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

Introduction

“Jewish cooking is love made edible,” David Apfelbaum, a deli owner, writes. “And it is home.”

Apfelbaum, originally from Lodz, Poland, included this line in a pamphlet he used to introduce Jewish food to his San Francisco customer base. By chance, he shared it with anthropologists Len Plotnicov and Sydney Mintz, both in town for a meeting of the American Anthropological Association, who published a rendition of the essay for their colleagues. Food, faith, family, history, community – as Apfelbaum's essay suggests, they were all one and the same when it comes to Jewish food. 

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 Jenna Weissman Joselit, a historian of everyday life, calls “domesticity, ritual, and identity.” 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 what has remained consistent is our cultural connection to Judaism. Jewish food makes that connection visceral, embodied. Rabbi Jonathan 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 Jewish studies scholar Rachel 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 emphasizes the cuisine and culinary nostalgia of Ashkenazic Jews in the United States, treating food as a object of religion. 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. 

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. 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. 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. 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, like that of novelist Erika Duncan: “the all-engulfing nurturer who devours the very soul with every spoonful of hot chicken soup she gives." 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, culinary researcher Jonathan Deutsch and Rachel 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 – 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 displays in this digital exhibit, 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.

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