Hungering for America: Italian, Irish, and Jewish Foodways in the Age of Migration (review)

Hasia Diner never really explains why she concentrates on Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigration in this study, yet her choice has obvious attractions for the understanding of ethnic American foodways. As discussed by Diner, Italians forged a New World national identity using food as a symbol to overarch the distinctions of region and class that were pervasive in the Old World. In contrast, Irish immigrants demonstrate for Diner an "inability to use food as a medium for community solidarity" that stemmed from the legacy of the Great Famine of 1845-48 and "made it impossible for them to create a distinctive Irish food in America" (p. 145). Eastern European Jewish migration illustrates yet another pattern, in which, according to Diner, immigrants "had been formed by a culture which entwined food with Jewish identity," but experienced new conflicts that "upset the boundaries between sacred and ordinary, Jewish and non-Jewish" because of a redefinition of "what had once been venerated as God's reward and the embodiment of Jewishness. . . into one of their new nation's gifts to them" (pp. 218-9).

The book's brief introductory chapter is followed by a series of paired chapters, in which the first discusses patterns of food consumption and production in the Old World, and the second discusses these patterns as they developed in the United States. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss Italians; chapters 4 and 5 consider the Irish; and Eastern European Jews are discussed in chapters 6 and 7. A brief concluding chapter finishes the book. Each of the main chapters presents an impressive wealth of detail, culled from contemporary reports, oral histories, diaries, documents of social clubs and organizations, and the works of social historians. The book is generally well referenced, and detailed notes provide the reader with the opportunity for further research.

Strangely, for a book that makes so much use of primary and contemporary secondary sources, relatively little space is given to discussing what these immigrants (or their Old World predecessors) actually ate or drank. We are given a glimpse of ethnic life on the frontier, for example, in the mention of Italian gold miners on Angel's Creek, California, building "their own beehive ovens to bake bread, eschewing the biscuits, cornbread, and sourdough bread consumed by other miners" (p. 75), yet we are not told what the Angel's Creek miners actually made in these ovens, nor are we given any insight into the esthetic that kept them apart from their fellow miners. Diner is dismissive of the "Grapefruit Irlandaise," "Potage Londonderry," and "Frozen Pudding Killarney" on the menu for the 1919 celebrations of the New York Friendly Sons of St. Patrick (p. 132), yet in order to understand the development of ethnic foodways, we must ask—as Diner does not—what aspects of the semiotics of food were used to create a link to the mother country in the minds of cook and consumer.

Diner is also hampered by an analytical framework that at times appears judgmental. The view that "alcohol symbolized Irish ethnicity, but it did not function as a constructive force for shaping community" (p. 143), for example, assumes a concept of "constructive force" within the community that is not true to the experience of many Irish-Americans. Diner's view that "had the daughters and sons of Ireland who came to America used food to celebrate their new identities as Irish Americans, they would have violated a deeply held cultural norm" (p. 223) is not supported by the evidence of the book or by an examination of Irish historical foodways. What Diner may be referring to is the relative lack of symbolic foods to differentiate Irish-Americans from others, in the manner of pasta for Italians and gefilte fish for Jews...