For the Love of Judaism
Rabbi Michael Pont, Senior Rabbi at Marlboro Jewish Center, shares his message of love, inspiration and Torah.
For the Love of Judaism
The People of the Cookbook
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Community cookbooks have been a part of Synagogue culture for decades. More than just recipes, they are the through line of generations past to the future of Jewish families around the world.
Few, if any, know more about Jewish cookbooks than PhD candidate Natalie Ross who is writing her dissertation on the people behind Jewish cookbooks. Natalie, who has more than 300 community cookbooks in her possession has traveled the world to learn more about Jewish cooking around the globe and the people, both professional and amateur, who have put their recipes on paper.
This is a great conversation that you will not want to miss.
Shalom, I am Rabbi Michael Pont, and this is For the Love of Judaism. And on this episode, we are going to be talking about food, in particular, cookbooks and recipes. I am so happy to have on the program today Natalie Ross. Natalie Ross is a doctoral candidate specializing in Jewish food studies. She is particularly interested in how cookbooks transmit and affirm Jewishness and how they uphold or shatter gender, class, and race norms. She has a collection of Jewish American community cookbooks from over 38 states spanning the 20th century, totaling almost 300 texts. The title of her upcoming dissertation is, and I quote, The People of the Cookbook. I love that. Natalie is the current Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and Culinary Arts Fellow in Food Studies. So Natalie Ross, welcome to the program. How are you today? I'm great, actually. I'm I'm so honored to be speaking with you. Yeah, this is terrific. And before we get into it, I should say that uh Natalie and I have known each other since 1999 or 2000, uh, because we both used to live in Greensboro, North Carolina. Uh I was there for five years. Natalie, how long were you and your family in Greensboro? Just about five years as well. Okay, so it was a it was a stop in our in our ongoing journeys. Um and it's just great to reconnect with you tonight. My wife, Natalie, suggested that you would be a great person to talk to. And I'm so glad that uh we made the connection. Absolutely. You've collected over 300 of what you call community cookbooks. And I want to ask, how do you define a community cookbook? I mean, how is it that reps recipes and food create community?
SPEAKER_01I mean, that's a great question. For me, I really think of community cookbooks as uh texts that are written and edited and compiled, uh published by uh home cooks by non-professionals. And really in the 20th century, those have been you know primarily put together by women and uh for a variety of purposes. Uh, some in the very early part of the 20th century had the goal in mind of uh uh assimilating immigrants coming from primarily Eastern Europe, trying to both Americanize them, but also hoping that they would maintain their uh Jewish identity through food ways. So the Settlement Cookbook, which a lot of controversy over whether or not it's a Jewish cookbook or not. But let's say it is probably the first Jewish community cookbook. It has a lot of traf, it has pork and oysters and all of that. Oh, it nonetheless, it does. I mean, it's when I when I ask people, what's your favorite Jewish cookbook? You'll have a lot of people who will say to me, Oh, the settlement cookbook, because my mom gave it to me. I got it as a bridal shower gift. You know, I remember my grandmother cooking from it. So it has these great memories associated with it. And other people will say, there's trafe, it's not kosher, it's therefore it's not Jewish. But nonetheless, this was a cookbook that was put together by Mrs. Uh Simon in or Mrs. Kander in Milwaukee. It was meant for mostly women who were come through her cooking school, and these were women who were new immigrants, these were women who might be domestics in Jewish homes, and these were women who just were not familiar with Jewish tradition. And so it has the, you know, hala, it has gefiltefish, it has a lot of Eastern European dishes. It has a whole section on Passover. So, in many ways, I I think you definitely would say this is a Jewish cookbook, but it had a purpose, which was to assimilate new Jews into American society. And later cookbooks, uh, community cookbooks had especially, you know, post-World War, had a different aim, you know, fundraising. And I think that's how a lot of us know our community cookbooks, right? Is is that they were used for whether it's you know a new wing of the synagogue, whether it's the preschool. But if you think about, especially in the kind of post-World War II era, these cookbooks had a very important part of our kind of Jewish American history, which is uh hospital fundraising cookbooks, for example. Books that were, you know, these funds were used to build hospitals and hospital wings because doctor, Jewish doctors could not get uh privileges in secular hospitals. And so, you know, we think of Jewish hospitals today, which, you know, many of them are highly acclaimed, but a lot of those came from exactly these fundraising appeals. Now, obviously much larger appeals as well, but but the community cookbook was a part of that charitable giving. And so many women, even when you think of kind of women getting involved uh today, you know, in fundraising activities, that vehicle in that kind of post-World War period was an opportunity for many women to get the organizing skills that we later will see in uh whether it's the civil rights movement or the women's rights movements. And so it's so easy to dismiss community cookbooks as just, you know, women collecting recipes, but they've really been a huge part of kind of narrating Jewish history and really important parts of Jewish history, as well as being a vehicle for women who were in the unpaid labor force and getting some organizing skills in particular that they were then able to utilize. And so, you know, when you look back at some of these cookbooks, whether it's the settlement cookbook, for example, and you might think, well, why would they include pork and oysters, for example? And you look at, you know, more recent community cookbooks, reform versus um conservative. And you could say, well, you know, reform cookbooks will only have trafe, but conservative cookbooks don't. You know, why is that? And so they communicate your synagogue and your community's values. You know, they say something about who you are as a as a community. And I think that that is something that's really important when you're looking at Jewish history, you know, on a historical timeline. And community cookbooks, I think, give us that glimpse uh because they are written by people, historical agents. So I love them. I I they're such a find when I I mean I hunt for them all the time. I I absolutely love community cookbooks.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Wow, there's a lot to unpack there. That's really fascinating, right? First, that a community cookbook, it it's not just it's not just a collection of recipes. Like it is, it's a glimpse into the, you know, the historical reality of that time, right? The settlement cookbook, the fact that it had recipes for, you know, for pork and oysters, you know, that was part of the Jewish way of looking at life, American life at that time. Jews wanted to fit in and be good Americans. Um, you know, a lot of Jews had Christmas trees in their homes because they thought that that's what it meant to be a good American. I mean, the Jewish identity has evolved, you know, since, say, the 1930s and 40s. So a cookbook that has, you know, trafe, as you said, is a reflection of maybe you could say the precariousness of Jewish identity, or or maybe just that's what Jews thought at the time, that to be a good American, you should have those kinds of foods and those kinds of recipes.
SPEAKER_01Well, and if you think this is not a community cookbook, but Esther Levy's uh book of Jewish cookery, which is the first commercial cookbook, you know, that cookbook was aimed at more middle class housewives. But that cookbook is kosher, and that was meant to show housewives who were at that point in history cooking for their spouses and dinner parties, uh, that you could have food that is elevated, that is you know, similar to your secular neighbors and friends that people would want to eat. Because socializing with non-Jews was a is a reality. And so if you're a um proper housewife and you're concerned about your spouse's upward mobility, then you're gonna have non-Jews into your home. And cooking in that time frame was important, and I think over time that evolved a little bit. And and part of that is, you know, we can have a discussion about in ingredients and and why one versus the other. But I think that's the larger kind of landscape, as well as you know, people's affluence, people moving out to the suburbs. You know, you're no longer when you lived in New York City and you had kosher butchers who were on every city block, getting kosher meat was very easy. When people got a little bit of affluence and moved out of the city and moved out into the suburbs, now they're dependent on their supermarket, which may or may not have kosher meat. So you could either drive back into the city and go to the kosher butcher, or maybe make a decision that, well, you know, I'm I'm gonna stop eating kosher meat. And so you see these reflected in cookbooks, which is one of the things I actually love about community cookbooks is when you look at different editions, you start to see how those norms change over time, like the notes that that different women will make about recipes, how you know, yes, uh mixing meat and and milk in in one edition would have been absolutely unthinkable. But in later editions, it's you know, it's a fact of life. Your neighbor's bringing over a casserole. And so, you know, you're dependent on your supermarket, and maybe you're gonna use that can of chicken and cream of chicken soup, or you know, whatever that is, which is non-kosher. And it is a very interesting read when you look at the decisions to include or exclude certain recipes, because again, it always comes back to, you know, who we are as a community. You know, these are kind of decisions that are made as an editorial board, right? People are saying, okay, like I had one um community in Dallas, actually, I have, I want to say three or four editions of their cookbook. And their very first edition, they decided not to include hala in their cookbook. And, you know, hala seems like one of those such basic Jewish recipes, right? But they said, well, everybody has a hala recipe, so we're not going to include it. But if you're a historian looking at it, you could look back and go, not including a hala recipe. Like if you don't have context, if you haven't spoken to somebody who was there, you might presume that maybe Shabbat wasn't import wasn't an important meal. You know, having hala at Shabbat was an important meal, wasn't an important um um item. And you could make all kinds of assumptions. And so, you know, I think that it's one of the reasons why when you look at it in kind of that larger context of Jewish history, cookbooks tell us so much about people, about the agents.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. No, again, it's it's not just a collection of recipes. I mean, it is a window into the Jewish feeling of the time and how people were expressing themselves Jewishly and how they wanted to fit in to their environment, to wherever they were living. Um I love the idea of the cookbook as a way for a housewife to make that perfect dinner party. You're hosting the husband's boss, you got to impress, like you said, his upward mobility that was absolutely critical. And a cookbook was indispensable, right? To you know, to help make that, you know, that dinner party a success.
SPEAKER_01It's interesting. One of the things I I did an analysis of of my community cookbooks, and you know, there's this assumption, right, that you know, conservative Jews are more observant and you know, they keep kosher, so there's kind of all kinds of judgment that comes from that, right? Reform Jews don't keep kosher. So, and I kind of went into it with that same bias, thinking, well, conservative cookbooks are going to be more kind of quote unquote Jewish and reform texts less so. And yes, overwhelmingly conservative synagogue textbooks, um, I mean, cookbooks are kosher right up front. And I would say almost overwhelmingly 100% reform cookbooks have some kind of trafe. However, both reform and conservative overall are highly assimilated texts. They are maybe only 20 to 25 percent of what we think of as like classic Jewish recipes. And the rest are very American recipes. And I mean, things that, you know, especially when you look at historical recipes, like things that, and I'm not American, so I would go like I would never eat this. Um, but you know, a lot of all kinds of dips with mayonnaise, all kinds of casseroles, all kinds of sukiyaki for some reason appears in a lot of community textbooks, a lot of different hashes. I mean, a lot of, you know, cakes and cookies and things, not particularly Jewish. And so this idea of like reforming conservative, we can talk about the dietary laws, but the texts overall reflect this idea that we really do consider ourselves American, and yet we have these foods that we are very attached to, um, especially around Shabbat and holidays. And a big part, I think, of Jewish eating and Jewish cookbooks is this tension between memory and renewal. I mean, every Jewish cookbook is either some kind of like, you know, tradition, you know, memories of yesterday celebration, or it's the new Jewish cooking, you know, modern Jewish cooking, some kind of, okay, we love Grant, you know, we love Bobby's cooking, but now we're going to reinvent it and make it new. And I think we have this kind of constant tension, but we love that memorialization. We love hanging on to, which is, you know, recently, I don't know if you've seen there have been a couple of Holocaust um cookbooks that have come out. Yes. One was just on the as a finalist for the Jewish National Book Award. And, you know, even in the Holocaust, we have these texts where women who are starved and are starving, and yet they are writing recipes down on stolen pieces of paper, and they are thinking about food. And they are also trading recipes, and you know, there are anecdotes of like, oh, oh, I don't make my regalah, you know, with this ingredient, or you know, my hala is bad. Like there's this competitiveness around food. But this idea of like preserving recipes is even when we're starving, is so I think intrinsic to our culture.
SPEAKER_00Right. And I love that idea of you know, a community cookbook as a you know repository of memory. You know, like you say, oh yeah, I remember so-and-so's mandelbread or her chicken soup. Um, often when I do funerals, I always ask people to talk about the food. Um, if a person was a was a great cook or baker, and they really just get very animated because you know, you look at a recipe and then you remember the person, but it's multi-sensory, right? Because you think of the smell and the taste, and it's very powerful in terms of memory and community building. I I wanted to get one other thing, too, that you said that was so interesting to me that a community cookbook was also sort of an entryway for immigrants to help them acclimate, and you said assimilate um into American life, which I hadn't thought about before. And that's also really fascinating, the importance of that cookbook, um, especially for someone who maybe is a recent immigrant, that they want to fit in, they want to be, you know, they want to be a good American, they want to do the right things, they don't want to make mistakes or whatever, or look be looked down upon. Um, and you said yourself that you're not an American, that you're an immigrant. So I was wondering, can you tell us your immigrant story? What was that experience like? And how did food and maybe recipes influence your American experience?
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. And actually, it's such a perfect segue for that. So I came to the US to go to graduate school. I was 22 years old. I'm Sephardic, you know, that typical kind of Sephardic story. My parents are from Cairo, they were expelled from Egypt, went to Paris, they grew up in Paris, met and married, went to Canada, and then had me. So I'm a first generation Canadian. So I think I have all these food issues as just being, you know, first generation, you know, going to school with falafel and hummus when everybody else had mac and cheese and a lot of just sensitivity and and feeling like I didn't fit in. And then when I came to the US in in um for graduate school, I had only ever been around other Sephardic Jews and French Jews. So I had to find my community, one, which there were not really any French Jews, so it was going to be just, you know, Jews. And quickly realized that, okay, a lot of ritual, a lot of food is different. And I felt very out of place. I felt very like an imposter, I think, trying to, it's like trying to learn and catch up what everybody else is doing. And at the same time, my husband wasn't Jewish. And so I think I almost felt like I had two strikes against me. And I almost like abandoned my Sephardic traditions and roots and went my my husband used to call me super Jew, like went full force of Ashkenazi immersion because I wanted to fit in. I wanted to speak the same language as my friends. And I wasn't ever really confident doing, you know, whether it was Shabbat or Passover, you know, holidays myself, because, like I said, I grew up in in a Sephardic home very different. But my very first Seder in Greensboro, my kids were the twins were four, my youngest was two. So they had just started going to preschool, or they'd been in preschool for a couple of years in in Jewish preschool, and they were being exposed to, you know, matzo ball soup and harose it with apples and nuts and gefiltifish, none of the things that I grew up with.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And they came home that first year expecting those things. And I was actually pretty um uh devastated. Like what I wanted to do Passover because at that point they were aware. So if I didn't do Passover, it would have been obvious, but I felt very uncomfortable in terms of what do I do, what do I eat, what do I cook? And I'm actually I called up um your wife Natalie and I said, Um, how do I make matzo ball soup? And she said, Well, just get the manashevets mix. Well, we lived in Greensboro at the time. And if you are a last-minute shopper, you can't just go to the grocery store and get manashevets mixed. Like it's you know, for them, it sells out. And I ended up finding my Joan Nathan cookbook, which was my one and only Ashkenazi cookbook. And I followed the recipe and I doubled, somehow I doubled the fat in the matzo balls, but my kids loved it. And so it's it's it's the thing in my house now that like they love my matzo balls because they're fluffy, not floating, you know, not hard, but it's because it's double the fat. And but it was really important to me to, you know, I could have just said, okay, well, we're gonna have harose it, you know, the sephardic way with raisins and dates, and but that's not what they were used to. That's not what they wanted. And I think I also didn't want my kids to have that sense of we're weird, we're different. So I did. I mean, I I didn't eat me out. I didn't, I didn't do any of the things that I grew up with until the senior rabbi at the congregation a couple of years in said to me, Natalie, like you can eat sushi. No one else in this, you know, not no one else here can, but you can, and that's wonderful. And you should really do that. You should include that in your. Family traditions. You're not cheating. You're not being, you know, a fake Jew. Like it's okay. And I think I just needed that permission to do that. But it took me a long time to feel comfortable, I think, doing that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, that's so fascinating. How food is symbolic of fitting in and doing the right thing, quote unquote. Right. And if you don't have the right foods, you know, like if you're a kid, you're going to get picked on at the lunch table, right?
SPEAKER_01Totally. I mean, I think, you know, for so many immigrants, the the cafeteria is a really tough place.
SPEAKER_00Right.
SPEAKER_01And, you know, I, like so many kids, would just toss my lunch. And um I survived on snacks, like what I could purchase for less than a dollar in the cafeteria line. And I actually think snacks are a great way of um or probably a very popular way of indoctrinating, assimilating new immigrants. But yeah, I mean, I think this idea, probably other cultures have this, but in Judaism, you know, like quote unquote doing it right, you know, am I doing it right? Um, this performative aspect, you know, am I whether it's making the hala and soup and brisket for Shabbat, am I, you know, as opposed to focusing on being together and lighting the Shabbat candles, even if I don't say the prayers quite right, you know, there they're sometimes I think our focus can be misplaced. And so for me, wanting to fit in that external doing it right was very important. And it was really, and I think on top of it, because my husband was non-Jewish, we lived in a small town where there were not a lot of interfaith couples. I really felt that I needed to excel Jewishly in order to like to prove myself. And it's taken a long time, you know. Now I look back and it's almost seems like it's not a big deal. Why was it ever a big deal? So the pressure's off. Um, and maybe that's what's allowed me to pursue, I think, my Sephardic traditions and be comfortable much more.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. That's really great. Natalie, you were you were in Turkey to investigate about uh what was it, Bouyas?
SPEAKER_01Bojos, B-O-Y-O-S, or sometimes Z at the end. But yeah, Bojos are, I mean, it literally is a pastry that goes back to the 15th century when you know Sephardic Jews were expelled from Spain and they went to Turkey and brought this pastry, which is similar to a kinish. And my interest in the Bojos was both personal and my professional curiosity. So pretty much every Sephardic community cookbook, commercial cookbooks, maybe to a lesser extent, but community cookbooks 100% will have a recipe for boyos, either cheese or spinach filled. And it's very much of a home like a lot of Jewish cooking, right? I mean, it's all very much a home-based pastry. It's very labor-intensive. And my grandmother uh used to make amazing bojos. And when I was a kid, I'd, you know, when she was making them, I would pay attention, but not enough that I ever wrote down the recipe because at that age I was not interested. And uh she passed away and no one had the recipe. And I for years asked every family member for her recipe. Like who has this recipe? And obviously in my mind, you know, it's been built up because it has it's the smell, it's her kitchen, it's her hands, it's obviously the taste. But I mean, I don't even know if I could really remember the taste at this point. It's been, you know, 30 years since I've had one. But I wanted this recipe so much because of everything it meant to me. Right. And there are plenty of recipes online, but none of them were like her recipe. And the technique is one that's a little bit difficult. And so I just wanted to go to Turkey to learn more about this pastry. And what's interesting is in Izmir, where they originate, there are like 800 boios bakeries and master bakers. Many today are not Jewish, but it originated from these Jewish bakeries and this the technique from Jewish master bakers. And so I was really puzzled as to this Jewish food that people know it has a Jewish origin, yet it's served in carts and bakeries all around the city. And so I went, I I was on a trip to Israel. I then did a little side trip to Izmir, and I got to see how they do it firsthand. And it's not my grandmother's recipe, but it's it was pretty darn cool, I have to admit.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, wow, that is cool. And a win for the Jews. I mean, every you know, everybody in Turkey is eating this, you know, this Jewish pastry that's fabulous.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And you know, one of the things that's interesting when you look at how food assimilates, a lot of time when food assimilates, you know, when food is eaten on a wide scale, it kind of loses its origin. You know, think of the bagel. I mean, yeah, bagels are thought of as as a Jewish food, but a lot of people, or homas is probably even a better food, right? People think of hummus as like it's Mediterranean, it's healthy, it's it's just been stripped of its original identity. But the boyos, people in in Turkey still recognize its Jewish identity. It's not one that's been transformed into just a Turkish pastry. It is a Jewish pastry with the recognition that most of the people who make it now are no longer Jews, but they understand it's a Jewish pastry. I was really interested in how that's been able to um to maintain to maintain that um that tradition and that culture in a country where there are frankly not a lot of Jews.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's really great. Natalie, in your in your research, um, you've spoken with some amazing people. Um, and there have been people who have been very generous with their time and people who have sent you cookbooks, community cookbooks to help you. Can you just tell us a little bit about that, this journey with this journey towards your doctorate?
SPEAKER_01Sure. I, you know, and I think it speaks to this idea of community, right? So the community cookbook is is a cookbook that's written by a community of women, you know, congregation and so forth. But if you think about today, our communities tend to be uh, they've expanded and they've expanded through social media online. And I, especially in the pandemic, joined a bunch of uh Facebook groups that were all dedicated to Jewish food, Sephardic food. And as I've had questions about my research, I would post questions. And one day someone posted something about, hey, I'm going through my mom's, you know, my mom passed away. I'm I'm going through her cookbooks and I've got a bunch of community cookbooks. If anybody wants them, and I raised my hand and I said, you know, I'm doing this work, I would love them. And it's kind of snowballed. I think a lot of people now know me online as oh, that PhD student. I've had all kinds of people, both collectors, engage with me and send me, I mean, of my 300, I probably have about 60 cookbooks that were sent to me by people I've met through Facebook. And then the flip side of community is, you know, for my work, I've wanted to reach out to speak to cookbook authors. And as people are active on Instagram, I have commented. And if they've commented back, I've said, hey, you know, I'm doing my doctoral research on Jewish cookbooks. Would you be willing to speak to me? And pretty much, I would say but one person has responded and has been so overwhelmingly not only supportive, but really committed to seeing me succeed. And so I think of Adina Sussman, for example, was one of the early cookbook authors I spoke to. And she's the one I went to Israel with to do a culinary trip. Phenomenal, by the way, if you get a chance or your listeners get a chance to go. But she at the end of our, you know, hour, hour and a half chat, she said to me, Well, who else would you like to speak with? And I, you know, threw out a couple of names. And she said, Okay, but you know, have you spoken to Joan? And I thought, and Joan, does she mean Joan Nathan? Like, I wouldn't even think to dream that big. And then she said, Have you talked to Claudia? And I thought, wait, Claudia Rodin? And she was like, Yeah, like you need to talk to these people. And she really pushed me to, I think, dream not only dream big, but she then followed up and gave me their emails and introduced me. And I spoke to Joan Nathan. I had like a three-hour Zoom video call with Claudia Rodin. I mean, the generosity has been unbelievable. I spoke with Jake Cohen. Leah Koenig is someone else who not only as a cookbook author has she been very generous, but as someone who I when I've just had questions about different aspects of Jewish food, she has just been so available. It's actually been pretty tremendous. Alan Shaya, who's a cookbook author and a chef down in Louisiana, he's Israeli, has an Israeli American restaurant. He got involved with rescuing some Holocaust recipes. And I reached out to him that way. And I said, Would you like to chat? And he said, sure. I'm constantly amazed at people's willingness to talk. Um, and then finally, my one of she actually has turned out to be now, she's on my committee, my dissertation committee as my outside reader. She just won Helen Pinair. She just won the, or she was a finalist for the um National Jewish Book Award in the cooking category. She's won numerous awards for her book on Sephardic food. And I just reached out to her to say, hey, how do I build? How did you go about building your archive on Inquisition recipes? And she has taken, I mean, hours, hours to um to help me with my dissertation. So it actually has been this sense of community around food and preserving food, I think it's been really overwhelming.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that's really fabulous. That is great. Um, and yeah, some of the big luminaries, Joan Nathan, Claudia Roden. I mean, talk about being starstruck. And Natalie, I have one last question I want to ask you, just for fun. What do you have a favorite dish that you love to make?
SPEAKER_01So I love to make hala because that's just, you know, something I do every single week. My I love to do it for my family. It I love making hala. But my probably favorite thing to make is something called meninas. That's probably the Sephardic name for it. Mahmoul is how you would probably know it if you went to a Middle Eastern bakery. And there are these little pastries that are usually they're stuffed with um dates, like a date paste. I make them with nuts because my kids aren't crazy about dates. And I have probably, I don't know, like a dozen different wooden molds for these pastries. You can make them without molds, but it's like I collect cookbooks, I collect these wooden molds. And I love making them with my kids. So we have the molds, it's like a whole thing. And that's probably, I think, my most, I get a lot of satisfaction out of baking. And uh, I love they're pretty. And I I love making these cookies. It also reminds me of my mom. My mom, you know, as a typical, like my I always thought my mom is being this horrible cook, and she wasn't. She was actually a great sephardic cook, terrible secular cook. And so growing up, she would make these men in us, but you know, they have an outs, uh a white outside and a very dark brown, mushy inside. And when I took them to school, I would get made fun of. And so I think I always associated them, you know, growing up with just more embarrassment. And but now I they remind me of my mom so much. And they're labor-intensive. So I think back to how much effort she used to put into making them that I do love making for my kids.
SPEAKER_00That's great. All right, Natalie Ross pursuing her PhD. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time to talk about community cookbooks and food and recipes and the power that it has to bring people together, the impact that it has on our lives. Um, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the podcast today.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely. Thank you. And if uh if your congregation has any community cookbooks that you want to send my way, I would gladly accept them.
SPEAKER_00All right, listeners, you heard that. If you're interested, reach out to me and I will make sure to get them to Natalie. Natalie, thanks so much. Have a great evening.
SPEAKER_01Thank you. You too.
SPEAKER_00Well, again, that was Natalie Ross, who is going to soon be Dr. Natalie Ross. Remember, her dissertation is called The People of the Cookbook. Um, I can't wait till you know she reaches that uh part of her journey. Um, such a really interesting conversation about the power of community cookbooks, what they do for us and food and recipes. You know, I got to Natalie through my own wife, Natalie, who remembered that Natalie Ross um is doing this great work on cookbooks uh because my wife, Natalie, also loves cookbooks. Just from a quick glance in our kitchen and you know, our library, uh Natalie Pont must have at least 200 different cookbooks. Many of them are Jewish, uh, you know, Susie Fischbein series, The Barefoot Contessa with Ina Garten, Smitten Kitchen, uh with Deb Perlman, Roselie B. Barenbaum, Joe Nathan, Claudia Rodin, um, and so many more. Um, so we have quite also a collection of Jewish cookbooks. And, you know, when I talk to Natalie about it, my Natalie, Natalie Pont, you know, she loves to cook and to bake with recipes, but it's also about the entire experience. And Natalie Ross and I uh got into this a little bit. You know, for my wife, cooking and baking is about that experience, cooking and baking with her mother and with her two sisters in the kitchen for holidays and for other meals since she was a young child until today. So it's not just the recipe, it's everything that it represents. My Natalie reminded me that when we got married, part of what she did is she got recipe cards. Um, and she remembers that she loved to see the handwriting of the different women who gave her recipes in honor of getting married. So that again, the recipes are not just about the food. In that case, with the cards, they were a part of the joy of our wedding day and moving forward. So, cookbooks, it seems to me, are like a written record of cultural and personal identity. And as we discussed in this podcast, cookbooks offer a glimpse into the everyday lives of Jews at the time, and they reflect that wide range of practices and religious customs. So when you pick up a community cookbook and you flip through the pages and you see those recipes, again, it's not just about the ingredients and the food and the recipe, it's about everything that it represents. It's that reflection of Jewish life at the time when that recipe was created and how people looking at that recipe, you know, think about that time, but also reinvent it, you know, for their lives today. There's so much there when it comes to recipes and cookbooks. Um, I'm looking forward to talking to Natalie Ross again. I think there's more to this conversation, definitely. So um, everybody, I hope you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. Have a great day and peace out.