Cookbooks and the Ideal Imaginary
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.” (Inness) 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.
As Givon writes, midcentury cookbooks act as “conduits of ethnic culinary knowledge that straddle inclusion in mainstream American taste." 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. 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. (Rabinovitch 2011, Solomon, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett) 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. (Inness, Neuhaus, Rabinovitch)
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 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. (driver, gross, Rabinovitch) 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.