My grandmother's cookbook is an old exercise book, bursting at the seams with clippings, shopping lists and letters, tied together with cardboard and a piece of string.

It contains page after page — the early ones in Hungarian, the later ones in English — of recipes in her neat script, many carefully inscribed with the name of the woman who shared them: "Cheesecake Susan", "Florentine Mrs Konrad", "Magda's Matzo Cake".

I found the book after my grandparents passed away, as I helped to sort through their things.

It was right at the bottom of a garbage bag crammed with cut-outs of recipes from newspapers and women's magazines dating back to the 1940s.

The recipes made a curious collection of Australiana: peach melba, cheesecake pie, fish chop suey, rabbit and banana loaf. They were especially odd given that nothing my grandmother made for me ever resembled "Australian" food.

Finding Evi's cookbook was like rediscovering my grandmother all over again, in unexpected ways.

Even though I am schooled as a social historian, I'd never really thought of cookbooks as historical artefacts, or as sources for understanding the intimate world of women's everyday lives.

Cookbooks as historical resources

Rachel Ankeny, a historian of postwar migration and a food studies scholar, says cookbooks were something many women used on a daily basis.

"They are the familiar, and in that way they are a really important historical resource," she says.

My grandmother's cookbook contained more than recipes. ( Supplied: John Balint )

Sian Supski, a sociologist who has researched the connections between cooking and migration, agrees.

"Cookbooks are completely fascinating because they tell us this really personal story of the woman who owned them or constructed them," she says.

"But also, they tell us so much more about the times that those women lived in."

Evi was in many ways the typical Jewish grandmother: a whirl of activity in the kitchen and a skilled and dedicated gardener, with an acerbic tongue and a strong aptitude for critical judgement of those she loved.

She eschewed any kind of ostentation, as she called it, she hated getting gifts, and she deplored what she saw as the over-consumerism of Australian society, often despairing that her grandchildren "had it too easy".

She never had it easy — being born Jewish in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 20th century saw to that.

After enduring World War I as a child and growing anti-Semitism in Hungary during the 1920s and 1930s, she escaped on the eve of World War II to Australia in late 1938.

Most of her family remained behind, and the scars of their loss to Nazi death camps never healed.

Despite the wonderful (Hungarian) dishes she plied us all with — the meatloafs, roast meats, the plum cakes and kugloff and the poppy seed roll (mákos beigli) — I never saw her eat much at all.

When I was older, I often wondered whether she was punishing herself for surviving when others did not.

'A recipe exchanged across the fence'

My grandparents did their best to get their families to Australia, eventually securing landing permits for their siblings, but none of them were able to use them in time.

Folded in neat squares in the pages of her cookbook, I discovered letters from her father Felix and her sister Anne, air-mail pages crammed with tiny script to fit as much as possible on the page.

Her cookbook was the one place where she could store precious things, and keep them safe and close.

Evi, with my grandfather Imre and their three sons, at home in East Brighton. ( Supplied: John Balint )

Arriving in Australia as a Jewish refugee wasn't easy either.

Official and popular sentiment towards Jews was hostile, and as fate would have it, my grandfather's first job was in Wodonga in rural Victoria, where foreigners, let alone Jews, were rare.

Evi's cookbook tells us something of her efforts to overcome her isolation: a letter from a woman called Clare, sharing her recipe for peanut butter biscuits; another from someone called Miriam enclosing the "really delightful" recipe for her sister's "Ginger Fluff Sponge".

I discovered letters from family members, as well as clippings from magazines, in Evi's cookbook. ( Supplied: John Balint )

Dr Supski says migrant women have often told her of recipe exchanges between themselves and their Australian neighbours.

"Many women I spoke to would exchange recipes with their Australian neighbours as a way of trying to, in the word of the time, 'assimilate' into Australian culture," she says.

"But it was also a way of trying to make themselves feel at home and to learn about being in Australia, so there would be a recipe exchanged across the fence perhaps, or in the local supermarket or grocery store."

These "lovely kindnesses" generated across suburban (and cultural) back fences tell a different story than the one we are often accustomed to hearing, of the backyard racism of white Australia in the 1940s and 1950s — though this too existed.

"There were many stories of discrimination but there were many stories of solidarity," Dr Supski says.

Through these encounters, she says, "food and kitchen work becomes a central way in which women begin to create them sense of home and place making for themselves".

Negotiating expectations

My father remembers Evi forever cutting out recipes from magazines and the women's pages of the newspapers.

I think this was partly because she was learning to cook, and partly because she was learning the role of Australian housewife her new country expected her to fill.

The garbage bag of recipes I inherited demonstrated, to my mind, Evi's early negotiation with the expectation of assimilation imposed on migrants in the 1940s and 50s.

It contained far more than recipes.

On the back page are pottery designs for the majestic vases, bowls and jugs she created, and curiously, pages of notes summarising child psychiatry manuals of the 1960s.

She never had a chance to go to university, partly because the Hungary she grew up in shut its doors to Jewish students in the 1930s, and partly because like many migrant women in post-war Australia, she simply didn't have the opportunity.

She washed dishes in the Scheherazade cafe in Melbourne for years, but she dreamed of being a doctor.

She was also a great adventurer, who camped at Wilson's Promontory, cycled around Tasmania and caravanned through the Flinders Ranges.

My grandmother was a great adventurer, travelling with her family around Australia. ( Supplied: John Balint )

Evi's cookbook was a revelation to me, both as her granddaughter and as an historian.

It became a way for me to understand something of my grandmother's past.

It was her working manual, her creative manual, her intellectual manual, her scrapbook for both the intimate and the everyday, a record of her dreams, her struggles and her achievements.

It also revealed a wider history of a migrant woman, a refugee, in a country hostile to and fearful of foreigners, and the everyday ways she negotiated these encounters.

Ruth Balint is a senior lecturer in history at the University of New South Wales.