Method and Form
Food study also fits that description. Food isn’t just a commodity; rather, food presents a “site through which humans make meaning” (Gross). Food study, then, unpacks that meaning: how culinary traditions, eating patterns, and ingredient choices reflect culture and society. We can consider food a prism that reflects historical, sociological, and cultural issues while being “embedded in nostalgia and a romanticized past” (Scholliers and Claflin).
Food is embodied, communal, coded as both ritual and taboo. It’s a phenomenal example of cultural politics, inviting questions of practice and power, and of taste, class, and position in society (See hooks, Bourdieu, Diner). Because it’s so universal to the human experience, it’s hard to pin the academic study of food down. It’s disparate among disciplines, with no real canon to draw on (Matheny). Jewish studies faces a dissimilar issue, with significant canon – but one that errs on the side of religious, Biblical or Talmudic, rather than contemporary, modern history or ethnic studies (Freedman).
As such, for Stock Images, I developed my own canon, drawing on literature primarily situated at the intersection of gender, food, and Jewish life. Through this work, I reference scholars whose work appears time and time again: Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Hasia Diner, Riv-Ellen Prell, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Joyce Antler, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Rachel Gross. These women share my identity as a white Ashkenazi Jewish American, and much of their work highlights that community.
Though I stay within the boundaries of existing research by interrogating Ashkenazi Jewish foodways, with Stock Images I contribute to scholarship through form and interpretation: curating a digital exhibit and linking together threads of Jewish womanhood, Americanization, and whiteness to create a monograph of a single food. The primary method I use in this work is archival collection and analysis. Through the Rubenstein Library, the National Library of Israel, and family records, I found (and, in the case of the former, digitalized) advertisements, cookbooks, and recipes that are the basis of my inquiry.
Notably, advertisements are a useful tool for historical learning as they reflect and reshape cultural norms and speak to consumer mentalities of the era. I examine advertisements’ copy, images, and placement for how they project an idealized version of Americana and traditional gender roles, showing a “common aspiration” for consumers (SOURCE). The way I approach interpreting advertisements is rooted in existing scholarship, like Emily Contois’s Diners, Dudes, and Diets, which focuses on even the most minute details of multimedia advertisements and packaging to support her thesis of brands profiting from gender role disruption, and THE KOSHER ADVERTISING ONE, which examines kosher advertisements in the same period I’m interested in.
Moreover, I rely heavily on cookbook analysis. Even among food scholarship, cookbooks have been largely ignored as texts for being too base or too unintellectual, with that sense rooted in misogyny – because cookbooks have predominantly been created by and for women, they’re seen as “inconsequential to historical narrative” (Nussel; see “peek into their kitchens”, Matheny). But cookbooks analysis is historiography of everyday material; they provide a means to understand the day-to-day life of women. Cookbooks carry explicit and implicit meanings and pose questions of authorship, purpose, and audience.
Consider how ingredients are listed. Pinches and dashes rather than measurements, “until done” instead of a specific temperature – this indicates oral tradition and passing down of family recipes or inherited cultural knowledge.
Look at what ingredients are called for. Butter or margarine or Crisco can reveal nutrition trends, culinary norms, or capitalism-driven choices.
How are recipes listed and grouped – by holiday? By meal? By protein, or lack thereof? What does this order tell us about a social order and how people organize their lives?
As texts themselves, cookbooks offer the opportunity for robust rhetorical, visual, and content analysis, breathing new life and understanding the many meanings of what can be seen as mundane. And as a genre, cookbooks put domestic life in the public sphere and demonstrate how women can access cultural authority (Nussel, Elias).
It’s only fitting that this project’s form captures that same ethos of accessible cultural knowledge. That’s the goal of a monograph archival exhibition: to create something that is easy to understand, weaving together scholarly work and personal story, and to spotlight the archival materials themselves, lending them a scholarly platform – in some cases for the first time.
Gross provides a list of singular monographs in Jewish food study; the one I found most inspirational is Laura Silver’s Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food. Knish is a cultural history of the potato-filled pastry, in which Silver’s family history coincides with vivid descriptions of food, historical accounts of businesses in Poland and New York, and commentary about Jewish cuisine and memory. Likewise, two exhibit books use multimedia presentation to examine Jewish American life, serving “to affirm one’s identity, to define one’s values, to take stock of the present, and to contemplate the past” (Joselit 141). The first, The Borscht Belt, is a book of photo essays documenting “Jewish Vacationland” – resorts in the Catskills that catered to Jewish families who were unwelcome or prohibited from vacationing elsewhere. The book juxtaposes archival photos from the interwar and post-war eras with contemporary images of the abandoned hotel sites – empty, cracked pools and animal bones in the grass outside a kitchen – telling a story of nostalgia and ruin through images. The second, Getting Comfortable in New York, is based on an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in New York, combining representations of works shown in the exhibit and long-form scholarly writing. Notably, the work includes Kirshsenblatt-Gimblet’s “Kitchen Judaism” and Joselit’s “A Set Table: Jewish Domestic Culture in the New World,” both pieces which directly speak to the communities and questions at hand in Stock Images.
Scalar, the platform Stock Images is built on, allows me to display archived works a la an exhibit, annotate visual media, and write long-form essays or short-form captions. It’s a nonlinear, recursive platform – you’ll see links that overlap between distinct parts or allude to pieces you’ve already seen and read. You shouldn’t feel like you need to read this project in any particular order. As you click through this project, be sure to hover over highlighted text, look for symbols, use the visualizations and path tools – there’s layers to the project that aren’t all accessible via the Contents tab and rather need to be found while exploring the work. It’s one of the ways I hope Stock Images engages an audience, encouraging new ways of reading and thinking about something as simple and familiar as chicken soup. And because Scalar is open-source and accessible, I can share consumable information about this comforting consumable.
Finally, I can’t earnestly write about method and form without also discussing a crucial ingredient in the mix: time. I took a year off from this project – a professional and academic break to recover from burnout and refocus my engagement across all parts of my life. When I returned to Stock Images, I reshaped how I approached this work. Realizing my own gaps in recollection, I needed to find additional secondary sources and was pleased to find new scholarship published since my initial research. And more subtly, I found myself playing with recollection and refocusing on nostalgia and memory. That shift in perspective shows itself through this platform, both in my interpretation of primary sources and in my writing – there’s more orientation around my own identity. This work plays with autobiographical elements, placing self and family in context and sometimes erring on self-indulgent. Nostalgia is embedded in this project: early 20th century immigrants, for the Old World; second- and third-generation Americans, for insular communities lost over time; mine, for my family and for the foods we’ve shared.
Through Stock Images, chicken soup isn’t just a comfort food. Rather, it’s the prism through which I study midcentury Jewish American life and better understand Jewish American identity – my identity – today.