Lilla’s Feast: A True Story of Love, War, and a Passion For Food

Lilla was born in 1882 into a British colonial family in the small Chinese trading port of Chefoo. Her mother, Alice, was a lively woman with a love of cooking which she passed on to her daughters. When the Japanese invaded China, Lilla was interned in a Japanese civilian camp, where she sustained herself through semi-starvation by composing a book of recipes and household hints that charmingly ignored the realities of war. Lilla’s precious cookery book, now in the possession of the Imperial War Museum, inspired her great-granddaughter, Frances Osborne, to find out more about Lilla’s extraordinary life. It is a story of love, courage and the triumph of the human spirit.