Full Description
In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. "I was trying to teach a group of young foreign girls in a crowded neighborhood how to cook simple and nutritious food, yet have it attractive and inexpensive as we prepare it in America," she recalled. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of Jewish American culture.
Recipes for the Melting Pot tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book, demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity—and was in turn shaped by generations of Jewish women. Nora L. Rubel traces the cookbook's evolution across forty editions over several decades, through waves of immigration, shifting gender roles, upward mobility, suburbanization, and rapid changes in Jewish life. She argues that the book celebrates pluralism, allowing it to serve at once as a tool for Americanization, a repository of tradition, and a platform for culinary innovation. Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book is a record of American Jewish women's history, told through the food they made and the lives they led. A cultural biography of an iconic cookbook, this lively and inviting book shares an inclusive vision of American cuisine.
Contents
Preface
Introduction: "It Takes History to Bake Such a Cake"
1. Dietary Reform as Moral Identity: The Settlement Cook Book and the Contested Idea of American Food
2. "For the Defense of Our Own Nationality": Culinary Pluralism and The Settlement Cook Book as a Path to Inclusion
3. Making Dinner in America: The Settlement Cook Book and Domestic Life
4. From Milwaukee Icon to American Classic: The Settlement Cook Book's Enduring Legacy
5. A "Jewish Joy of Cooking"?: Gastronomic Nostalgia, Culinary Revisionism, and Defining Jewish Food
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
