Recipes for the Melting Pot

The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book

Nora L. Rubel (Autor)

Buch | Softcover

240 Seiten

2026
Columbia University Press (Verlag)
978-0-231-22434-5 (ISBN)

Noch nicht erschienen (ca. Juni 2026)
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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.

Nora L. Rubel is the Elizabeth Denio Professor in Jewish Studies at the University of Rochester. She is the author of Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (Columbia, 2009), as well as coeditor of Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (Columbia, 2014) and Blessings Beyond the Binary: "Transparent" and the Queer Jewish Family (2024).

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

Erscheint lt. Verlag	16.6.2026
Zusatzinfo	11 b&w illustrations
Verlagsort	New York
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Essen / Trinken ► Grundkochbücher
Themenwelt	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
ISBN-10	0-231-22434-6 / 0231224346
ISBN-13	978-0-231-22434-5 / 9780231224345
Zustand	Neuware