Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South (review)

This lovely book represents a significant contribution to southern and Jewish social history and folklore and is full of southern Jewish anecdotes, recipes, photos, and illustrations. Matzoh Ball Gumbo provides a wealth of information about Jewish settlement patterns and social networks in order to explain the dissemination and creolization of Jewish foodways from Charleston to Memphis. Marcie Cohen Ferris ably demonstrates how Jews maintained their ethnic and religious identity while totally embracing a southern regional identity. Food traditions, which define Jewish and southern identity, made it possible for Jews to become accepted as southerners (though not always as white) by southerners, both black and white.

Matzoh Ball Gumbo is full of tasty tidbits about family meals, local kosher butcher shops, bakeries, and groceries. Cohen Ferris uses a wealth of ethnographic interviews, archival sources, and secondary works to trace family and local histories through several generations of food businesses. Chapters trace the development of unique food traditions, the result of differing Jewish national backgrounds in combination with the ethnic makeup of a particular southern region. In particular, the discussion of public versus private food traditions reveals how Jews maintained their Jewish heritage and became southerners.

Well before the Christian Era, many Sephardic (from the Old Testament Hebrew Sepharad, for “Spain”) Jews emigrated from the Middle East to Spain and Portugal. During what is referred to as the “Golden Age” (eighth to eleventh centuries), the Muslim Moors ruled Spain and the Sephardim thrived culturally and economically. With the rise and spread of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire (1299–1453), those Jews followed the empire and also migrated to south-central Europe. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inquisition forced Jewish residents of Spain and Portugal to convert, flee, or face execution for their faith. Those who survived and refused to convert fled to the Netherlands. Many settled there or migrated to Germany, France, and the British Isles. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a significant number of those Sephardic Jews came to the American colonies. These new immigrants to America adhered to dietary laws, marriage customs, and sabbath observance. Shochets (kosher butchers) and bakeries that could produce matzoh for Passover were critical for the establishment of successful Jewish communities, which also created businesses serving both Gentiles and Jews in Charleston, Savannah, and later Atlanta.

Ashkenazic Jews from central Europe, mostly from the Germanic states, Alsace-Lorraine, and France, emigrated during the mid-nineteenth century; largely from the middle class, they settled in New Orleans, Charleston, Savannah, and Memphis; in the Northeast; and, to a degree, in the Midwest. Largely adherents of Reform Judaism (an early nineteenth-century western European movement advocating services in the vernacular, a focus on theology rather than ritual, and an abandonment of dietary restrictions), those Jews were most influenced by urban European cuisines, often regarded as “higher class” and “lighter” than traditional eastern European “heavy” foods. Partly to fit in with their neighbors, they served benne biscuits, tortes, sauced meats and fish, and fruit-filled pastries for holidays, special occasions, and social events with gentile friends.

Violent pogroms (ethnic cleansings) caused tens of thousands of eastern European Jews to flee to the United States between 1882 and 1922, after which a xenophobic America cut off immigration from eastern and southern Europe. While most eastern European Jews, largely Orthodox, settled in the Northeast, resettlement agencies dispersed many to the Midwest and South. Stereotypically “Jewish” (i.e., eastern European) foods spread with resettlement: bagels, smoked fish, stews of root vegetables and slow-cooked meats, kugels (puddings) of potatoes or noodles, dark-grained breads, and nut-filled cakes. Appearing “too Jewish,” even at home, was dangerous in places such as Atlanta, where anti-Semitism was more explicitly alive and well, and German Jewish women offered “American” (i.e., southern) cooking classes to the newcomers.

In New Orleans and Natchez, Creole and, to a lesser extent, Cajun traditions strongly influenced Jewish culinary practices. Settled first...