Bread and Milk

From translator Saskia Vogel and one of Sweden's most loved authors, an essayistic memoir about women and food

Bread and Milk traces a life through food from carefully restricted low-fat margarine to a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother’s rice pudding. In this radiant memoir from one of Northern Europe’s most notable literary stylists, we follow several generations of women and their daughters as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, independence, and motherhood. When Karolina finds herself a single mother to a young daughter of her own, food becomes the way for her to show her love, but also to instill a fraught and complicated inheritance.

The result is a lush, meditative memoir about the connections we make between food and love: how a mother’s emotional absence is filled by the food she painstakingly provides, how a missing father’s approval is granted for tomatoes sliced just right. Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist’s authorship. After all, what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love.

”The strange thing is that, parallell to Ramqvist’s remembering, my own memories of food and people are activated, and suddenly there are tastes, smells and voices that I thought I had long forgotten." – Svenska Dagbladet

“In such an associative and winding story as this, it is impressive how Ramqvist manages to keep a steady course. At times one is lead to believe that she is taking a detour, but with safe hand she steers us back to the dinner table - and even if she occasionally leaves the kitchen, its aromas are always present.” – Västmanlands läns tidning

“Ramqvist’s skill as a writer does not only lie in her ability to neatly put the abyss into order, but rather in how she manages to depict the untarnished in the utterly boundless: the states that in and of themselves are neither wrong nor right, they just are.” – Svenska Dagbladet

“The relationship between mothers and daughters appears to be an inexhaustible subject in prose. And when food enters the picture my interest is piqued.” – Jönköpings-Posten