More Than Recipes: Kosher Cookbooks as Historical Texts

The Jewish Cookery Book, published in 1871 by Esther Jacobs Levy of Philadelphia, is widely accepted as the first kosher cookbook in the United States. In a tone described by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as defensive, Levy set out to show Philadelphia Jews “who identified with the English cultural standard of the local elite . . . how their elegant tables could also be kosher.”¹ This desire for elegance foreshadowed an ongoing undercurrent in kosher cookbooks and Jewish life in the United States: the drive to emulate and belong without losing an autonomous identity.

If, as Steven Tobias writes, “cookbooks contain not only recipes but hidden clues and cultural assumptions about race, gender and ethnicity,”² then Levy’s book offers a unique glimpse of American Jewish life for a nineteenth-century urban matron. The full title of Esther Jacob Levy’s text is Jewish Cookery Book on Principles of Economy, Adapted for Jewish Housekeepers, With the Addition of Many Useful Medicinal Recipes, and Other Valuable Information Relative to Housekeeping and Domestic Management. In the introduction, Levy sets the tone with “information as to the manner of strictly keeping a Jewish house,” including a reminder on the need for mezuzahs, instructions on Sabbath preparations, kashering and carving meat, supervising servants, checking bills, and preparing for Passover.³

Levy places her audience firmly in the women’s sphere when she describes preparing the home for Passover as a time when Jewish women feel “pleasurable emotions” at seeing everything in the house looking “brilliantly clean.” She writes that all Jews should feel “delighted” inasmuch as all the cleaning was “preparation for becomingly celebrating our wonderful deliverance from bondage.”⁴ Cleaning for Passover means stripping a house bare of any sign of products containing leavened flour (chomets), and casting the massive undertaking as a “delight” can be read as an attempt to elevate the drudgery by imbuing it with religious significance couched within the work ethic that is at the core of the American character. It is a notion that echoed a similar book of the era; in The American Woman’s Home, coauthors and sisters Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe emphasize the importance of “placid and cheerful temper and tones” as a necessary component of a Christian home. The authors suggest that women needed to “cultivate” those characteristics and make them “habitual,” in order to maintain a happy household.⁵ Even if through self-delusion, Benjamin Franklin’s virtues of order, industry, and cleanliness⁶ are embedded into both the Beechers’ and Levy’s narrative.

Levy stressed that her readers should carry out specific traditional duties and responsibilities in their households, each continuing a biblical tradition as a woman of valor described in Proverbs 31.15 as one who “riseth while it is yet night and giveth provision to her household.” It was assumed that this late nineteenth-century woman would be kosher-observant, despite the reality that Reform Jewish leaders were just a few years from declaring kashrut unnecessary. Additionally, the 187-page Jewish Cookery Book assumed that its audience would have servants. This was consistent with the late nineteenth-century middle-class American urban lifestyle. In the years between 1870 and 1910, there was a dramatic increase in the number of female domestic servants in the United States, an increase David Katzman explained as a result of “the rapid industrialization and accompanying urbanization”⁷ of the country combined with what Faye Dudden observed as a new concern for status.⁸ As Levy educated her readers about supervising servants, she was both reflecting and predicting their economic status as upwardly mobile Americans.

Levy’s text begins with “Arrangement of the Table,” describing how the table should be set for breakfast, luncheon, and dinner. For breakfast, this includes instructions on placement of cutlery and plates, salt shakers and cruets, tea and coffee pots, milk, hot milk, and cream, as well as what should be placed on the sideboard. The luncheon instructions detail how to transport items to the table by bringing them on “a tray, with let-down sides, on which has been previously...