Introduction
I grew up eating family dinners every night. No matter how busy work was for my parents, no matter how many activities and commitments my brother and I had, we’d all end up around the kitchen table. My dad is still the chef in our house, subverting gendered expectation through culinary exploration after having grown up eating the same kosher and, as he saw it, uninspired meals day after day. He reads cookbooks for inspiration, subscribes to The New York Times Cooking section, makes his own vanilla extract – and he’s passed that love of food and novelty on to me and my brother. For us, food is certainly a matter of what Joselit calls “domesticity, ritual, and identity” (171). We shop farmers’ markets and co-ops; our group message thread is mostly tales of triumph and woe re: baked goods. And though we draw on global flavors and spices and textures, we also fall back to the same foods year after year: hamantaschen on Purim, noodle kugel cookies each winter, chicken soup whenever sick.
Those foods – their creation, timing, purpose – are perhaps our strongest routine connection to our Jewish identity. My family’s Jewish observance and belief have waxed and waned over time – I think we’d all consider ourselves agnostic these days – but was has remained consistent is our cultural connection to Judaism. Jewish food makes that connection visceral, embodied. Brumberg-Kraus explains this, unpacking the adage “you are what you eat” and how for Jews, identity construction can come via food. And it’s not always the ritual or holiday that makes Jewish food part of identity. As Gross writes, “Eating traditional Jewish foods, particularly in a public setting such as a deli, may be a meaningful part of a Jew’s life, but it may be too ordinary, too easily overlooked, to be described as essential or important....Commonplace activities such as eating Jewish foods are often quietly fundamental to religious identities rather than explicitly identified as essential to them.”
It makes sense, then, that Jewish food history scholarship is often rooted in religious studies. Existing work in the field also frequently “[reflects] the culinary nostalgia of the Ashkenazic majority of Jews in North America whose families came from Eastern Europe” (Brumberg-Kraus). With Stock Images, I intend to expand Jewish food studies scholarship by taking an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on history, gender studies, and critical race theory. But the idea of “culinary nostalgia” is at the core of this project: I consider Joselit’s “domesticity” in both forms: family and nationally. I use Jewish food to explore the transition of a community from racialized immigrant other to white middle-class Americana. I’m telling that story with Stock Images: a monograph on chicken soup. Moskin tells us that in Yiddish, chicken soup was called “goldene yoich,” or golden broth – just as the United States was called “goldene medina,” or golden land.
Chicken soup is an emblematic food in Jewish culture. It’s a quintessential comfort food, an embodied cognitive link to fulfilling the need to belong (Troisi and Gabriel 2011). Historically speaking, chicken soup predates Judaism; archeological evidence found in China suggests that domesticated chickens may have been boiled and served well before 6,000 BCE (Hata et al 2021, Zielenski 2013). But chicken soup has gained ubiquity in the Jewish community. Maimonides, a renown 12th century philosopher and physician, attested to its healing power, with “Jewish penicillin” still considered a folk remedy today (Nathan 2019). References to chicken soup appear in 1950s advertising cookbooks and today’s blogs alike. It’s even the cover of The 100 Most Jewish Foods – a visual representation of its cultural importance.
Chicken soup is made nostalgic in Yiddish poetry and made regretful in writings about the stereotypical Jewish mother - “the all-engulfing nurturer who devours the very soul with every spoonful of hot chicken soup she gives” (Duncan 1983). But existing scholarship about Jewish-American foodways makes no inquiry into chicken soup, rather treating it as a given – a kind of cultural common knowledge gained through generations of not writing down recipes and eating the same thing weekly. For example, Deutsch and Saks write about the ubiquity of Jewish-American “chicken in the pot” – whole chicken simmered into a soup, with the chicken then combined with vegetables to a main course (2008) – without interrogating why. For them, and for Jewish-Americans in general, chicken soup is a staple – but as a staple, it carries deeper meaning and demonstrates change over time.
In the series of essays and primary document interpretations on this website, I’ll discuss how chicken soup serves as a link between Old World and New World Jewish life, a symbolic representation of mothering and caretaking, and an example of how ethnic foods can be commercialized, all together telling a culinary story of Jewish-American assimilation and “becoming white” during the interwar and post-war periods.