If you were a devotee of Jewish food and alive in 1975, you might remember…nothing much at all.
Bagels? If you didn’t live in a city like New York or Philadelphia, you were lucky to find Lender’s in your supermarket freezer case. Gefilte fish? Unless Bubbie was still alive and cooking, you were condemned to jars of mystery fish balls swimming in a viscous liquid that resembled formaldehyde.
Yes, the old-line delis were in full throttle: Sam & Hy’s in Skokie (outside Chicago); Attman’s in Baltimore; Canter’s in Los Angeles; Famous 4th Street Deli in Philadelphia and, arguably the king of them all, Katz’s in New York City. But there were signs of trouble: The Ratner’s Jewish dairy restaurant location on Second Avenue—with a late-night clientele that once included the likes of Fannie Brice, Al Jolson and Groucho Marx—had closed the year before. And even though the nearby Delancey Street branch wouldn’t close till 2002, the future of Jewish food was far from promising.
Exhibit A may have been the 1975 edition of the Hadassah Cookbook, produced by the chapter in Rochester, NY (where the first Hadassah convention took place in 1914). While the women’s movement of the 1970s came close to (but never did win) ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the cookbook extolled the Jewish woman as “the inspirer of a pure, chaste family life whose hallowing influences are incalculable.” Illustrations portray the Jewish mom as impossibly thin in a circle skirt, a chirpy smile on her face. The cookbook served up helpful hints on packing kids’ lunches during Passover (“Did you know you could take farfel pancakes to school?”) as well as recipes for gelatin molds, cakes with margarine and matzah balls with MSG-laden seasoning.
The book also recalls the trickle of Sephardic Jews who began settling in Rochester in the early 20th century, noting that their arrival caused “a great stir in the Jewish community of Rochester over these strange people who were so different from them.” Recipes include exotic moussaka, falafel and “hommos” (an “Israeli dip”).
The Jewish food scene of today would hardly be recognizable to Hadassah’s 1975 membership and perhaps most other American Jews of the time. Interestingly, the change has been more multidimensional than linear. Old favorites have been reconfigured with new ingredients—think kimchi-stuffed cabbage. Bagels and hummus broke into the American mainstream. Sephardic and Israeli-style cuisine has flourished to the point where Whole Foods now sells jars of shakshuka simmer sauce and shawarma marinade.
“Jewish cooking in America closely follows American cooking in America,” says Jane Ziegelman, author of 97 Orchard, about the food traditions of immigrant families who lived on Manhattan’s Lower East Side near what is today the Tenement Museum in New York City. But one thing that distinguishes Jewish cuisine from those of other ethnicities is its lack of ties to one specific place. Since ancient times, Jewish food has absorbed the ingredients along the diaspora trail. “Jewish food is tied to where Jews are,” Ziegelman says. “It’s a really flexible cuisine.”
When mainstream America embraced convenience foods in the second half of the 20th century—frozen TV dinners and the like—Jewish food manufacturers followed suit. And when Americans embraced health kicks, all-natural ingredients and vegetarian cooking in the 1970s, the Jewish counterpart was not far behind. Mollie Katzen, who grew up in a Jewish family in Rochester, published her landmark Moosewood Cookbook in 1977. Although not specifically Jewish, it does contain a few Jew-ish standbys: noodle kugel, hummus and falafel.
A few other milestones:
Tweaking the tradition: Joan Nathan’s Jewish Cooking in America, originally published in 1994, made traditional Jewish cooking accessible; “user-friendly, not so weird,” as Nathan told me. The book won a James Beard award. It even played a cameo role in an episode of Sex and the City. Nathan wrote in the book’s introduction that she massaged the recipes to reduce fat and sugar “without destroying the traditional flavors.” In their 2016 The Gefilte Manifesto, Jeffrey Yaskowitz and Liz Alpern extract “fusion” from “confusion” with recipes including the aforementioned kimchi-stuffed cabbage, and carrot-citrus horseradish relish (as a gefilte chaser), root-vegetable latkes, fried sour pickles with garlic aioli, and “cholent deviled eggs.” The authors are “presenting an old approach to a new way of eating,” Alpern wrote in the introduction. “Or is it a new approach to an old way of eating?”
Sephardic cuisine: The Book of Jewish Food: An Odyssey from Samarkand to New York by Claudia Roden, published in 1996, put Sephardic cuisine on the map. The author based it on wistful memories of growing up Jewish in Egypt before the government expelled Jews in 1956 after the Suez crisis. The book follows Sephardim through their own diaspora after Spain expelled Jews in 1492. (Of course, Jews already had lived in the Middle East since antiquity.) In an area stretching from North Africa to Greece, Turkey, Syria and beyond, they reconfigured the regional foods and seasonings, including lamb, eggplant, cumin, coriander, acacia-tree resin, rose water, orange zest and pomegranates. Tabbouleh, couscous and bulgur wheat all have Sephardic roots. Also, while not specifically Jewish, The Silver Palate Cookbook of 1982 influenced Jewish foodies of the time with its easy-peasy cast of international offerings. The book’s famous Chicken Marbella recipe—including Mediterranean-type prunes, olives and capers—even began winning a place on gourmet Passover seder tables.
Bagelmania: Starting in the 1980s, companies like Bruegger’s Bagels and Einstein Bros. Bagels helped sate America’s till-then subconscious yen for fresh bagels. Together, these corporatized entities went a long way toward liberating the masses outside major Jewish population centers from the dreaded freezer-case bagel. Bruegger’s, founded in 1983, now has locations in 22 states. Einstein Bros., started in 1995 and now owned by Panera, is in 35 states and DC, and also in Okinawa.
Food writer Andrew Coe credits Lender’s and mechanized mass-production with helping break the vice grip of the New York City bagel bakers union, which dictated bagel sizes and flavors and times of preparation for New York, the nation’s largest bagel market by far. Without constraints, bagel baking proliferated beyond traditional plain, sesame and poppy-seed. Regions of America with little bagel experience embraced oversized bagels in a multitude of flavors (blueberry, cinnamon-raisin, banana-nut and dozens of others). “It’s been completely erased from its ethnic origins,” says Coe, who is writing a history of American bread that includes a bagel chapter. “Now it’s like a canvas for people to do anything they want with.”
Hummus: With rising American interest in all-natural, healthy maybe, hummus checked all the boxes. Starting in the 1980s, cultivation of the humble chickpea skyrocketed, mostly in the Northwest. Yes, there is conflict over which Middle Eastern ethnicity gets credit for hummus. But at a minimum, Israelites have a credible claim. (And honestly, does it matter?) Interestingly, the invention and marketing of the Cuisinart in the 1970s and 1980s aided home cooks in the rediscovery of Jewish classics (gefilte fish, potato latkes) and the leap forward into new ones (hummus). As Joan Nathan put it: “Americans would never have had the patience to make these dishes [with] mortar and pestle.”
Today there are many brands of hummus, but few rode the marketing wave like Sabra, the top-seller in the United States. Sabra started in Queens, NY, in 1986, and by 2013 it was declared the NFL’s official dip. (The company also made news in 2008 for sculpting busts of that year’s presidential candidates.) Sabra is now owned by PepsiCo.
Israeli-style: “There really aren’t Israeli restaurants in Israel, as strange as that sounds,” cookbook author Michael Solomonov writes. But that didn’t stop him from opening an Israeli restaurant in Philadelphia in 2008, Zahav (“gold”). His aim was to recreate in one place the spectrum of restaurant food in Israel, whether Bulgarian, Arabic, Georgian, Yemenite, and so on. His lushly illustrated cookbooks, Zahav and Israeli Soul, are a National Geographic-quality tour of Holy Land dishes and food markets, with recipes to match. There is Israeli Salad, but little else says “Israel.” Among its offerings: shakshuka (a tomatoey red sea with islands of poached eggs); and a parade of pastries (cashew baklava “cigars”; konafi, from shredded phyllo dough).
Also there are meats (shawarma) and eggplant (sabich) wrapped in pita or Druze mountain bread. And everywhere there is hummus, hummus and more hummus. Another seminal contributor to the “Israelification” of Jewish food is Jerusalem, a 2012 cookbook by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi. The authors themselves were a microcosm of the region’s cross-cultural culinary influences: Both born in 1968, Ottolenghi was from Jewish west Jerusalem and Tamimi from Palestinian east Jerusalem. “Alas, although Jerusalemites have so much in common, food, at the moment, seems to be the only unifying force in this highly fractured place,” they write in the introduction. Many of these Israeli-style food offerings are now more common in the United States, with falafel, also chickpea-based, neck and neck with hummus as the breakout star of the Middle-Eastern (and Mediterranean) food constellation, because they’re healthy (minus the frying)—and delicious!
Big Kosher: As the hummus-falafel wave was gathering momentum, the traditional Jewish-food industry was desperately trying to reinvent itself. For Manischewitz, the kosher giant, the last years of the 20th century were lean indeed. Starting in the 1950s, non-Jewish food companies gained ground on Kosher counterparts when the Union of Orthodox Rabbis began certifying mainstream products such as Oreos as kosher and allowing them to use the now-famous “U” within a circle on labels.
In 1991, Manischewitz was fined $1 million for conspiring to fix matzah prices—a deal allegedly hatched at Ratner’s (no less). Manischewitz then spent what seemed like 40 years in the culinary desert, bought and sold by a series of vulturous private equity firms before landing in 2019 as a subsidiary of Kayco Kosher Foods, purveyors of kosher wines and Kedem grape juice. With redesigned packaging, Manischewitz has introduced lines of new products, including Kosher-for-Passover pizza (gluten free) and mixes for brownies, chocolate cake and red-velvet cake. Its sister Kayco company, Gefen, produces Kosher-for-Passover breakfast cereals for kids.
The exponential growth of America’s Orthodox Jewish population has also fueled the rebirth of kosher food production and distribution. Kayco operates a facility the size of an auto plant in Bayonne, NJ. For Passover, they can offer a line of products that mainstream companies mostly don’t want to challenge.
“You’ve got a growing population, and I think you can safely say you’ve got a population that likes its food, that values food, which is not always the case in our population today,” says Roger Horowitz of the Hagley Museum & Library in Wilmington, DE, and author of Kosher USA.
So, what’s next? For Jewish food developments and all those who love them, is it another hearty dose of “back to the future”? “This is not a static tradition,” says Jeffrey Yoskowitz, coauthor of The Gefilte Manifesto. The idea that you must replicate your grandparents’ (or great-grandparents’) exact recipes for matzah balls or stuffed cabbage “doesn’t speak to the dynamism of the culture,” he says. “These foods are not stuck in amber.”
Opening picture: Illustrations by Mrs. Herbert J. Schwartz from the 1975 edition of the Hadassah Cookbook.
