Tag Archives: community cookbooks

Culinary History, Summer 2026

Carping about Gefilte Fish: Love, Labor and the Evolution of a Demanding Recipe in the Jewish-American Kitchen

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By Tamar Gonen Brown

Although gefilte fish plays a central role in Jewish culinary tradition, many American Jews have grown up unfamiliar with the homemade recipe. Traditionally made with de-boned carp, ground and mixed with matzoh meal or breadcrumbs, onions, eggs and seasoning, then poached in a broth made from the fish bones, gefilte fish was once an intricate and labor-intensive dish that offered Jewish home cooks an opportunity to display their virtuosity. Beginning in the 1950s, it was marketed to American Jewish homemakers as a convenient jarred product, and today many who know the dish are familiar with it only as a packaged food. Asya Vaisman Shulman writes in Pakn Treger, or “Book Peddler,” the magazine of the Yiddish Book Center, that “access to variety of prepared foods and a growing disengagement from tradition caused a rapid decline in gefilte fish preparation in the United States in the first half of the twentieth century.”  

Barbara Cohen’s children’s book The Carp in the Bathtub, first published in 1972, tells a story centered on old-fashioned gefilte fish preparation that was already a cultural memory for many of its young American-Jewish readers. Leah and Harry, the main characters in Cohen’s book, know gefilte fish only as a homemade dish. In fact, it is precisely because they have seen every step in the preparation process that they harbor a secret: they have never tasted a single bite of their mother’s famously excellent version. After days of playing with the fish their mother brings home alive, and feeding it bits of bread and lettuce, the children can’t bear its fate: “Could you eat a friend?” As a child, I could relate to this jarring question—I remember covering my ears so that I would not hear the thud of the fishmonger’s club when my grandmother bought carp for her gefilte fish. Even so, unlike Harry and Leah, it never occurred to me to not eat the product of my grandmother’s labor. My grandmother’s gefilte fish was delicious. 

 Despite the traditional dish’s starring role in Jewish celebratory meals, the shift away from traditional recipes is not surprising considering the laborious process of making gefilte fish. Gefilte, in Yiddish, means stuffed, though the actual step of re-filling the carefully preserved head and body of the fish with the gefilte mixture is a flourish not all home cooks include. Harry and Leah’s mother is a master of the dish, but even she has dispensed with this challenging step. As Leah exclaims, “At least Harry and I were spared that!” Her mother, too, may have been grateful to skip that painstaking work.

Xenophobic attitudes toward “smelly” foods of immigrant cultures (see, for example, “Garlic and Social Class”) may be another reason why jarred gefilte fish took over the American-Jewish table throughout the twentieth century—and then, ironically, the strange-looking jarred product itself became a source of shame in itself. Rebecca Flint Marx describes her own childhood alienation from the authentic Eastern European recipe in “Learning to Love Gefilte Fish” (2016). She knew only the industrialized version of the dish, and remembers watching her mother eat “nugget after terrible nugget, and feel[ing] embarrassed that Jews ate such ugly, mysterious food.” She also reflects on her own reading of The Carp in the Bathtub as an “anti-gefilte fish cautionary tale.” Gefilte fish here is a source not of beloved cultural memory, but of deep-seated immigrant shame.

One place to trace the story of the jarred gefilte takeover is in culinary pamphlets of the mid-twentieth century. A 1960 pamphlet of Passover menus produced by Philadelphia Gas Works encourages “the housewife” to seek out traditional Jewish foods that are newly available in convenient cans and jars.  The Mansichewitz Company’s “8-Day Menu Planner and Recipe Guide,” produced for Passover in 1971, includes a checklist “for easy shopping at your local grocer” featuring no fewer than nine jarred variations on gefilte fish. Perhaps even Leah and Harry’s own mother would have welcomed the respite these products offered. 

Pamphlet marketing Manischewitz products for Passover, 1971. Image courtesy of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.

Despite easing the home cook’s labor, mass-produced gefilte fish has shortcomings in flavor and visual appeal. In fact, a jar of prepared food on a festive holiday table is hard to swallow for many reasons. When a host sets a table with silver and linen, as many Jewish families continue to do for Shabbat and for holidays, they are unlikely to place a recognizably industrial food product at its center. Instead, family recipes and community cookbooks trace a new genre of recipes focused on doctoring up a jar of gefilte fish to make it more appealing. One such example lies within the recipes of Rose Maybush Flax. Rose’s handwritten recipe cards include a recipe dated 1985 that calls for many of the same ingredients as Mama’s gefilte fish—carrots, celery, eggs, matzoh meal. However, the key ingredient is not a live carp but a 24 oz. jar of gefilte fish. 

Recipe designed to improve the flavor and appearance of jarred gefilte fish. Recipes of Rose Flax (2016-M128), Card Box 2. Image courtesy of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard-Radcliffe Institute. 

Similar recipes are scattered in synagogue community cookbooks, produced by Jewish women’s groups from across the country (see The Recipe Project’s Summer 2024 issue Cooking Up Community for more on this genre). These cookbooks trace the survival of gefilte fish recipes across the United States. Many of them also document traditional techniques for preparing gefilte fish (though none call for a live carp). 

Community cookbooks from synagogues and Jewish organizations across the United States that include variations on gefilte fish recipes. Image courtesy of the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Harvard-Radcliffe Institute.

Detailed instructions for the preparation of gefilte fish also hide in surprising contexts, including a 1988 episode of the radio show Laugh Lines, broadcast by the feminist Boston Women’s Community Radio. Here, a grandmother and granddaughter acknowledge the labor that is inherent in the recipe while sharing their commitment to passing on the technique. Finding this conversation in a secular feminist context is striking—these women reject the marketed “ease” of the  industrial product in favor of the traditional recipe, accepting its historical difficulties in order to access its culinary delights. 

Tamar Gonen Brown is a librarian who currently serves as the head of education and outreach at the Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, located at the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute in Cambridge, MA. She earned her doctorate in English and American language and literature from Harvard University, her master’s degree in library and information science from Simmons University, and her bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago, and has sampled gefilte fish on or around all three of these campuses. Her professional interests include teaching and learning with primary sources, culinary history, women and gender studies, and the history of the novel. If you are interested in learning more about some of the culinary collections at the Schlesinger Library that helped inspire this piece, this research guide will help you get started.

 

American Studies, Education, Modern, Posts, Summer 2024, Teaching Resources

Teaching with Community Cookbooks

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By Jolie Braun
Increasingly, cookbooks are finding a place in the classroom. In recent years, they have been used for teaching a variety of topics, including storytelling and language,[1] women’s lives,[2] and African American history.[3] In this piece, I will share my experience taking a book history approach in a session on community cookbooks. This method of studying the book as a physical object and cultural artifact can open up new avenues of discovery for students and spur different ways of thinking about authorship, publishing, and audience. In this context, community cookbooks are equal parts challenging and accessible, complex objects that offer students much to consider and discuss.

In Fall 2022, I taught a one-credit first year seminar, “More than Just Recipes: Exploring American Cookbooks,” based in the cookbook collection I steward as curator of modern literature and manuscripts at the Ohio State University Library’s Rare Books & Manuscripts Library (RBML). I organized the course chronologically, beginning with Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796), known as America’s first cookbook, and ending with a recent collection of no-recipe recipes, Danny Licht’s Cooking as Though You Might Cook Again (2021). Each class period focused on a different topic, such as cookbooks and global foodways or advertising cookbooks. The first part of a session was a combination of lecture and discussion. During the latter half, students worked directly with materials from RBML’s holdings.

Community cookbooks work well for hands-on analysis. Produced by small, amateur groups outside of traditional publishing channels, these books deviate from their mainstream counterparts in significant ways. This is evident inside and out: for example, they are often bound with inexpensive, comb binding, lack images of finished dishes, and frequently include duplicate recipes. The creators, resources, and motives involved in producing community cookbooks are vastly different from mainstream cookbooks and the tangible evidence of these differences can lead to a fruitful discussion about expectations and conventions of the genre. 

For our class session on community cookbooks, I selected several published in Ohio between the 1960s and the 1990s, including a mix of cookbooks printed by cookbook publishers—an option that became increasingly popular during the late twentieth century—as well as books that had been produced largely by the groups themselves.

A few Ohio community cookbooks used in this class session. Image credit: Jolie Braun

Working in pairs, students chose a book from the selection and used a handout I created with questions to guide their study. They began by recording bibliographic information about their book, a task that prompted them to locate these details and consider the context they provided. With community cookbooks, this seemingly simple task can present challenges: Who is the author? When and where was it published? During our class discussion, we talked about why such details may not have been considered necessary to include in self-published works created by a collective and intended for a local audience.

Students also wrote a physical description of their cookbook. How was it made, what materials were used, and what could that reveal? Some were bound together with metal rings or had covers made out of scrap cardstock, familiar materials used in unconventional ways that suggested both the limitations and resourcefulness of their creators. These descriptions were an opportunity to encourage students to think about how a book represents a series of choices and what decisions they might make if creating a book of their own.  

Lastly, students reviewed the contents of their book, chose an unfamiliar recipe to research, and reported their findings to the class. Their selections—such as applesauce meatloaf and sock it to me cake—were representative of home cooking, and led to a conversation about the nature of foods found in community cookbooks and what they could tell us about how people ate and the group that compiled the cookbook.

Community cookbooks can be eye-opening for students. My class was surprised and excited to encounter cookbooks that were not the work of chefs or cooks or writers, but of ordinary people.

[1] Jennifer Cognard-Black and Melissa A. Goldthwaite, “Books That Cook: Teaching Food and Food Literature in the English Classroom,” College English, 70.4 (2008): 421-436.

[2] Kathryn G. Matheny, “No Mere Culinary Curiosities: Using Historical Cookbooks in the Library Classroom.” RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage, 21.2 (2020): 79-97. https://rbm.acrl.org/index.php/rbm/article/view/24707/32534

[3] Sakina M. Hughes, “Teaching African American History and Culture through Cookbooks and Etiquette Manuals,” Teaching History: A Journal of Methods, 42.2 (2017): 59-72.

Jolie Braun is the Curator of Modern Literature and Manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she manages and develops the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include teaching and outreach in special collections, self-publishing, cookbooks, and zines. Her co-curated exhibit, Essential Ingredients: Cookbooks as History, runs from August 20, 2024 – January 5, 2025 in the Thompson Library gallery.

Food and Drink, Knowledge Transmission, Posts, Winter 2024, Women and Gender

Building Community Through Recipe Sharing

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By Sara de Blas Hernández

All of the famous cookbooks emerging in early modern Spain were written by men who worked for the royal court: Libro de guisados (1529) was written by Roberto de Nola, Arte de cocina, pasteleria, vizcocheria, y conserveria (1611) by Francisco Martínez Montiño, and Arte de repostería (1747) by Juan de la Mata. Outside of the palace walls, however, it was generally women —and not men—who were in charge of feeding the family. Even though there is no record of edited cookbooks by female authors during the period, there are some manuscripts authored by nuns and by literate noblewomen that made possible the preservation of knowledge shared through oral traditions. One of these recipe books is Libro de apuntaciones de guisos y dulces written by María Rosa Calvillo de Teruel around 1740.

Original Libro de Apuntaciones de guisos y dulces at the Real Academia Española in Madrid. Image Credit: The author

At first sight, one might consider recipe books to be straightforward texts with instructions, but they can provide the attentive reader with more information than what initially meets the eye. This is the case with Libro de apuntaciones de guisos y dulces. The only biographical information contained in the book is the name of the author, which, interestingly enough, is written by a different hand than the one that writes the recipes in the book. Is María Rosa the author? Was the book passed down to a relative who signed her name to claim it as hers? Even though these questions remain unanswered, a careful reading of this recipe book has allowed me to reconstruct, to a certain extent, the details of María Rosa’s life, the social context in which she lived, and the cooking practices used at the time.

In Libro de apuntaciones, the titles of some recipes —“How to prepare quails as it is done in Seville” or “How to make Utreras’ pastries”[i]— locate the author in Andalusia, the southernmost region of mainland Spain. The ingredients, meanwhile, disclose María Rosa’s social class, or at least the one she interacted with, which was the lower nobility. The book calls for spices such as clove, paprika, cinnamon, and saffron. These are a constant in most of the recipes and were very expensive but essential ingredients in the preparation of most dishes at the time. There is a recipe that even calls for Flemish butter, a special kind of butter mixed with potassium nitrate that kept the product fresh. This butter was imported from the Netherlands, Denmark, and Ireland and was a luxurious and expensive ingredient not available to all.

Map of Spain with the Andalusia region highlighted. Image Credit: Wikicommons

An exploration of the handwritten recipes in Libro de apuntaciones reveals yet another key detail. Out of the 100 recipes contained in the book, six of them are attributed to other women: Antonia, Mari-quita, tía Felipa, doña Joaquina, María Teresa, and María Manuela. These recipes are considerably longer and more accurate than María Rosa’s recipes. By including these recipes in the book, the author recognizes other members of the food-making community and also acknowledges their skills, abilities, and knowledge. This resonates with Janet Theopano’s concept of “cookbook as community,” which understands recipe books as spaces where women created networks of support and spaces that promoted social interaction and exchange of ideas.

In these six recipes, María Rosa’s own voice gets intertwined with the voices of the six other women. She suggests improvements and variations to the original recipes proposed by her peers and evaluates the quality of the food being prepared. This is proof of experimentation. María Rosa tests and tastes the recipes herself, which is the kind of experimental knowledge and sensorial methodology necessary in the kitchen.

Food making relies on what Sutton defines as the “lower senses.” Take as an example the recipe for “Huevos moles” in which the sense of sight — “both things are whisked until they are very white and they make little bubbles”— and the sense of smell— “ cook until it smells done”— are the ones that determine when the eggs and the sugar are done. In “How to make pork blood sausage,” the sense of touch, and more specifically the hand and its parts, become the unit of measurement: “[add] a handful [of aniseed] with the whole hand,” “as much [cumin as] can be fitted in three fingers,” or “as much [ginger as] can be fitted in four fingers”.

The examples above position María Rosa and her peers as a community of practice that boasts a unique set of knowledge and skills rooted in experimental methodologies and the senses. In turn, this is conducive to the validity and recognition of a field —food-making— and a group of people—women— undervalued and undermined by society. My work helps unveil the potential of a text which, although not very promising at first sight, proves to be a rich source of avenues of inquiry and a way to rescue women’s voices and their knowledge from an unrecognizing past.

[i] Utrera is a town south-east of Seville

 

References

Calvillo de Teruel, María Rosa. Libro de apuntaciones de guisos y dulces, 1740.

Sutton, Davis. “Cooking Skill, the Senses, and Memory: The Fate of Practical Knowledge.”  Sensible Objects ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006.

Theophano, Janet. Eat My Words: Reading Women’s Lives through the Cookbooks They Wrote. Palgrave, 2002.

Sara de Blas Hernández is a Ph.D. student specializing in Spanish Linguistics at UC Davis. Even though her main field of research is Second Language Acquisition, she has a keen interest in Food Studies. She is currently working on creating and testing pedagogical materials that develop students’ communicative competence and critical thinking skills while boosting motivation and engagement through multisensory and experiential learning methodologies.

American Studies, Networks of Knowledge, Posts, Women and Gender

Favorite Recipes: Social Networks in the Pages of a Regional Community Cookbook

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By Rachel A. Snell

Members of the Mount Desert chapter may have attended the ceremonial induction of officers at the neighboring Tremont chapter, as depicted in this undated photograph. Courtesy Southwest Harbor Public Library

In the late 1920s, members of the Mount Desert Chapter No. 20 of the Order of the Eastern Star compiled a cookbook of favorite recipes. During the peak of associational life, from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the Order of the Eastern Star was one of a number of social organizations that shaped civic life and sociability on Mount Desert Island.[i]The recipes collected by the members of this chapter provide windows into the lives of early-twentieth-century women, both within and outside of domestic spaces. A previous post explored the representation of globalized food systems within the compiled recipes, this post will examine social networks within Mount Desert. The Order of the Eastern Star, like other women’s organizations of the early twentieth century, strengthened the social bonds between rural Maine women. The recipes for salads and cakes, which would be appropriate for an informal ladies’ luncheon or tea, suggest the significance of social gatherings to the members of the Mount Desert Chapter and complement the histories we have of this chapter. Additionally, the text of the cookbook can be used as a map and as a spatial analysis of the collected recipes, which reveal the continued importance of familial ties and residential proximity in the lives of rural women of the early twentieth century.

This map, created using census and directory data, provides a spatial analysis of the compilers of Favorite Recipes. A full map of the Island can be viewed here.

Cookbook collections such as Favorite Recipes shift our focus from considering women’s experiences in time, to considering their experiences across physical space. Research into historical and genealogical records permit this cookbook to be mapped, allowing women’s networks to be presented visually, and thereby provide an image of social culture on Mount Desert Island during the period in which these recipes were collected. Of the forty-one women and two men who submitted recipes to the cookbook, thirty-three individuals can be definitively identified and mapped through Census Records and local directories. The map reveals that the majority of the recipe compilers, and likely the majority of the members of the Mount Desert Chapter, resided in Somesville. A few lived further afield in Pretty Marsh, Sound, and Northeast Harbor, but the majority appear to have resided within easy commuting distance to the Masonic Lodge.

This undated photograph shows the two and one-half story Somesville Masonic Hall built in the early 1890s. Courtesy of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society

The clustering of recipe contributors in Somesville affirms the intentions of the founders of the Mount Desert Chapter. According to an undated “Brief History” of the chapter from 1894-1920, “the ladies of Somesville, desirous of enjoying more frequent opportunities of meeting together, held a number of meetings during the fall and winter of 1894, taking preliminary action toward the organization of a chapter of the Order of Eastern Star.”[ii]The creation of the Mount Desert Chapter provided the women of Somesville and surrounding villages with an opportunity to meet regularly at the Masonic Lodge and to attend to chapter business, as well as a chance to socialize outside of domestic spaces and obligations.

Recipes for cake frostings and fillings from Favorite Recipe with a splatter suggesting these recipes were used by the cookbook owner. Courtesy of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society

The recipes themselves also suggest the importance of this social function. While there is no lack of substantial family fare, recipes for cakes, cookies, salads, and other delicacies that may have formed the menu for a ladies’ luncheon or an afternoon tea are well represented in Favorite Recipes. It is quite possible that these recipes provided the foundation for the menus of suppers served at officer appointments and at regular chapter meetings. Newspaper accounts of the Mount Desert Chapter’s activities frequently note the quality of the spread, such as the comment that “delicious refreshments were served at the close of the chapter” meeting in January of 1932.[iii]In this sense, it is a recipe book perfectly suited to the women of the chapter and their increasingly organized network of friends, family, and neighbors. Recipes suitable for quick, hearty, and wholesome family meals and for impressing guests, or fellow attendees of a neighborhood potluck, comingle within the cookbook.

This post is excerpted from “Favorite Recipes: Relationships Past and Present in the Pages of a Regional Cookbook” published in Chebacco, the magazine of the Mount Desert Island Historical Society. The full article is available here.

[i]William J. Skocpol, “Fraternal Organization on Mount Desert Island,” Chebacco 9 (2008), 36-59.

[ii]A Brief History of Mount Desert Chapter #20, O.E.S., 1894-1920, 1, Mount Desert Island Historical Society.

[iii]“Somesville,” Bar Harbor Record(Jan. 27, 1932): 7.