Luisa Weiss talks about her new book, My Berlin Kitchen, and reveals some of her favourite local foodie spots…

For me, the idea of ‘soul food’ is connected to those specific meals, flavours and smells that extend beyond the mere pleasures of the palate to embrace memories of family and home.

My own (admittedly odd) example is the combination of fried egg, cheese, mayonaise and sweet pickle relish my parents used to make for lunch on Sundays: the taste instantly transports me back to my childhood, sitting at the kitchen table in my uncomfortable Sunday clothes stuffing my face as quickly as possible so that I can go outside and play.

A similar notion prompted Luisa Weiss, aka the Wednesday Chef, to write her new book My Berlin Kitchen, a combination of memoir and cookbook that rekindles memories of growing up in Berlin through recipes.

In the book, Weiss draws on personal stories of living in New York and Italy as well as Berlin and how she has used the kitchen to battle constant homesickness.

While her childhood love of Pflaumenkuchen and roasted rabbit are a bit more exotic than my American fried egg sandwiches, that’s the beauty of soul food: it’s inherent to each individual…

Kirsten: My Berlin Kitchen seems almost like a personal memoir rather than a cookbook. How have your personal experiences influenced your cooking? Are there any particular recipes which remind you of your Berlin home?

Luisa: My Berlin Kitchen is a memoir with recipes – each chapter tells a piece of the story and since, for me, cooking is a big part of my life, each chapter has a recipe that fits that particular story. I spent my childhood and a lot of my adulthood traveling back and forth between my parents and found this experience rather destabilizing, especially when it came to feeling ro…