Stock Images: What Cookbooks, Advertisements, and Chicken Soup Recipes Tell Us About Jewish America

Cookbooks and the Ideal Imaginary

Cookbooks aren’t traditionally sources of scholarly inquiry, probably because they live in our kitchens, stained and scribbled on and assumed to be only for the home cook, read: wife and mother. But there’s incredible value in reading everyday domestic sphere items, like cookbooks, as texts with historical value. Studying them recognizes women’s foodwork as labor and acknowledges that cooking can act as both a manifestation of patriarchal norms and a vehicle for self-expression and love. By placing emphasis on “the central place of the kitchen and social adulation of the housewife,” cookbooks act as windows into a woman’s world – and like soup on a burner, they boil over with layers and interpretations.

Not only did they contain guidance for a woman’s cooking, but cookbooks “conveyed ideological messages about how she was expected to live her life.” Lists of ingredients tell stories of sourcing, accessibility, and affordability. Instructions for a recipe communicate expectations and technology changes. Accompanying prose makes us question authorship and authority. Cookbooks’ culinary content evokes memory, community, and communality, both actual and aspirational.

Midcentury cookbooks translate ethnic culinary knowledge into American tastes. In this case, postwar community and kosher cookbooks can be read as prescriptive texts that aim to assimilate Jewish women within white middle-class America while also reinforcing Jewishness within their families, cultivating a Jewish cultural lifestyle. These cookbooks harness the tension between Old World and New World, blending traditional and religious references with mass-produced ingredients and occasionally non-kosher recipes. Written by women and for women, largely of the emerging upper-middle class, they use food to communicate an American ideal during a time of great social anxiety, conflicting values, and challenges of a transforming ethnoreligious identity.

The cookbooks I analyze in this chapter are examples of Jewish community cookbooks. Created by women’s groups at synagogues or secular centers in heavily Jewish areas, these cookbooks reflect how Jewish tradition was mediated communally (and maternally) and not just by religious authority (and patriarchally). These cookbooks were filled with family recipes, their creation outsourced to the community. They were sold as fundraisers; we can see how publication costs were kept low by using plain paper and spiral-bound binding. As archives outreach librarian Kathryn Matheny explains, community cookbooks “defy the usual techniques for evaluating book sources: they are published but unresearched and unmediated by an editor, familiar and informal like manuscript items but mass produced.” They present recipes as artifacts, reflecting the preservation, innovation, and reproduction of cultural values. I read these community cookbooks as aspirational texts, presenting the ideal Jewish woman - that is, wife and mother – who is emblematic of whiteness and middle class, the post-war Jewish American imaginary.

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page references: