lady, but she had grit in her soul.
Freed from internment, Lilla and Casey find themselves disenfranchised from the emerging post-war landscape. They were "the flotsam and jetsam that even before the war she had feared they might become."
Many British Empire families who had worked as civil servants, soldiers or diplomats for "the great machinery of the British Empire" found themselves unwelcome and superfluous in a still war-battered land.
True, there were worse fates at the time -- life in the Soviet gulags and death camps, for example. Yet Frances Osborne so identifies with the perceived tragedy of the UK's loss of its colonies, and how this impacted her ancestors, that her account of their plight can be interpreted as a unique outburst of familial tenderness rather than the class rantings of somebody married, as the author is, to a UK Conservative politician.
Meticulously researched, thought-provoking and moving, Lilla's Feast is crafted with such devotion that it comes out, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, as genuine labor of love.
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