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

Introduction

The study of Jewish-American food reveals how the community transformed from impoverished immigrant other to white middle-class standard over only a few generations. As Diner writes, “Eastern European Jews lived in a world where food was sacred for all, but in which scarcities loomed for most” (2003). Yet upon their migration to the United States, scarcity ebbed, so gastronomic opportunity flowed. New Jewish-Americans had access to food – and with that came tension between the religious doctrine for food purity and the aesthetic desire for eating American. As a tradition, Judaism places heavy emphasis on food preparation and consumption; as Myers notes, “in America, devout Jews could continue this with fuller platters” (2019). 

Whether full or lean, however, those platters probably contained chicken soup, an emblematic food in Jewish culture. 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. Pictured here is an image from 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 foods, 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” over the 20th century.

 

This page has paths:

Contents of this path:

This page references: