Reviewed by Anna Wenzel
Imagine this: You are on a trip in Vienna. You researched the city mercilessly before arriving, pinning restaurants and museums on your Google Maps application under a folder titled “Vienna, Summer 2026,” if you might be so organized. On your second night in the city, you sit down at a traditional Austrian restaurant, order what the older, polite waiter recommends, and rub your hands together in anticipation. When your food finally arrives (Mahlzeit! says the waiter), you pull out your phone and snap a picture of your plate and blast it to your Instagram followers, tagging the restaurant, your location, and your travel companion.
Perhaps this is you on a vacation; it is undeniably the reality of the characters in Teresa Präauer’s Cooking in the Wrong Century, translated by Eleanor Updegraff. Präauer’s English-language debut follows an unnamed cast of characters as their dinner party veers continuously and wildly off course, satirizing our contemporary excessive connection to social media, pseudo-intellectualism and multiculturalism, and punctuating these themes with a connection to home that can only come through the food of our past.
The novel’s unnamed hostess has anxiously planned a dinner party for five guests: herself, her partner, and her three friends. One of her friends is the Swiss man, a professor at the university who waxes poetics about impossible utopias all night long, wears hiking clothes, and chainsmokes on the balcony. The other two are a couple, the wife and the husband. The wife is an intellectual who masks her intelligence with an aggressive social media presence and flashy clothing. The husband is a stern, serious man wearing beachy linen trousers who is uncomfortably and continuously noted to look quite similar to the hostess’s partner. The hostess’s partner is the newest addition to the group, an older, confident man who is at ease in his wealthier upbringing assuring his intelligence, and thus constantly looks things up on his smartphone.
Cooking in the Wrong Century plays with a multitude of recurring motifs over its 176 pages, the most prominent of which is the consistent use of second-person address. The novel is told in third-person omniscient narration, and this omniscient narrator will often directly address the hostess. The novel opens with this narrator asking: “Do you remember that first time, deciding to cook something in your very own flat—it wasn’t much more than a room—and realizing only halfway through that you were going to have to run out and buy salt?” (7). This casual, conversational narrator peers into the hostess’s memories with each use of the second-person, giving the reader a look into her past through the way that she engages with food. Though her journey with food was once warm and familial (“As children, you and your sister had enjoyed making afternoon sandwiches of salami and gherkins, or cheese and sharp mustard,” 66), the narrator tells us that in “the past few years, you’ve taken almost 400 photos on your phone of plates with variously prepared and arranged ingredients…Why the photos? As a reminder? Out of joy? To capture that moment before the first bite? Before the plates are empty?” (121). Präauer’s hostess grapples with the technologically connected nature of her generation: Do these photos seek to retain the memories connected to our meals, savoring the flavors that have left our mouths, or do they trap us in an online world where food is only worth so much as it looks and the location-taggable places you experience it in?
An interesting aspect of the online presence throughout the novel is its outdated nature. The hostess’s friend, merely referred to as the wife, whips up posts with hashtags (“BestFriendsForever, FoodPorn, WineLovers,” 91), emojis, and filters that cover the group’s faces with berets and mustaches. She tags their location to an excessive degree, making them findable by an American couple they met earlier in the day. They are evidently unconcerned about their lack of privacy, though, as the National Police Force Headquarters rests across the street from the hostess’s apartment, constantly surveilling them. The hostess lives in a “bourgeois area” (16), and although a “helicopter labelled ‘Police’ circled over the roofs of the neighborhood and didn’t go away” (40), the guests seem relatively calm. The surveillance, it seems, is not intended for them, but to protect them from outsiders: “any kind of alarm and you instantly thought it was terrorism, remarked the Swiss man” (40-41).
This group feels that they have nothing to hide from the world or from one another, no matter how much they nitpick at each other’s anxieties as the night goes on. The friends are in their forties, but are consistently described as barely grown-up: “The three of them giggled like teenagers” (135). The dissonance between their behavior, their online presence, and their true age results in ample tension. The characters are jealous of one another’s lives, whether it be their true lives or their social media ones; they try to one-up each other in intellectual knowledge; and they flirt with one another’s partners, resulting in a truly messy evening.
The hostess is evidently from a lower-class background than that of her friends: this class difference is highlighted through her obsession with beautiful, foreign wares (her Danish dining table and tea towels, her Finnish glassware, her Turkish cushions) and through her linguistic confusion. Updegraff’s translation handles the intricacies of the text well, using variations of English words to render the hostess’s language: “The hostess handed her a carafe…She’d got it from a shop in the city centre. It’s store here, not shop, said the hostess’s partner” (27). This correction is minor and glossed over, but nonetheless belittles her for a word that is comprehensible to everyone at the table. In her internal dialogue, she fusses over similar linguistic complications: “Here, incidentally, people said red beets, not beetroot, but neither inter-regional cookbooks nor the pages of the World Wide Web, nor multinational manufacturers, could afford to take idiomatic variations into account” (44); “Here, of course, people rarely said chair; they said armchair—for both armchairs and chairs. Armchairs, however, were equally often referred to as wingbacks” (84).
These and other examples underline the hostess’s apparent concern with the words she is using and their effect on how others perceive her. This is even more pronounced when the downstairs neighbor, a Polish woman, complains to them in “perfect German with a Slavic accent” (42). Though the hostess is a native German speaker, it is evident she fears a lack of perfection in her German. To translate these idiosyncrasies in language, particularly when the book does not provide context of proper setting, was undeniably a challenging task. Updegraff’s choice to use this repeated phrase “here people said…” helps to emphasize these words as important, even if the distinction between armchair and chair does not seem significant to the English reader.
Together with the hostess’s lower-class background comes much anxiety about the way her friends will receive her dinner party. This anxiety is revealed through the novel’s playful, nonlinear structure where the dinner party is told three times over, successively becoming more outrageous as it goes on. It is hard to say whether this dinner party was a success. The food was certainly good, the company lively, the music spirited. If we are to believe the third telling, the guests were disrespectful, and the night ended in somewhat of a riotous, shocking twist. It is these aspects that leave the hostess to wonder if she is “cooking in the wrong century” (100), the century of surveillance and judgement and perfection, where she may never be enough. But her simple Quiche Lorraine and summer salad were the perfect meal for her guests, and the moment everyone had their share of dinner, they “seemed relaxed and cheerful…this quiche was the right meal with the right people in the right place” (112). As the novel comes to a close, and the day resets, the hostess daydreams about doing it all over again. It seems she may be in the right century, after all.
Präauer, Teresa. Cooking in the Wrong Century. Translated by Eleanor Updegraff. Pushkin Press, 2025.
Anna Wenzel is a writer from Boulder, Colorado. She recently graduated from Oberlin College with high honors in Comparative Literature where she also studied literary translation. She is interested in German literature with feminist and socialist themes.