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

Limitations and Further Research

One of the most significant limitations I encountered while researching material for Stock Images was that community cookbooks are difficult to source. It’s not just that they aren’t digitized – many are not archived at all, either held as family heirloom or preserved so little that the pages are rendered illegible. And cookbooks that did make library archives are rarely coded as such: they’re frequently labeled “cookery books” or by their specific titles, like Pots, Pans, Pies, Plates. With COVID-19 limits on access to otherwise public archives (like at the University of Michigan or New York Public Library), I developed my project with materials from the more limited supply at the Rubenstein Library or from my own family, plus pre-digitized materials from public libraries. In other circumstances, I would have loved to have drawn on a broader array of source material.

Another limitation in my work comes through how I deal with archival advertisements – I present them largely devoid of context. I do not include the cover pages of newspapers or stories on the backside of magazine pages. In isolating the advertisements, I lose the opportunity to examine the juxtaposition of idealized Americana ad and actual lived experience as presented in news writing.

As for future scholarship in Jewish food studies: researchers ought to center historically underrepresented facets within the Jewish community, incorporate additional sociological lenses of inquiry, and harness accessible forms of presentation.

As Jewish Studies scholar Rachel Gross so aptly writes, a limitation of my work and that of broader scholarship is that little emphasis is placed on Jews of color and non-Ashkenazi tradition. Further research should illuminate Sephardic cuisine and make effort to locate and digitize archival cookbooks and family record of Jews of color. Scholars like Michael Twitty (also known as @KosherSoul) are already doing incredible work on Black Jewish cuisine; similar inquiry into, say, Ladino cuisine, pre- and post-war, would be fascinating. A similar critique of Stock Images comes from a feminist scholarship perspective: I rely on inherently heteronormative assumptions and contribute to a gender binary in how I frame my analysis of women’s foodwork. Future research should examine domestic roles and the relationship with food for queer Jews, women without children, and women who remained single.  

Jewish food studies writ large are finally moving away from Biblical and Talmudic interpretations and into historical and actual examinations. However, further research should add additional layers of sociological analysis to historical analysis. I’ve tried to incorporate both in Stock Images but could only achieve so much due to the limited scope of my project. More concerted inquiry into questions like generational trauma and relationship with food, or sense of self and community as constructed through relationship with food, would be enlightening.

Finally, future research in Jewish food studies would benefit from presenting information in accessible formats. As I see it, food studies in general could benefit by being distilled to a wider audience; it seems in its attempt to gain legitimacy as an academic field, it swung far into the Ivory Tower. Jewish food studies ought to take cues from other applied ethnic and area studies fields and embrace multimedia and popular formats. Studies could include coded analysis of blogs, magazine articles, and modern recipes; narrow monographs of singular foods; spatial analysis and urban geographies of kosher districts; oral histories of long-time dining institutions; or interviews with Jewish chefs and restauranteurs to establish contemporary meaning. Any of these could be presented as popular nonfiction prose, exhibit, podcast, or food television.

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