Cookbooks are Our Texts
Reading An Immigrant Community Through their Cookbooks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/rsth.32556Keywords:
cookbooks, foodways, identity, Iraqi Jews, Kosher, gender, religon, immigrant community, receipes, cultural memoryAbstract
Cookbooks are more than mere devices for presenting recipes. They inform the practice of cooking and much more. They contain information about ethnic identity, treasured folklore, gender patterns, and religious performances. They are chronicles of public and personal record. Importantly, food cultures not only strengthen a community’s group patterns, they also sustain those configurations
longer than most other customs. But food is ephemeral; it is filled with meaning and then disappears. Cookbooks endure displaying social patterns and cultural meaning. In this essay, the examination of a succession of Iraqi Jewish cookbooks exposes patterns of adjustment and conservation as the community flees its homeland and settles in Montreal, Canada.
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