Food History

One of the commenters on this blog, Neil, has hit upon a really crucial definitional question in his comment on one of those posts where I try to puzzle out the balance between retaining a cuisine and maintaining kashruth. You can find his comment here.

Neil implies that all Jewish cooking must be kosher. He says that my grandmother’s cooking was “non-jewish cooking done by a non-observant (or the kashrut laws) jew�?. Except that Jewish cooking isn’t just a matter of eating bacon or not eating bacon, of mixing milk and meat or not mixing milk and meat.

Is my mother’s cooking less Jewish than one of her granddaughter’s, because that close relative is Ultra-Orthodox and is stricter than my mother, who is only very kosher Orthodox? They both have different dishes and sinks and my youngest sister doesn’t. Yet that sister is the one who keeps the family foodways by handing the cooking down to the next generation and by bringing the family together for traditional dinners and by playing a leading role in her synagogue.

The ‘Jewish’ bit of the foodways is deceptive. It’s easy to say that religious law is the same as foodways. That any Jew who doesn’t keep very strictly kosher is not actually following Jewish foodways, no matter how strong their family traditions have been over time. In any culture that has strong religious foundations and strong food cultures, for some people foodways and religious laws will be very close and for other people foodways and recipes and family customs are quite a long distance from religious laws.

The dishes I puzzle about can’t just be compared to the rules in the Shulchan Aruch (a late codifcation of Jewish law) and be given a Jewish culture pass or fail mark. They have to be taken in the context of their their own time and place. My grandmother lived in the middle of a vibrant Jewish community where very, very few people kept kosher as did her ancestors. Her foodways – as I’m about to demonstrate for a conference in Sydney next month – are very typical of her ancestry and her place. They’re typical of much English Jewry as well from the first half of the nineteenth century. It is Anglo-Jewish cooking. All the early Anglo-Jewish cookbooks contain bits of bacon.

Judaism more than most religions has porous boundaries where culture and foodways and religion are concerned. Many cultures have similar distinctions, though. What the priest says to do as opposed to what the community actually does (study the theory of Medieval marriage as opposed to the practice and you might be amused). What the rabbi teaches (halacha) as opposed to what actually happens in the home.

I suspect I will argue forever that my grandmother cooked in a way that fitted the Jewish culture of her time. I would not be so silly as to claim there were religiously sound reasons for this, but nor would I be so dismissive of Jewish cultures other than that of my Ultra-Orthodox family members to assume that they are not Jewish, simply because they follow different aspects of halacha.

Anglo-Australian Jewish cooking is not the same as modern Australian Jewish cooking, or as Romaniot Jewish cooking or Israeli Jewish cooking. I should blog more varieties of Jewish cooking and show you some of the variants, I guess. Except there’s so much else to talk about! What you need to know is that they’re all culturally Jewish – and some of them are more religiously proper than others. This means that while lots of cuisines are culturally Jewish some of them are quite a way from the religious laws.

PS Sorry for evil joke in the picture. Hamburgers with cheese are also a problem for most Jews.