Appeared in Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880-1950, edited by Susan L. Braunstein and Jenna Weissman Joselit (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1990, pp. 75-105. Please see published version for illustrations and notes. =============================================================== Kitchen Judaism Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett Tisch School of the Arts/New York University YIVO Institute for Jewish Research The beauty of white stewed fish on the Passover table carried a special message at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago in 1893. There, at the Jewish Women's Congress, Mary M. Cohen spoke to interested but uninformed Christians in her audience about the kitchen's role in creating a "bond in sanctity" between Jewish religion and family life. Noting that some people disparaged Judaism as a "kitchen religion," Cohen alluded to Israel Zangwill's legendary paean to fried fish, published in Philadelphia the preceding year: "Fried fish, and such fried fish! Only a great poet could sing the praises of the national dish.... With the audacity of true culinary genius, Jewish fried fish is always served cold. The skin is a beautiful brown, the substance firm and succulent. The very bones are full of marrow; yea, and charged with memories of the happy past. Fried fish binds Anglo-Judea more than all the lip-professions of unity." But, Cohen cried out, "where is the writer who has done justice to the glories of the white stewed fish as it appears on the Passover table?" Cohen took up the challenge: "Golden balls, of delicate flavor, surmounting slices of the whitest halibut; cayenne peppers, with circles of lemon, adding brilliant color and spicy taste to the compound; over all the yellow sauce, almost jelly-like in consistence." It was precisely through such little customs, such culinary traditions, and not just through the dietary laws, that religious life and domestic life were bound together. This was the responsibility of the Hebrew woman, who, in Cohen's view, was a woman of character and moral force responsible for the "purity of the domestic altar." In 1896, shortly after the Jewish Women's Congress, the participating women organized the National Council of Jewish Women. By the turn of the century they were publishing cookbooks to raise money for their organization and its activities. Although fundraising cookbooks have been the most prolific genre to this day, they are but one of the many kinds of Jewish cookbooks to emerge in the American context. A close reading of the humble literature of Jewish cookbooks can reveal how the malleable medium of food shapes social life and cultural values. Unlike other material manifestations of social life, which can be built and left to stand, food is perishable, ephemeral, constantly renewed by women in their kitchens. Preparing food and eating it are daily affairs. Cookbooks, though not direct indications of what people ate, nevertheless represent Jewish cuisine and social life in ways that illuminate changing notions of Jewish womanhood and the Jewish home in the United States. The Kosher Gourmet: Haute Cuisine Ritually Purified From the mid-eighteenth century kosher cookbooks in Europe instructed the reader in the preparation of an "invisibly" Jewish, gastronomically superior culinary art, the result of the ritual purification of haute cuisine. The implied reader was someone familiar with kashrut, and presumably with traditional Jewish specialties, but not with culinary elegance. The spate of elegant kosher cookbooks published in Europe during the nineteenth century showed how civility and aesthetics, so important to the Reform Jewish ethos, could be combined with Orthodox and Liberal adherence to ritual law. Jewish Cookery Book, on Principles of Economy, Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers, with the Addition of Many Useful Medicinal Recipes, and Other Valuable Information, Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management was in this tradition. The volume, which appeared in Philadelphia in 1871, is believed to be the earliest Jewish cookbook published in the United States. On the defensive, the author, Mrs. Esther Levy, wrote that, "without violating the precepts of our religion, a table can be spread, which will satisfy the appetites of the most fastidious. Some have, from ignorance, been led to believe that a repast, to be sumptuous, must unavoidably admit of forbidden food. We do not venture too much when we assert that our writing clearly refutes that false notion." She then brought Anglo-Jewish cuisine to the well-to-do, probably native-born Jews of Philadelphia, who identified with the English cultural standard of the local elite. What she condemned as their laxity in regard to kashrut may well have been the result of indifference or pragmatism, rather than ideological rejection of dogma. Some of Levy's readers were presumably familiar with fine cuisine and so eager to achieve comparable results that they had abandoned kashrut. Her task was to show them how their elegant tables could also be kosher. The Treyf Cookbook: "Aunt Babette" and Her Successors Levy's cookbook is an exception, for most Jewish cookbooks published in America before World War I were not kosher. To our knowledge, only one edition of Jewish Cookery Book appeared, in contrast with the enormously successful "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book, Foreign and Domestic Receipts for the Household, A Valuable Collection of Receipts and Hints for the Housewife, Many of Which are not to be Found Elsewhere, which was published in 1889 and went through several editions in the first year. In keeping with her persona as devoted mother and wife and accomplished housewife and hostess, "Aunt Babette," the pseudonym of Mrs. Bertha F. Kramer, explained that she never intended to do more than pass along her treasured recipes to her children and grandchildren. By incorporating her readers into what she had intended as a chain of transmission from mother to daughter, she removed the transaction from the realm of commercial exchange. This strategy domesticated her mass-produced cookbook and distinguished it from the work of those who wrote for a living. Her authority was derived from a lifetime of experience as head of her household, and she spoke in a personal tone to the reader: "And pray don't get discouraged if your first attempt is a failure, but try again, and never be ashamed to ask your neighbor, or any friend, to show you how to mix a cake." Unabashedly up to the minute, "Aunt Babette" provided menus for the "Kaffee Klatch" and complete instructions for such frivolities as the "Pink Tea": "`Pink Teas,' just now so fashionable, are rather novel if carried out to the letter, and an expensive way of entertaining, too; yet, as the old saying is, one might as well be dead as out of fashion. So all those who wish to be fashionable come and listen, and I will give you a few hints in regard to getting up a `Pink Tea.'" Everything was to be pink: the napkins, tablecloth, frosted cakes, flowers, boutonnieres, charlotte russe, lampshades, and cap and apron worn by the waitress. During this period of American history, known as the Gilded Age, the fancy dinner party was a fixture of middle-class life. As a "leader of society and a most noted entertainer," the well-to-do Jewish woman who wanted to write a cookbook had an audience of other socially aspiring women eager to learn from her experience, which, the reader was told, consisted largely of supervising her cooks. Theme dinners, where everything was one color, were specially popular. Though neither kosher (recipes call for shellfish and ham), nor explicitly Jewish, this volume was written and published by and for Jews. A star of David, the insignia of Bloch Publishing Company, appeared on the title page. A section entitled "Easter Dishes" instructed the reader on how to set the table for the Passover seder and prepare Passover delicacies. The index included an entry for "Trefa" (that which violates the laws of ritual purity), which reads, "NOTHING is `Trefa' that is healthy and clean," thus giving precedence to hygienic over ritual purity and exhorting the reader to proceed accordingly. Uncompromising on culinary matters--"none but the best" was her motto--"Aunt Babette" did make some concessions to the kosher reader: If she did not have the drippings and poultry fat called for in a recipe for piecrust, "Aunt Babette" admonished her to "use rendered meat fat (I do not mean suet--that is horrid!--but genuine meat fat); use half butter; if you consider this "Trefa" use all fat." A "special notice to the reader" cautioned that "wherever the word LARD occurs it refers especially to COTTON SEED LARD, which is entirely free from hog fat, and is strictly kosher, pure and wholesome and economical as well." On the back pages of the cookbook, Bloch Publishing and Printing Company, as it was known in 1889, advertised The Sabbath Visitor, a "bright and entertaining magazine, the only distinctively Jewish publication for the young in the world," books for Hebrew Sabbath schools, and a full range of prayer books, including Minhag America by Isaac Mayer Wise. These volumes could be ordered "elegantly bound in silk velvet, with fine gilt clasps, rims and centerpiece for name, adapted for Wedding and Confirmation presents," with or without an English or German translation. Such indications confirm that "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book was produced by and intended for German Reform Jews who rejected certain ritual requirements that set Jews apart and who tried to bring elegance and decorum to Jewish life in the synagogue and home, whether through beautifully bound prayer books in translation or haute cuisine. The Bloch Publishing Company was closely allied with the moderate wing of the Reform Jewish movement in the United States. Wise, who was leader of the moderates at that time, was married to the sister of Edward Bloch, with whom he had established the firm of Bloch and Co. in 1855. In 1883, just before the publication of "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book, the first American Reform rabbis were ordained place in Cincinnati, and the ordination banquet created a stir: Shrimp were served at what came to be known as the "terefa banquet" because "Apparently the Jewish caterer thought that `kosher' food meant only the exclusion of pork products; sea foods were so good they had to be kosher." It seems that "Wise himself observed the biblical laws of kashrut, but made an exception for oysters, which he said were legally permissible. On his farm, he kept two pigs to consume the leftovers; one was called 'Kosher,' the other 'Tref.'" But Wise did not advocate the eating of pork--on scientific, rather than religious grounds. His position was that the dietary laws should not be followed as a matter of religion but should be evaluated on the basis of their hygienic merit, humanitarian concern for the pain of animals, Biblical (rather than post-Biblical) sources of legitimation, rationality, and appropriateness to modern life. Jews were not to be set apart by archaic and exotic practices that he viewed as later additions to the Biblical foundation and not essential to Judaism. Treyf cookbooks like that of "Aunt Babette" reveal how Jewish identity was constructed in the kitchen and at the table through the conspicuous rejection of the dietary laws and enthusiastic acceptance of culinary eclecticism. At "Aunt Babette's" table Jewish diners would not be estranged from their non-Jewish friends by what they considered irrational and foreign practices. On the contrary, they would display the gastronomic connoisseurship and social graces appropriate to a well-to-do elite. Their Jewishness was to be defined in terms of religious concepts and ethical principles rather than of "unaesthetic" ceremonial practices. What, then, made the treyf cookbook Jewish? First, as Wise made clear, treyf was an ideological issue, not simply a matter of indifference, pragmatism, or aesthetics. Inclusion of oysters, shrimp, and ham, though not worthy of mention in a general American cookbook, make the statement in cookbooks by and for Jews that it is not necessary to observe ritual law to be Jewish. Second, such volumes were selectively treyf; they might include shrimp, oysters, ham, and bacon but less often lard and pork, particularly in the earlier publications. This selectivity is interesting when viewed in terms of culturally formed threshholds of disgust. For reasons that remain to be explored, some forms of treyf--particularly shellfish, cured pork, and the unporged hindquarters of beef, were seductive, whereas other forms, like lard, were generally repellent; ideology and hygienic purity aside, certain nonkosher foods were rejected on aesthetic grounds, a remnant of the internalization of religious taboo. Copyrighted in 1889, "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book appeared first in Cincinnati and Chicago, moving to New York in 1901 with its publisher, the Bloch Publishing Company. It went through at least eleven editions and remained in print for more than twenty- five years; "46,000 copies" was printed on the title page of the 1914 edition. To what may we attribute its success? First, it had little competition. Although many cookbooks were published in the United States, in this period few were addressed to Jewish readers, in contrast to England and Germany, where Jewish cookbooks had been appearing since the first half of the nineteenth century and had established a middle-class Jewish female readership. Perhaps more important, "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book spoke persuasively to the social aspirations of American Reform Jewish readers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in a culinary language they could understand: "Aunt Babette" delivered a central European bourgeois cuisine that would have been familiar to her readers but in an American idiom. There was a good fit among the publishing house, the market, and the genre, for such cookbooks were, in their way, manuals for the dramatization of middle-class values at the Jewish table. Above all, "Aunt Babette" really knew what she was doing. Clearly an experienced cook herself, she offered a prodigious variety of excellent recipes that were clear, detailed, and delicious. Her recipe for "Boneless Fish, Filled," a version of gefilte fish, is exquisite: The chopped trout, pickerel, or pike is seasoned with parsley, onion, pounded almonds, and grated nutmeg, and stuffed back into the skin, so that the fish is reconstituted; it is then poached with celery root, garnished with sliced blanched almonds stuck into the skin so that the fish "looks like it were all bristles," and served with a fish sauce that has been thickened with egg yolks and enlivened with sliced lemon. Her recipes for cakes and pastries could have produced the fondly remembered delicacies with which a middle-class German Jewish family broke the Yom Kippur fast in the Midwest in the 1890s: "There was one giant platter devoted wholly to round plump cakes with puffy edges, in the center of each a sunken pool that was pure plum, bearing on its bosom a snowy sifting of powdered sugar. There were others whose centers were apricot, molten gold in the sunlight. There were speckled expanses of cheese kuchen, the golden-brown surface showing rich cracks through which one caught glimpses of the lemon-yellow cheese beneath. There were cakes with jelly; cinnamon kuchen, and cunning cakes with almond slices nestling side by side. And there was freshly baked bread; twisted loaf with poppy seed freckling its braid, its sides glistening with the butter that had been swabbed on just before it had been thrust into the oven." Always at her reader's side offering helpful hints, "Aunt Babette" graphically decribed what was required: "After the goose has been picked take some old newspapers, light them in a coal-bucket, hold the goose over the flames in this way: Take the neck in your left hand and the feet in your right, swing it back and forth over the blaze until the little hairs are all singed off, being very, very careful that your dress or apron does not take fire." Elsewhere, when explaining a complicated procedure, she complained solicitously: "I wish I could show you this personally, for I am afraid my young housekeepers will not understand just how" to remove the skin from the goose in one piece. "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book spawned several successor volumes, which offered to meet challenges of an era that Kramer had never anticipated when she first published her highly successful volume. One such successor, Fannie Fox's Cook Book, was written by the older sister of the novelist Edna Ferber and appeared in 1923. In her introduction to this volume Ferber, author of Show Boat and other highly acclaimed novels and plays, recalled that, "There was, in the household of my little girlhood, a book called Aunt Babette's Cook Book. It must have been a volume frequently consulted. The margins of its pages bore frescoes, dadoes, and thumb marks of chocolate, flour, lemon juice ... such as ornament any cook book in common use. To look back on its recipes now is to feel something like horror at contemplation of an age that seemed devoted to wanton waste. `Now take ten eggs and the yolks of six more,' orders one recipe, lavishly." Comparing such extravagance with the prodigal feasts of the early Romans, Ferber characterized this cuisine as the savory, but indigestible and excessive creation of "an ample, hospitable, gingham-aproned soul, who was always pressing food upon you long after you were surfeited," a "beaming, motherly person of comfortable curves, whose white hair framed a plump face flushed with the heat of the kitchen stove." This image may tell us more about about the women who used "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book, as Ferber remembered or imagined them from her childhood in the 1890s, than about the readers "Aunt Babette" had in mind when she respectfully dedicated her volume to the "young housekeepers of America," whom she admonished, "In order to govern and command the respect of your servants and to show them that you are not ignorant of the duties you expect them to perform, you must first learn the management of a household yourself." "Aunt Babette" also stressed the importance of avoiding waste, by the standards of her period, preparing food that was healthy and not too highly seasoned, and treating servants kindly; the housekeeper was to do her own marketing, plan meals ahead, and exhibit good management more generally. In her autobiography Ferber, who was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, recalled her maternal grandmother's boundless hospitality and German-Jewish cooking. Grandma Neumann may well have been the cook Ferber had in mind when characterizing the women of her childhood who used "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book-- Ferber's mother was remembered, not as an enthusiastic cook but as a resourceful businesswoman. Grandma Neumann, n‚e Harriet Lichtenstein, had been born in Milwaukee. After marrying Louis Neumann, who had immigrated from Berlin to Milwaukee in the 1840s, she moved to Chicago. Ferber remembered her grandmother's house in the early 1890s as full of friends and relatives, twelve to fourteen seated around the expandable dining room table to enjoy her lavish hospitality: The soup was served in a tureen. The meat was carved at the table, the vegetables dished. I have that old soup tureen, a creamy china with a tawny oak-leaf pattern. I never see it that my mouth does not water. The soup was almost always chicken soup with noodles (hand-rolled, homemade, hair-fine) or beef soup with marrow balls, a clear strong golden brew. When the cover was removed a fragrant steam arose. It seems to me an excellent custom--now largely discarded by modern households--that of serving and carving the food at the table. The eyes feasted on it first and immediately they sent their message to the stomach. "Get ready, boys!" they telegraphed to the gastric juices. "Gather, all you fluids of digestion. Here comes the soup! Look at this roast stuffed chicken, brown and crisp. I can see the slices melting away from the glittering carving knife. During Edna's childhood an "American hired girl," or "maid of all work"--usually a recently arrived immigrant--helped around the house, cared for the children, and did some of the cooking. As she and Fannie were growing up in Appleton, Wisconsin, and their father's health deteriorated, their mother took over the family store. Fannie, assisted by a maid, ran the household, while Edna worked as a newspaper reporter from the age of seventeen. Both were encouraged to cook and had attended a weekly cooking class at Ryan High School. They were taught the principles of cooking but were not fond of the cuisine: "The dishes we essayed were, however, a shade too smothered in cream sauce for my taste. Goy cooking, we called it. Ours was richer, more sophisticated food." Her sister Fannie, who never succeeded as a writer, capitalized on her gifts as a cook and several years after she married, published Fannie Fox's Cook Book. Without advocating Jewish religious observance, Edna, who was proudly Jewish, noted the prominent role accorded Jewish cooking in her sister's cookbook: "Some of the recipes herein are culled from the finest of Jewish cookery, which for delicacy and flavor, cannot be excelled. The crumbling and toothsome torte made from the humble cottage cheese and the commonplace zwieback is one of these. It is called Zwieback Cheese Torte and is usually eaten to the accompaniment of choked murmurs of rapture." The attachment is strictly gastronomic, not ritual or ceremonial. Who was expected to bake this delicious torte? The implied reader of Fannie Fox's Cookbook in the 1920s was an "alert, well- dressed, and witty young woman" who was intelligent and capable and played bridge. A "middle-class matron" who knew how to entertain, she took as much pride in presenting food attractively as in "the planning of a gown or the decorating of a room," without, however, feeling that "a woman's place is with her head in the oven." This modern and practical cookbook would save her money, time, and effort as she prepared edible "objects of beauty, with an added element of surprise" for the picnic lunch, "so vital in these days of motoring," or "that festive and informal meal, the Sunday-night supper" or the children's party. This was no scientific treatise promulgating "the stern rules of the diet fanatic" but an exemplar of "modern American household cookery at its best." The kitchen was to be equipped with all manner of specialized pans and tools, including aluminum utensils--aluminum was the futurist material par excellence--and a Dover rotary eggbeater, a labor-saving device that would presumably compensate for the lack of servants. Ferber's memories of "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book suggest just how alien the world of "Aunt Babette" had become by the 1920s. The implied reader of Fannie Fox's Cook Book inhabited a different body--she was youthful and slim, though Ferber repeatedly characterized herself in her autobiography as short and plump, explaining that in her youth "Dieting hadn't become a fad"--and a different social world. This imagined reader was not a frivolous slave of fashion, a social climber who supervised a bevy of servants in the making of pink teas. Her main mission in life was not to elicit of "Henry's praises about his dear wife's meals." Nor was she a selfless mother laboring with a smile at the stove. Fannie Fox's reader was envisioned as "a modern, intelligent, and capable woman (or one who wishes to be)," who lived a "modern" and "American" life that, though family and child-centered, was compatible with her success in business or some other career of her choice. Fannie Fox's reader presumably managed her own household with a minimum of fuss, made luncheons, teas, suppers, and parties in her home, ate on occasion at French restaurants, and emphasized food that was light, stylish, and easily prepared--though Edna, who never married, was noted for the rich food she fed her guests, among them famous writers and playwrights. Special note was taken of the new importance of salads for luncheons and of sandwiches as accompaniments to salads or tea, as appetizers and canap‚s, luncheon and main dishes, or to be served at Sunday evening suppers. More than fifty recipes for sandwiches followed. The 1920s were the era of the New York tea room, whose cuisine Ferber dubbed the "lettuce leaf, chopped apple, marshmallow or cream- sauce school, too anemic for my Jewish palate, trained to a richer tangier taste." Although Ferber stressed the contrast with "Aunt Babette," her sister's cookbook shared with the earlier volume a love of good food and gracious hospitality, economy, efficient management, and wholesomeness, albeit expressed in terms that had changed since the 1880s. The reader of Fannie Fox's Cook Book may not have been particularly extravagant or have spent days on end with her head in the oven, but here and there recipes still invited her to fuss over individual servings of salmon and caviar mousse, to splurge on lobster … la Newburg with two teaspoons of chopped truffles, to offer such substantial dishes as noodle ring filled with creamed chicken and sweetbreads with mushrooms and green peas, and to spend time preparing rich kuchen (coffee cakes made with sweet yeast dough), pastries, ice creams, and puddings. She, too, entertained, but differently. First, the recipes were intended to produce the maximum effect with the least effort, which accounts in part for the importance of arranging food on serving platters to create a spectacular visual impression. Some of the most time consuming aspects of cooking (reducing sauces, shelling crab, peeling brains) are not visually apparent to the diner; where such painstaking labor is missing, the appearance of effort became all the more important. Also, with the emphasis on lightness, visual appeal replaced abundance. Second, the events at which these dishes were to be consumed had also changed, suggesting new leisure patterns, distinctive ways of staging informality, and the commercialization of domestic sociability. The Domestic Handbook, a complimentary guide to entertaining published by the Baltimore Jewish Times around 1930, instructed the hostess of a bridge or Mah-Jongg party: "Again informality is the keynote and the dining room and larger tables should not be used unless the number of guests make it necessary." For the luncheon preceding or following such a party "the table is set more informally than for a dinner and is generally decorated with flowers," though "the table is laid as for dinner, with service plates, on each of which is placed a folded lunch napkin." High Rock ginger ale recipes followed, including a ginger ale salad. The author assumed a woman at home, with a social life of her own and the means to entertain in an elegant manner, even on informal occasions. Hospitality, the Domestic Handbook asserted, is a "mark of civilization." The punctilious observance of social rituals assumed priority over ritual laws: "Whatever the size, however, formal entertaining augurs a certain ritual and the formal service must be subject to certain conventions," one more reason for the proliferation of etiquette books during that period. Both treyf dishes and traditional favorites--"lekach" ("Palestine recipe" for honey cake using Gold Medal flour), "teiglech," "kreplech," sweet-sour fish, gefilte fish, stewed milt, and kuchen of various kinds--were to be presented in a socially impeccable manner. Such a formal dinner, the reader was told, might be necessary as a way of honoring someone in her husband's firm. Marks of Jewish middle-class status in the 1930s included a return of the woman to the home--tangible evidence that her husband's income was adequate to support the family--and the elevation of child rearing and homemaking as female activities, albeit in new terms. The elegance promulgated by Domestic Handbook suggested even higher social aspirations and expressed the ethos of Baltimore's well-established German Jewish community. The Science of Kosher Cooking The last edition of "Aunt Babette's" Cookbook appeared at the beginning of World War I, to be followed in 1918 by Jewish Cook Book, advertised by Bloch Publishing Company as "the direct successor to the "Aunt Babette Cook Book, which has enjoyed undisputed popularity for more than a generation and which is no longer published" and as the "best and most complete kosher cook book ever issued in this country." The author, Florence Kreisler Greenbaum, was identified in the "publishers' note" as an instructor in cooking and domestic science at the Young Women's Hebrew Association of New York, which had been established in 1902, the Association of Jewish Home Makers, and the Central Jewish Institute, the latter two under the auspices of the Bureau of Jewish Education. Featuring "1600 tested recipes according to the dietary laws with the rules for kashering," Jewish Cook Book boasted over 100,000 copies sold by 1937. The publisher billed the volume as modern, practical, economical--"the first strictly kosher cook book ever published in English in this country--and as the most economical cook book ever issued for the Jewish household." Jewish Cook Book was to be the means by which "the Jewish housewife can achieve culinary perfection." These claims, though inflated, do suggest that Mrs. Levy's Jewish Cookery Book had been forgotten (or perhaps ignored) by cookbook publishers and readers--if not by cookbook writers; Greenbaum lifted entire recipes verbatim from Levy's cookbook, for example, "English Lemon Stewed Fish," without ever crediting Jewish Cookery Book. (This is the dish that Mary M. Cohen had celebrated at the Chicago World's Fair.) Nor did this German Jewish publisher take notice of the kosher volumes issued in Yiddish since at least 1901 by the rival Hebrew Publishing Company. The publisher's claims support the observation that most of the Jewish cookbooks available in English in the United States before World War I were not kosher. To allay any fear that these recipes had been concocted in a laboratory kitchen, Bloch reassured the reader that the recipes had been used in Greenberg's own household for three generations and were still being used on a daily basis, thus invoking again the authority of the experienced homemaker. Proud of the book's "truly international" character--there were favorite recipes from "America, Austria, Germany, Russia, France, Poland, Roumania, Hungary, Etc., Etc."--Greenbaum "laid special emphasis on those dishes which are characteristically Jewish," having been passed down through the generations, particularly specialties for the Jewish holidays: According to the dust jacket, the recipes "retain the flavor of 'mother's dishes' in modernized form." Reminiscent of Mrs. Levy's defensiveness, Greenbaum's cookbook would make it possible for the Jewish housewife "to serve the simplest as well as the most elaborate repast--from appetizer to dessert--without transgressing the dietary laws." Meals prepared according to Jewish Cook Book would be wholesome and attractive and sufficient for a family of five. Editions published during the Great Depression gave "directions for making meat substitutes and many economies of the hour, which have been added to meet the needs of the present day." With abundant pride in Jewish cookery and the Jewish cook, Greenbaum integrated domestic science, kashruth, and traditional cuisine. At the beginning of World War II, Mildred Grosberg Bellin issued a revised and enlarged edition of Greenbaum's Jewish Cook Book. Bellin was a graduate of Smith College, where she studied dietetics, and directed meal-planning clubs and cooking classes at the Jewish Community Center in Albany. During the thirties, her own little cookbook, Modern Jewish Meals, was issued by the Bloch Publishing Company, who claimed to have sold more than 90,000 copies. Using "her own kitchen as a laboratory," Bellin offered her book as an answer to the constantly recurring question "What shall we have for lunch and dinner today?" In "an era of balanced meals," mother's food, while delicious, was too rich, too high in protein, and too low in green vegetables, fruit, and milk--these "deficiencies" of the Jewish diet had become axiomatic in the dietetic literature of the day. Modern Jewish Meals was "first aid" in the preparation of "modern, economical, palatable, scientifically prepared Kosher food" that was also dainty in appearance, easy to make, seasonal, and varied. The issue was no longer hunger--how to get enough food--but nutrition and variety, a factor in ensuring "balance" in the diet of the poor and excitement in the diet of the well- to-do. The volume suggested how "our housewife can soon utilize her limited number of Kosher cuts in so many ways that she won't feel the need for the more numerous non-Kosher foods in order to get variety," for Bellin substituted kosher cuts in recipes that normally called for treyf cuts of meat. Bellin feared that culinary boredom would tempt Jewish cooks to use treyf and offered the science of balancing meals as a kosher way to achieve wholesome variety--hence the preponderance of menus and the arrangement of the recipes by month of the year to stress seasonality and appropriate combinations of foods at a single meal. The publisher's preface to the new edition of Jewish Cook Book noted that Bellin "combines modern theories of dietetics with the flavor of mother's cooking" and brings together "modern American cooking" and "old Jewish dishes." To encourage the use of kosher meat and facilitate shopping, Bellin provided the same name for the cuts as used in kosher markets. She also enlarged the number of Passover recipes and included guidelines for "interesting, varied and balanced menus" for Passover meals, as well as for a week of each month, the Jewish holidays, Thanksgiving, and "buffet suppers, parties, campfires and picnics, light afternoon and evening refreshments, and luncheon parties." When the newly revised and enlarged (3000 recipes) edition appeared in 1958, Bellin proclaimed that "Jewish cooking, in its fullest sense, is international cooking based on the dietary laws." Accordingly, she expanded the compass of the book to include "the food customs of the Jewish inhabitants of North Africa, the Levant, and the Far East," and after commenting that like America, the new State of Israel, is a melting pot, she provided international Israeli recipes previously published by Hadassah, for example, "Yachni," or "Israeli Boiled Dinner," a dish from Bokhara. Resolutely Jewish in their orientation, Greenbaum and Bellin brought the nutritional ideas of their day into the Jewish kitchen. Instead of rejecting the immigrant diet as inherently unhealthy and unamerican, as did earlier food reformers, they rationalized what Jews ate, supplemented the traditional repertoire, and literally made science palatable in Jewish terms. Primarily concerned with nutrients, Greenbaum, Bellin, and other dieticians recognized that if they alienated their immigrant charges by violating the laws of kashrut and condemning the foods they loved, immigrants who rejected the bland creamed vegetables and salads with mayonnaise dressing that the dieticians advocated would also be rejecting the nutritional program that travelled with this cuisine. Accordingly, the dieticians tried to increase the nutritional value of the food that immigrant Jews were already eating: the cookbooks they wrote were an important adjunct to their cooking classes and institutional kitchens in schools, orphanages, vacation houses, and other charitable organizations. Yiddish Cookbooks for Immigrants The audience for Jewish cookbooks had been reshaped by the mass influx of East European Jewish immigrants, many of whom observed greater stringency with regard to the dietary laws than did the earlier waves of German Jews. In the years between the wars, the American-born children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe would have been the generation most likely to attend Greenbaum's cooking classes and use her cookbook, and their children in turn would have turned to Bellin's revised edition. But their European-born parents and grandparents had their own cookbooks, in Yiddish, which from the beginning of the century took a variety of positions on the question of what to eat. Attempts to change the Jewish diet, whether to make it more elegant, more kosher, more scientific, more American, or less bourgeois took a variety of forms in the Yiddish cookbooks published in America--some condemned old world cuisine and promulgated Anglo-American cooking in its stead, others promoted vegetarianism. One of the earliest Yiddish cookbooks published in America is Hinde Amkhanitski's Ler-bukh vi azoy tsu kokhn un bakn (Manual for How to Cook and Bake), which appeared in 1901 and could be purchased, according to the title page, for fifteen cents at R. Kantrovitsh's religious bookstore and at all standkeepers. In the subtitle of the little volume, Amkhanitski derived her authority for the recipes that followed from her forty-five years of experience in European and American kitchens, adding in the foreword that "The best guarantee that my manual will be very useful to every woman and entirely satisfying in many homes is the fact that I have for many years in New York run restaurants that nourished the finest people with their capricious stomachs and all were satisfied with my food." Here was the voice of a working woman, a professional cook and restaurateur, who offered the best of Jewish food in a language her immigrant sisters could understand--a Yiddish that was exact and clear. Like her, most of them were working women. After long hours in the factories, where so many of them were employed during this time, they had little energy, time, or resources to expend on cooking. Addressing "Jewish daughters," Amkhanitski noted proudly that her recipes were for "pure Jewish dishes prepared in the finest Jewish houses in Russia and Galicia, Hungary, France, England, and America." Stressing economy, Amkhanitski reassured the reader that such food will "protect children from dyspepsia and other stomach ailments." Taking kashrut for granted, there followed recipes for such traditional dishes as flodn (layers of dough and apple baked with honey), teyglekh (pellets of baked dough and nuts cooked in honey), khremzlekh (Passover pancakes made of matzah meal), and kneydlekh (dumplings), as well as American oatmeal, sago, pancakes, apple pie, and potato salad. The third edition included chapters devoted to vegetarian cooking, cleaning the home, maintaining an orderly household, the right food and drink for hot summer months, and how to maintain a strictly kosher kitchen. The traditional cuisine of East European Jewish immigrants came under attack in H. Braun's Dos familyen kokh-bukh... ("The Family Cookbook adapted from American, French, Italian, and German Cookbooks Specially for the Jewish Kitchen"). Copyright in 1914 by the Hebrew Publishing Company, this kosher volume adopted the critical tone of voice familiar in Yiddish cookbooks published by male translators in Europe, though some women writing in Yiddish also addressed their readers condescendingly. Indeed, there is reason to believe that A.H., who appeared on the English title page of the volume, was the prolific translator and lexicographer Alexander Harkavy, who issued through the Hebrew Publishing Company many books addressed to newly arrived Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, including dictionaries, letter- writing manuals, teach-yourself-English textbooks, and translations of world literature into Yiddish. The authority for the recipes was derived from other cookbooks and, the foreword explained, from male scientists, not from the personal experience of the author, whose gender and identity were hidden behind the initials: "The modern art of cooking has risen to the highest level, and no longer rests in the hands of the ignorant cook, but on the contrary, it is the result of a study that men of science have made." Asserting that what we eat determines the kind of life we will enjoy, this self-professed modern cookbook advocated light and easy-to-digest food to stimulate the sluggish appetites of office workers. The approach was characteristic of the New Nutrition of the period, which did not yet have a sound scientific basis for determining nutritional requirements and identified proper food with a bland Anglo-American diet--peppered here with hints of a social program that rejected bourgeois dining pretensions. The implied readers--the author assumed that they were no longer poor, hungry, and doing physical labor outdoors-- were discouraged from eating soups, gefilte fish, herring, and other traditional favorites. Soup, the reader was told, was not nutritious and took up space in the stomach that should be reserved for better food. Gefilte fish was overcomplicated and overcooked. Salty herring was questionable because appetizers were superfluous. The kitchen emerged as a place of danger, where modern hygiene led to "less bad results." Asking the question, "Is there a "Jewish cuisine?", H. Braun replied that it in the strict sense of the term, the answer was no, with the possible exception of tsholnt, a Sabbath stew that cooked slowly overnight. But Jews had learned to cook from their neighbors and in this way developed a so-called Jewish cuisine. Though the volume would include the allegedly Jewish dishes from Lite (region of Jewish settlement in Lithuania, Belorussia, and Latvia), Southern Russia, Bessarabia, Rumania, and Hungary, "we say at the outset, we will not make a speciality of it"--kashrut was guaranteed. The emphasis was instead placed on the Anglo- Saxon tradition, which was viewed as "healthier and more nutritious." The project of Americanization was thus implemented under the guise of science. Nor were the contents of the volume entirely consistent with the foreword, for there were thirty-one pages of recipes for soup, nine recipes for appetizers, including herring, and a recipe for gefilte fish, as well as instructions for preparing tea in American, English, and Russian styles, Wellesley fudge, preserved pineapple, junket, blancmange with Irish moss, English fruit pies, sandwiches, and over seventy recipes for salads and vegetables. The reader that Adela Kiev Zametkin addressed in Der froys handbukh (The Woman's Handbook), which was privately published in Yiddish in 1930, was a Jewish working girl not yet enlightened by notions of social justice: "Today's typical Jewish woman of the working class is the daughter of a mother who never went to school, never read books and magazines, knows nothing about any new ideas and practices in society and the home. And regarding many social injustices, that mother's ignorance is retained by her daughter. The young Jewish daughter even here in America is also usually not far away from her mother, because for the most part she goes directly from the ship to the factory and is thus left behind the times like her mother with regard to concepts pertaining to food, hygiene, household management, and child rearing." Restrictive immigration legislation passed in 1924 curtailed the flow of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe to America, so those whom Zametkin addressed may well have been the latest to arrive and the most conspicuously out of step with the sizable American-born generation that had emerged in the decades since the 1880s. Consonant with new advances in nutritional science after World War I, Zametkin stressed natural food, balanced meals, calories and vitamins, which were now much better understood, and the other subjects associated with home economics and domestic science in the thirties: child rearing, sex hygiene, and table manners. While disparaging the bourgeois social pretensions of the etiquette books, Zametkin told the reader in detail how to eat soup so as to eliminate slurping and "how to avoid looking like an animal." Other topics included correct posture, the use of such amenities as a napkin ring for each person, a clean tablecloth, and serving spoons, the placing of a little butter on the edge of one's plate, not reaching but asking for food to be passed, not serving foods in the containers in which they were bought, not dunking food in tea or coffee, and economy and efficiency. Zametkin's list of what a person should and should not do implied how working class Jews, presumably in crowded living environments, actually conducted themselves at table. The reader was then instructed on systematic housekeeping, followed by the cookbook, organized by season. Food Columnists and Newspaper Cookbooks From at least the 1930s, Jewish newspapers, both the English and the Yiddish press, issued cookbooks based on their recipe departments, among them The Jewish Times (Baltimore), The Sentinel (Chicago), The Jewish Daily Forward (New York), The Jewish Ledger (Connecticut), and The Jewish Examiner (Brooklyn). Each newspaper had its own readership and each volume had its own emphasis. Proclaiming in 1935 that a good cookbook was as indispensable to a home as was a bed, The Sentinel Cook Book offered to enhance traditional culinary knowledge with a comprehensive and trusty guide to the "distinctive and delightful table offerings" of Jews in various countries. Making clear the focus on Jewish cuisine, the Preface continued: "While the greatest number of the dishes contained in this work are characteristically Jewish, yet no particular emphasis has been placed on Kashruth. Some recipes, too, have been included that are either favored in Jewish homes where the strictest dietary considerations do not prevail or that might with advantage and without prejudice to anything essential in Jewish life, be introduced in the menus of Jews as of others because of their nutritive as well as palatable quality." The usefulness of the volume was to be enhanced by the inclusion of "valuable scientific data." By the fourth edition a year later, The Jewish Sentinel Cook Book was setting out a somewhat ethnographic and museological role for itself as "an earnest attempt to preserve many of these traditional recipes before they are entirely forgotten." What "good Jewish cooks of the last generation" knew was in danger of being lost and with it the "toothsomeness and wholesomeness" of a cuisine that had been created by Jewish housewives who "borrowed the best methods of food preparation from every country in which they lived and then improved upon those methods." The inclusion of nutritional information, menu planning, and American dietary items was intended to make the book even more useful. "Farmer's Chop Suey" (sour cream served with tomatoes, scallions, radishes, cucumbers, and pumpernickel), "Gefillte Helzel" ("Stuffed Poultry Neck"), taffy apples, and a large section of Passover dishes suggest the range of recipes. By 1945, when Regina Frischwasser, a food columnist for the Jewish Daily Forward, issued Jewish American Cook Book: 1600 Selected Recipes, she explained in the Preface: "In offering this book in English, I have considered the fact that many of our children, who have grown up with the preferences of their own particular home cooking, are unfamiliar with Yiddish print, and although their tastes are present, there is lacking the facility of reaching these recipes. Their mothers have been able to participate in our contest and thereby exchange favorite dishes, but many of the daughters have been been unable to do this. It is to these daughters, therefore, that I contribute this work; and to their mothers who have offered me their pet dishes for consideration all these years, I dedicate this book." kashrut was not mentioned, because it was assumed, and Frischwasser wrote with pride about "the vast variety of dishes that constitutes Yiddish cuisine" and their presence in America thanks to the Jews from many lands who brought their traditions with them. Some typically Jewish dishes have even made their way into non-Jewish homes and restaurants, she noted, while Jews have adapted American delicacies to their own taste and custom--for example, "Stuffed Bologna." Shredded cabbage is saut‚ed in chicken fat, spooned onto slices of bologna, which are rolled and fastened with a toothpick. The stuffed bologna rolls are placed in a casserole, topped with condensed tomato soup, and baked in the oven. This two-way exchange has allowed her "to construct this book not only as a part of our tradition but as a part of the American traditional way of cooking." This formulation suggests by extension that Jewishness is part of what it means to be American. Avoiding glamor and social pretensions and in the interest of clarity, Frischwasser used plain language to describe dishes: for example, Stewed Brain Balls, Open Baked Lung Pie, Triangles (kreplakh), Stewed Udder and Vegetables. Even when people were no longer poor and could afford more expensive cuts of meat, the cheaper cuts--offal and extremeties--were still valued and used, particularly in traditional dishes. Frischwasser offered recipes for these items without apology, euphemism, or sentimentality; she proferred no obfuscating French menu language or aristocratic pedigrees for the dishes in her book. Jewish American Cook Book contained a wide array of traditional dishes and many variations on them, as can be seen from the variety of fillings proposed for blintzes (jelly and nuts, liver, millet, sweet potato, veal and lung, prune). Not reform, but pride in the culinary skills of her Yiddish readers and the desire to transmit this knowledge to their English-speaking daughters prompted Frischwasser to publish her cookbook. The Examiner Prize Kosher Cook Book (revised and enlarged, 1949) grew out of the kosher recipe contest sponsored by the newspaper. The distinctiveness of this book's approach was signalled clearly by Rabbi Abraham H. Heller's essay "Kashruth: Advancing the Cause of Jewish National Survival," which addressed "those of the Jewish people who retain in principle at least, an organic relationship with K'lal Yisroel. The acceptance of Kashruth implies adherence to the ideal of Jewish survival," a statement that would have resonated in the years right after the Holocaust and the formation of the State of Israel. Identifying the religious with the national, Rabbi Heller drew on rational (hygiene), ethical (animal cruelty), and aesthetic arguments: "The aesthetic element in Jewish life as far as food is concerned expresses itself not only in a positive special table of its own but in the rejection of certain foods antagonistic to its group taste. Call them taboos if you will, but the Jew need not apologize for his aversion to meats of animals that feed themselves on decomposed food or for rejecting the use of the fish, clammy in appearance and ugly to the sense of touch." As this passage makes clear, disgust is a powerful determinant of food choice, which gives to the visceral revulsion from treyf, when that taboo has been internalized, special importance in the maintenance of kashrut. "Balabusta"--compiler of the cookbook and pen name for Adelaide Ettenson Lowe, the women's page editor--reassured the reader that kosher cooking was not complicated while admonishing her that "Many homes have broken down because the `lady of the house' did not know how to cook and never wanted to learn....I have never known a good cook who had marital trouble." The women who contributed to the book--"each recipe a masterpiece"--were identified by name and address. Commercial Penetration of the Domestic Order Newspapers played an important role in the transmission of culinary traditions and innovations, not only through their food columnists and cookbook compilers, but also through advertisements for the food industry. Large food companies sponsored contests, published recipe booklets, and employed domestic scientists and dieticians in their efforts to promote their products to the largest possible market. Gold Medal flour, Crisco, Wolff's kasha, the Rumford Company, and the Aluminum Goods Manufacturing Company were among those who targeted the Jewish market for their products. The challenge faced by companies specializing in Jewish holiday products, for which their Jewish market was assured, was to get women to use holiday foods all year long. This was the goal of the cookbooks published by Manischewitz and Rokeach. Instrumental in the process of product promotion were dieticians developing recipes in commercial test kitchens and domestic science in the public schools. The promotional cookbooks are particularly interesting because they illuminate how the food industry used tradition to market change, and how the industry helped shape what was served on Jewish tables during the decades before and after World War II. Furthermore, those that solicited recipes from women appropriated a technique used by women's organizations to stimulate the participation of their members in collaborative fundraising projects--but with two important differences. First, recipe contests encouraged competition, rather than egalitarian cooperation. Second, in those cases where women were paid for recipes that were published, they were offered money for the transaction rather than freely giving the recipes for a good cause. The money was miniscule compared to the potential income either from the cookbook itself, or in the case of cookbooks that were sold cheaply or given away as a promotion, the profits to be derived from increased use of the products that were promoted in their pages. Recipe contributors were thus coopted by the food industry and the exchange of knowledge about food from one woman to another was commercialized. Recipes were sold rather than given and women were paid to devise new and more ways to use commercial products. Their participation, in turn, was used by the food companies to legitimate the recipes included in the booklets by appealing to the authority of the home cook in her own kitchen. Tempting Kosher Dishes Prepared from World Famous Manischewitz's Matzo Products, first published in the 1920s, featured 250 recipes in Yiddish and English, each of them tested in the Manischewitz Experimental Kitchens by Miss F.O. Gahr, B.S., Domestic Science Expert and Graduate in Institutional Management. Like the newspapers, the volume enjoined readers to send in their favorite recipes: "We shall carefully test recipes submitted, and pay liberally for such recipes as are accepted for publication in future editions of this book." Thanks to consumer participation, "Housewives, from every quarter of the globe....have made possible this book of delicious kosher dishes...They sent us the treasured recipes that have pleased their own families....Each recipe was tested in our own kitchens....Some of these recipes are old favorites...Some are so distinctly new as to offer one tempting surprise after another...The dishes cover every range of cookery from a half- dozen ways to prepare the ever-useful Matzo Knoedel [dumpling] to a delightful method of making Strawberry Shortcake." Not only would the reader be equipped to avoid the monotony of matzah at every meal during Passover, but now everything could be made from matzah all year round, including root beer cake, tamales, chocolate pudding, mock sausage, and "farfelroons" (a coconut macaroon made with matzah farfel). Priced at $1.50, the volume proudly displayed a Medal of Award: "Manischewitz's Matzos were awarded the Gold Medal at the World's Exposition, Philadelphia." Crisco advertised itself as a new substitute for the fats Jewish housewives were accustomed to using, though hydrogenated vegetable shortenings were already available in "Aunt Babette's" time. Published in a bilingual Yiddish-English edition in the early thirties, Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Housewife made the case for Crisco in both scientific and ritual terms: "Ever since it was put on the market, Crisco has been the principal cooking fat in many Jewish homes. It fills a great need, taking the place of heavy fats and oils which have been used in Jewish foods for hundreds of years. Goose-fat, chicken-fat, and olive oil were good enough when there was nothing to take their place, but when it became possible to obtain a strictly Kosher and Parve fat in the form of Crisco, Jewish women quickly appreciated its merits. In Crisco they find a pure, sweet-flavored fat which they can use for meat, dairy, and parve foods. They find in Crisco a fat which is so easily digested that it makes everything in which it is used more digestible." Other virtues included price, mild flavor, freshness without refrigeration, lightness and fluffiness, texture for use as shortening and purity for frying. Described as a "modern" cooking fat, Crisco also claimed to meet the highest standards of kashruth and bore the hekhsher (imprimatur) of a "prominent Orthodox rabbi," unnamed in the recipe booklet, but specified elsewhere in "The Story of Crisco," under the heading "Brief, Interesting Facts": "Crisco is Kosher. Rabbi Margolies of New York, said that the Hebrew Race had been waiting 4,000 years for Crisco. It conforms to the strict Dietary Laws of the Jews. It is what is known in the Hebrew language as a 'parava,' or neutral fat. Crisco can be used with both 'milchig' and 'fleichig' (milk and flesh) foods. Special Kosher packages, bearing the seals of Rabbi Margolies of New York, and Rabbi Lifsitz of Cincinnati, are sold the Jewish trade. But all Crisco is Kosher and all of the same purity." The food industry, recognizing the revenues to be gained from the Jewish market, integrated kashrut into its general promotional efforts. Then, in order to allay any fears on the part of the non-Jewish consumer that cans of Crisco not bearing the kosher seal were any less pure, the company asserted that all Crisco was kosher. In this gendered division of labor, men verified the ritual purity of the scientifically created product, while women guaranteed its place in the kitchen. A cookbook was necessary because Crisco could not simply be substituted for butter, oil, or chicken fat, without modifying the recipe: the ratio of fat and water was different in each. The booklet featured "recipes of true Jewish foods," each of which "has been tested in a strictly Orthodox home," a consideration of greater importance to the implied reader than the scientific test kitchen. By placing Yiddish and English versions of a recipe on a single page, the cookbook's aim was to encourage Yiddish-speaking mothers and their English-speaking daughters to cook traditional dishes together--with Crisco. The suggestion was that Crisco conserved culture; it was presented as a singular innovation in a cuisine that was otherwise transmitted perfectly intact. The cookbook promoted the idea that, pouring together over their bilingual cookbook, the mother would transmit the traditional cuisine, showing the daughter how it could be done with Crisco, while the daughter would bring greater receptivity to the new product and new dishes. Intergenerational transmission moved in two directions and Crisco was there, right at the nexus. Whereas Manischewitz expanded its market by deceremonializing a ritual food and offering ever more and new ways to use matzah, Crisco's challenge was get its most stringent consumer--the strictly Orthodox Jewish woman--to use this shortening in every conceivable traditional dish. The challenge for other companies such as Rokeach, which sold bottled borsht and gefilte fish, was to encourage the Jewish housewife to treat their finished product as a raw ingredient for creating a new dish. In their test kitchens and recipe booklets, they promulgated the borsht jello ring, a Jewish answer to Perfection Salad, and the gefilte fish quiche, dishes that would later make regular appearances in charity cookbooks. These are but a few indications of how deeply the commercial food industry penetrated Jewish domestic culture in the United States. The industry created entirely new products to replace those that set limitations on kosher cuisine--parev fats, not just Crisco but also the later non-dairy creamers, and fake treyf, including simulated bacon and crab. They created a market for prepared Jewish foods. They expanded the use of holiday foods. The penetration of the food industry into the home was accomplished through a four-pronged process: the industry deceremonialized festival foods, then elaborated them as cuisine, sought the rabbinical imprimatur for new foods, and finally wired their adoption to female networks of transmission. Recipes for Creating Community The charity cookbook, by far the most prolific genre of Jewish cookbooks, is best seen in relation to the history of Jewish women's voluntary organizations. By the early nineteenth century in the United States, Jewish women were already creating a wide array of voluntary organizations--burial societies, sewing societies, orphanages, infant asylums, building fund committees, Sunday schools, settlement houses, and groups offering mutual aid, relief to the distressed, or comfort to the sick. Some were autonomous, while others were auxiliaries to men's organizations or to synagogues. Though there are European precedents for Jewish women's groups in the form of khevres and Vereins, Protestant women's groups in America provided an added stimulus and model. The importance of these voluntary associations is not to be underestimated, both in terms of the social and cultural needs they filled for their members and in terms of their power in the larger community. By the 1890s, virtually every Jewish community in the country, from the largest in the East to the smallest in the Far West, had a women's organization, in many cases, even before there was a synagogue. According to American Jewish historian Jacob Rader Marcus, the smaller the Jewish community, the higher the percentage of Jewish women who joined. Indeed, the women's groups and their fundraising projects were often key factors in building synagogues and other organizations. The 1901 Cook Book Compiled for the Benefit of the Building Fund of Temple Israel in Omaha, Nebraska, is an early example. It is not surprising to find that so many of the early Jewish cookbooks were published by Reform Jewish women's groups in widely dispersed communities in the far western states of America. Unlike the East European Jews at the turn of the century, who settled primarily in the largest cities, mainly in the east, German Jews had ventured forth across the land during the nineteenth century to settle in communities large and small. In Oregon and Nebraska, California and Iowa, Georgia and Texas, they expressed their Jewishness largely through philanthropy and often turned to cookbooks to raise money for charitable causes. It is characteristic of Reform Judaism of the period to define itself through the rejection of Jewish ceremonialism and the commitment to philanthropy, a combination that reaches an apotheosis of sorts in the treyf charity cookbook. Such philanthropic efforts to train Jewish girls and women in cookery and household management should be viewed within the larger context of East European Jewish immigration to England, Germany, and America, and the social divisions and tensions within the Jewish community. German Jews had started arriving in the United States in significant numbers in the 1840s, and quickly achieved positions of power and social prominence in their communities. The mass emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe began in the 1880s. Through charitable work, the elite could fulfill their sense of social responsibility, while keeping their social distance from the newcomers, whose uncouth ways repulsed them. By the 1890s, the National Council of Jewish Women was formed and chapters were established across the continent. Shortly thereafter, Hadassah, a Zionist women's organization, began its rise to the position of largest women's organization in the United States. For such organizations, cookbooks were a philanthropic tool, and a particularly appropriate one, for a major activity of women who belonged to philanthropic organizations was meetings at which food was served. Edna Ferber's mother was a member of the Ladies' Aid Society in Appleton, which met once a month at the home of a member: as Ferber recalled from the 1890s, "A mammoth supper was served. We, being not so well-to-do as some of the other Jewish families, naturally tried to outdo them in lavishness and variety. Huge platters of cold fowl, tongue, sausages hot and cold, baked dishes, salads, vast tortes and cakes, ice cream, all were set out." The Council of Jewish Women was publishing fundraising cookbooks as early as 1908/9 (San Francisco) and 1912 (Portland), a logical extension of the culinary activities of these club women. By far the most successful American Jewish charity cookbook is The Settlement Cook Book, which has gone through some forty editions and more than 1,500,000 copies since it first appeared in 1901. The force behind the book was Lizzie Black Kander (1858-1940). The daughter of a merchant, Lizzie grew up on the South Side of Milwaukee, where she finished high school. Two years later, in 1881, she married Simon Kander, then a clothing salesman. Never having had children, Mrs. Kander devoted her time to philanthropy and social work. As a member, and later the president, of the Ladies' Relief Sewing Society, she helped repair old clothes for immigrants. Up by five in the morning, she would get her household chores out of the way and spend the rest of the day doing social work. She founded and served on the boards of many organizations, including the Milwaukee School Board, and helped introduce manual training and domestic science into the Milwaukee school system. She was also a founder of the Milwaukee Jewish Mission, a society which provided vocational training for children. This Mission and the Sisterhood for Personal Service established The Settlement in 1900 in the Jewish immigrant neighborhood of Milwaukee. Mrs. Kander was one of its founders. As president of the Settlement House from 1900 to 1918, an active volunteer, and an expert cook in her own right--her husband had become a Wisconsin State legislator and she mingled with Milwaukee's finest hostesses--Mrs. Kander organized and taught cooking classes for the new immigrants who had settled in the city, many of them from Central and Eastern Europe, and most of them Jewish. Mrs. Kander and Mrs. Henry (Fanny Greenbaum) Schoenfeld decided to publish the lessons and the recipes. The preface to the thirty-first edition explained why: Most of the pupils were of high-school age; the time they could devote to cooking classes was limited to after- school hours. The youngsters particularly enjoyed eating the results of their labors. But there were difficulties: the children spent much valuable time copying the simple recipes devised for them, and when they brought home what they had learned, there was often opposition from their parents to the new ways. The committee in charge felt that printed lessons would help solve these problems. Time spent in copying would be saved, and print might add dignity and importance to the endeavor in the eyes of the immigrant parents. The first edition of 1901 was printed thanks not to the support of the men in the organization, who exhibited little confidence in the project, but to a cooperative printer and the sale of advertisements. It appeared in about 1000 copies and sold out immediately. New editions were issued in quick succession. The book was so successful that by about 1909, the proceeds were used to buy the site for a new Settlement House and shortly thereafter to pay for the building. The women then formed the Settlement Cook Book Company, a philanthropic trust devoted to educational projects, which continues to function to this day. The recipes were culled from Mrs. Kander's cooking lessons, the cookbook committee and from their friends in elite social circles, as well as from the students and from famous chefs. Over the years, the committee members tested the recipes repeatedly in their own kitchens, as did the Settlement House Classes, the Milwaukee Public School Kitchens, and the School of Trades for Girls. The volume, which could not depend for its wide success on the students alone, included recipes for the novice and experienced cook alike and was directed to both the East European Jewish immigrant teenager and the well-to-do German-Jewish matron. Though this encyclopedic cookbook appeared to be intended for everyone, the institution's sponsors were Jewish as was their immediate constituency in the early years. Editions prior to Mrs. Kander's death reflected the predelictions of the wealthy German-Jewish women who created it. Like other Jewish cookbooks of the period, The "Settlement" Cook Book (1903) was treyf in the characteristic way: there were recipes for broiled live lobster, frog legs … la Newburg, shrimp … la Creole, fried oysters, creamed crab meat, and crawfish butter; there were hindquarter cuts of meat (rump and tenderloin), presumably unporged; and butter and cream appeared in meat recipes. But in the early editions, pork per se was absent, pie crusts were made with butter, not lard, and there was a nominal explanation of kashrut at the beginning of the meat chapter that was confined to the method of slaughter and draining of blood. There were some Jewish specialities, such as kugel, matzah balls, matzah pancakes, and filled (gefilte) fish. There were many recipes from the German culinary repertoire that would have extended the appeal of the book to the large German population of Milwaukee, for example, German Pancakes, Hassen Pfeffer (marinated rabbit), and a whole chapter on Kuchen. The designation Berliner Pfann Kuchen (fritter made by deep frying rounds of Kuchen dough stuffed with preserves), which seems to indicate a German dish, was subtitled Purim Krapfen and designated "superfine 'doughnuts'" in "Aunt Babette's" Cook Book. This is but one indication that the place of such dishes in the Jewish culinary repertoire is often not apparent from their names. In time, it was precisely the instructions for preparing European and Jewish dishes, particularly the baked goods, that came to be identified as the signature recipes of The Settlement Cook Book: as the dustjacket of the twenty-fourth edition stated, "Unusual Cakes, Torten and Cookies, for which this book is famous, make baking a pleasure, especially at holiday time." By 1930, the volume more than tripled in size to encompass over 600 pages. Pork now had its own section and more Jewish specialities were included. Though many of the earlier recipes were retained intact, some, such as the filled fish, lost such nice touches as bay leaves and almonds, hints of an earlier and more elegant style. After World War II, readers were reasssured that they would still find the "heirloom" recipes in new versions of the book updated to include casseroles, barbeques, cocktail appetizers, and snacks for teenagers. Nowhere is the approach to the many Jewish dishes in the 1930 volume as clear as in the "Seder Supper Menu", which appeared between the Easter and Thanksgiving Dinners. (It was not uncommon among Reform Jews to celebrate both the American and the Jewish holidays.) In Mrs. Kander's hands, the ritual Passover meal was transformed into a domestic science feast. Food that was once eaten because of what it symbolized became ornamental in a menu that included what was described as "Individual Charosis Appetizer, p. 318, in half lemon shell, surrounded by a quartered hard boiled egg, thin slice of horseradish root, sprig of parsley and radishes on a bed of Water Cress. Serve with salt water." Instead of the egg, horseradish, kharosis, and parsley being consumed, one by one, at the appropriate points in the reading of the Haggadah, the entire seder platter was miniaturized, multiplied, and presented in a single simultaneous moment as the appetizer course in a formal dinner. The communal platter became an individual smorgasbord, detached from the Passover narrative and divested of symbolic significance. The ceremonial had been rendered culinary. The Settlement Cook Book was so successful that it outgrew its original auspices and lead to the formation of its own organization, the Settlement Cook Book Company. In a review of three durable cookbook classics, The Joy of Cooking, The All New Fanny Farmer Boston Cooking School Book, and The New Settlement Cook Book, cookbook author Michael Field expressed surprise that M.F.K. Fisher, the doyenne of American gastronomy, should have been such a fan of the Settlement House Cookbook, because the edition Field reviewed was so "impersonal, simplified, and unimaginative." No doubt M.F.K. Fisher was referring to the editions so popular during the 1930s and 1940s, the ones with the white covers and the procession of litle women in aprons making their way to a man's heart, not the one he reviewed. The book has undergone such thorough revision over the years, and long after the death of its author, that little more than the title is recognizable. Even the author's name, Mrs. Simon Kander, has now disappeared from the title page. The Settlement Cook Book is a good example of the transformation of a text book for cooking classes into an autonomous commercial venture, albeit for charitable purposes. The Settlement in Milwaukee was neither the only one to offer cooking classes, nor the only one to publish a fundraiser cookbook. The Council of Jewish Women issued The Neighborhood Cook Book to raise money for The Neighborhood House, the Settlement Center of the Portland Section, in Oregon. First published in 1912, the volume went out of print in ten months and was revised, enlarged, and reissued in 1914. Flora K. Lippitt, chairman of the Cook Book Committee, explained that demand for the book came from all parts of the United States. Cooking classes were a staple of public school education by the last decades of the nineteenth century and were figuring as a vocational subject in industrial training curricula for immigrants by the 1890s in New York and other cities: the Official Souvenir Booklet of the 1895 Fair in Aid of the Educational Alliance and the Hebrew Technical Institute included a photograph of the "Cooking Class," in which uniformed young women--they wore aprons, armlets to protect their sleeves, and caps--were busily occupied in an instructional kitchen. Jewish women had pioneered in the development of domestic science in Germany during the nineteenth century: in the 1870s, Lina Morgenstern (1830-1909) established the Kochschule des Berliner Hausfrauenverein, the leading cooking school in Berlin at the time. What the cookbooks underscore is the gap in class and culture between the German Jewish cooking teachers and the East European Jewish immigrant women they served. Reports of the College Settlement Association in the first years of this century indicated, for example, that the cooking school attempted to follow kosher cooking "inasmuch as care was taken to avoid the combination of food which would be in opposition to Jewish customs." Apparently, the cooking classes in settlements were heavily subscribed by Jewish children "whose first question on applying for admittance was, 'Is it Kosher?'" Yet the settlement cookbooks included the treyf dishes so loved by the ladies. Similarly, while the immigrant girls learned the rudiments--Mrs. Kander's second lesson included toast, soft cooked eggs, hard cooked eggs, egg vermicelli, and white sauce-- her lady friends experimented with Manhattan Cocktails, Sauce Bernaise Delmonico, Lobster … la Thackeray, Frozen Nesselrode, and Lalla Rookh Cream. At the Educational Alliance in New York in 1902, "The Chairman of the Committee on Industrial Classes reported that two new cooking classes had been formed, that mothers meetings had been held and that, to encourage the social side of her work, she [Mrs. Loeb, for the Women's Auxilliary Society] had arranged a Japanese tea, at which she delivered a lecture with stereopticon views based on her experience." Immigrant women had travelled too, but without stereopticon views to illustrate their saga. The Auxiliary Society of the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society of New York Orphan Asylum was typical of women's organizations of its day that tried to raise money for worthy causes by publishing cookbooks. The Auxiliary Cookbook (1909) extolled the dignity of women and the primacy of the home: "'It takes a hundred men to make an encampment, but one woman can make a home.'" Just what kind of a home they had in mind may be seen in the section entitled "A Woman's Housework as Physical-Culture School": Sweeping gives much the same motion as is used in handling golf clubs. For perfection of arms and shoulders there is nothing better....Dusting should have a chapter by itself. First you are down on all fours, then on tiptoe to see how far the cloth will reach. The tiptoeing for calf-development is superb." Reflecting a preoccupation of the period with physical culture, this passage treated housework as play, invoking golf, a sport of the elite, and suggested that lack of physical exertion was a problem that could be solved by choreographed dusting. This was hardly the view held by women who worked as professional housekeepers or who, exhausted from working, cooking, and tending children, cleaned house. Since this volume identified the women in the Auxiliary who contributed recipes, it probably reflected what they actually served their families and friends. On a blank page marked "Recipes," a former owner of my copy of the volume recorded instructions for "Miss Parloa's Mayonnaise," an indication that she was familiar with recipes from the most famous cookbooks of her day. The "Best by Test" Cookbook compiled by Mrs. Alfred Loeb for the Hebrew Infant Asylum in 1914 also celebrated the home. It drew upon domestic metaphors for moral order, providing in the Preface "a recipe that has often been tried and never found wanting": "Into the milk of Human Kindness, add a large portion of Charity and Pity; flavor it liberally with Generosity, season with Good Nature and Unselfishness; mix well, put it into your Soul, and serve with your whole Heart to those less fortunate than yourself. If you are a Wife, sweeten with a little of the Mother Love. If unwedded, flavor with a portion of the materal instinct born in every woman." Recipes for filled tomatoes, croquettes, timbales, white sauces, cream dressings, sweets, and culinary conceits were abundant. The recipe for Caviar … la King would have made Fannie Farmer proud: "Cut bread in shape of a butterfly. The body make of Caviar. For the eyes use pearl onions. Inside of wings use hard boiled eggs chopped and line edge with thin sliced salmon." The pattern of the treyf cookbooks was apparent here too: though there were no recipes for pork, one section was devoted to fish, shellfish, and oysters. Here and there a Jewish dish made an appearance, for example, "Matzoth Kloese" (dumpling) in the section on farinaceous foods. The Home as Sanctuary By the 1920s, synagogue sisterhoods were creating a special type of cookbook, one that situated food in the context of holiday celebrations and the making of a Jewish home. Sisterhood Temple Mishkan Tefila in Boston published The Center Table in 1922, to raise money for their new Jewish centre. The canap‚s and electric refrigerator desserts were preceded by the Talmudic epigraph "A true wife makes a home a holy place." There followed in the 1929 revised edition two theories: first, "the home as we know it,--is gradually disintegrating," because people are turning to the community at large as their home, and second, according to the psychologists, the first four years of a child's life are formative and should be spent "in a truly Jewish atmosphere." Accordingly, "a Jewish mother's prime function is to safeguard her home and to make it Jewish," and nowhere can she do his more effectively than at the table. The author, Mignon L. Rubenovitz, continued, "Many Jewish customs center about the table where the family meet. This is especially so of holidays. The Jewish table may be said to be the center of the home; its altar of friendship, and, if properly provisioned, the family's source of strength and health." There followed blessings, in English only, as well as dietary principles, traditional Jewish dishes, and such modern American inventions as the Candle Light Salad, a ritual object made edible: Place a slice of canned pineapple on a plate. Place 1/2 banana standing erect in hole; on top of banana, put a marachino cherry to represent the light. Cut 1/2 round strip of green pepper and insert on side of banana to represent holder of candle. Cover pineapple with whipped cream or any fruit salad dressing. Very attractive. E.K.C. The emphasis was decidedly modern and American, as expressed in the eclectic culinary repertoire, dietary principles derived from nutritional science, and technological metaphors: "Food must be to the body that which fuel is to the steam engine...." Whereas The Center Table, a product of the oldest Conservative synagogue in New England, stressed the combination of religion and science, the Jewish Home Beautiful, published in 1941 by the National Women's League of the United Synagogue of America, a Conservative Jewish organization, suggested that Jewish life required more than "faith, knowledge or observance": "To live as a Jewess, a woman must have something of the artist in her....The Jewish woman today, guided by the memories and traditions of yesterday, must herself create new glory and new beauty for the Jewish home of today." What followed was a script for a pageant to be presented by mothers and their married daughters. By sharing the role of hostess at each of the holiday tables in the pageant, they would symbolize "the transmission of the tradition from one generation to another." The purpose of the pageant was to: urge every mother of Israel to assume her role as artist, and on every festival, Sabbath and holiday, to make her home and her family table a thing of beauty as precious and elevating as anything painted on canvas or chiseled in stone.... A little skill and love and understanding can transform the humblest surroundings into a sanctuary more holy and beautiful than the house decorated elaborately, but without love and intelligence and religious warmth. The author went on to explain that women have been turning to Christmas and Valentine's Day features in women's magazines and department stores for holiday ideas. They needed to be encouraged to search more deeply into "their own treasure house." Traditional Ashkenazic holiday recipes followed. The pageant was presented from 1932 to 1940 in such settings as the National Convention of the Women's League at the Ritz- Carlton Hotel in Atlantic City and the Joint Sisterhood Assembly in the Temple of Religion at the New York World's Fair--an exposition that celebrated the World of Tomorrow in the streamlined contours of high technology. This was an extraordinary context for a pageant that emphasized the aesthetics of ritual, the artistic creativity of the Jewish woman, and nostalgia for yesterday. In the suburbs, where single-family homes included spacious dining rooms and were set on garden lots, the themes of art and festival were extended to include flower arrangement. In New Rochelle, the sisterhood of Temple Israel and the Garden Circle collaborated in the production of The Blessings of Food and Flowers. Sensory delight, craftsmanship, and artistic perfection were significant components of Jewish religious observance, according to the two rabbis who wrote the introduction, "Food and Faith." The editor's ten-year-old son captured the lifestyle of the compilers in a poem that was included in the volume: Just a little time to spend Doing all these things Baking cake and apple pies, Meats and bread and such, Going to all my meetings, Then entertaining friends for lunch. In the afternoon that day I'd arrange my flowers around Then still have time for dinner and My family, friends, and town. The recipes in the volume were an eclectic mix of the "heirloom" dishes fondly associated with grandmothers and aunts and the perennial treyf offerings--Pat‚ Maison (made of chicken livers, consomme, gelatin, butter, and cream cheese), Minced Clam Canapes a la Wurmfeld, Tanta Betty's Chicken in the Pot, Up to Date Farfel, Aunt Bessie's Gefilte Fish, stuffed lobster tails, Challah, and Matzoh Charlotte for Passover ("This is an old family recipe"). The section on Holiday Dishes stressed the role of love and art in helping "children feel the spirit of religion." For each holiday, a color scheme and flower arrangement or centerpiece were specified, followed by a menu. For Sukkoth, the centerpiece consisted of "a miniature succoth [sic] built with tinker toys and leaves" and a "cornucopia overflowing with fruits." Sylvia Hirsch, "authority on table decor," explained that "Flowers add beauty and glamor to every occasion, whether formal or informal." The watchword was "gracious dining." Photographs of flower arrangements were entitled Purim, Halloween, Hanukkah, After the Ballet, Gourmet's Delight, The Wedding Table, and Sukkoth, among others. What can be seen so clearly in The Blessings of Food and Flowers--though the phenomenon is much older and widespread--is the clear detachment of traditional cuisine from ritual requirements. The result is "kosher-style" food, itself the expression of a sentimental attachment to culinary traditions on the part of those who have rejected the dietary requirements. At the extreme, culinary Judaism, or Fressfr”mmigkeit as it was known among German-speaking Jews, is a term applied to those whose piety is expressed almost exclusively by eating the appropriate holiday foods. Food associated with traditional kosher cooking comes to embody Jewishness, even when it is not itself kosher. The Jewish Home Beautiful and The Blessings of Food and Flowers reimagined the "kitchen religion" valorized by Mary Cohen at the Jewish Women's Congress in Chicago in 1893: in her apology for the apparent ugliness of immigrant life, Cohen had praised the religious faith that was to be found even in the most squalid living conditions. By the 1930s, the message of The Jewish Home Beautiful was that faith was not enough, and that art, while it was also necessary, needed to be inspired by Jewish sources. By the 1950s, the message of The Blessings of Food and Flowers was that Jewish life was the good life. Note I would like to thank Charles Bloch, Kay Caughren, Marilyn Einhorn, Jan Longone, and Joan Perkal for bringing particular volumes to my attention. _______________________________________________________________