A01=Nora L. Rubel
Author_Nora L. Rubel
Category=JBSR
Category=VF
Category=WB
Category=WBA
Category=WBN
eq_bestseller
eq_food-drink
eq_health-lifestyle
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
Product details
- ISBN 9780231163941
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Columbia University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
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.
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 the Department of Religion and Classics 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).
