A moving culinary memoir about the relationship between food and family—and sustenance and survival—from a chef, award-winning Canadian journalist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor.

When you’re raised by someone who once survived on potato peels and coffee grounds, you develop a pretty healthy respect for food.

Bonny Reichert grew up hearing stories about her father’s near-starvation in Auschwitz-Birkenau, and as a young adult, she struggled to find herself within her family’s narrative. Did the tiny dramas of her own life matter in comparison to everything her father had seen and done?

But after a chance encounter with a perfect bowl of borscht in Warsaw, Reichert began to unearth her culinary lineage dish by dish, digging for the roots of her own food obsession and finally confronting her family's tragic past. Tracing the defining moments of her life, from her colorful childhood in the restaurant business to the crumbling of her first marriage and the intensity of young motherhood, her decision to become a chef after a trip to Italy, and that life-altering visit to Poland, Reichert recounts a tale of scarcity and plenty, using food to connect her past to her future. Whether it's the flaky potato knishes and beef tongue dipped in sweet-hot mustard her grandmother Baba Sarah cooked for her dad, a refugee and orphan, before he was her son-in-law, or the soft-boiled eggs Reichert made for her babies, or the scrambled eggs her now 91-year-old dad still cooks for her, cooking and cuisine is both an anchor and a familial identity; a comfort and a signifier of survival.

How to Share an Egg is a journey of deep flavors and surprising contrasts. By turns sweet, salty, sour, and bitter, this is one woman's search to find her own voice as a writer, chef, daughter, and mother, and a moving exploration of heritage, inheritance, and self-discovery.