My name is Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, I am the Ronald S. Lauderr chief curator of the exhibition at the Museum of the History of Polish Jews. I'm delighted to be part of this year's TISZ Jewish Food Festival. And today I'd like to talk to you about my collection of cookbooks and specifically Jewish cookbooks. And I want to focus today on two very special ones. But let me say a word first about how I formed this collection. I should start by telling you that I am an inveterate collector. I collect, well, not quite everything. But over the years I have tried to restrain myself and to focus. And so I decided to focus on cookbooks. But that's a fool's errand because cookbooks are probably the best sellers of all time, short of the Bible. And I quickly discovered that collecting cookbooks was simply too broad and well beyond my budget. So what I needed to do, and I currently have more than 6000 cookbooks and still counting - the 6000 is a count for maybe 15 years ago. So I actually don't even know how many I have. But I thought, you know, if I could find a category within cookbooks that was smaller, then I could focus my collecting on that category. And I thought, well, how about Jewish cookbooks? Well, I have over a thousand Jewish cookbooks and that was still too broad. And especially when I was a graduate student and I had very, very limited funds. So I thought to myself, you know, maybe I should focus within Jewish cookbooks on Yiddish cookbooks. Now, that has to be a very small category. And then if I do find within that tiny category, very special ones, I would be in a position to buy them. I could pay a little bit more and I could form a collection of very, very specific, very special collection of Yiddish cookbooks. And that's basically what I did. And of course, it has expanded since then.

And then I thought, well, maybe I could focus it even more.

And that is, I would collect all the editions of the most interesting of those cookbooks. So on the one hand, I was absolutely indiscriminate and I collected every charity cookbook I could find from synagogues and JCCs and temples and schools, any Jewish group or any community that produced a charity cookbook. Usually they they created these cookbooks as fundraisers. I was indiscriminate. It good, bad -it didn't matter because they are quite extraordinary as documents in their own right. So that was the kind of that I would call promiscuous collecting. Just collect all of them, sight unseen. But then there was this surgical collecting and that is collecting multiple editions. Now on my shelf, it looks like I have 30 copies of the settlement cookbook, that I have umpteen copies. Why do you need. Why do you need so many copies of the same book? Because those editions and sometimes they're more than editions, translations, and sometimes they're even more than they're more interesting than simply a translation. And what I wanted to do today is to to talk to you about two examples of what I would call my surgical collecting - the collecting of multiple editions of a single cookbook. But before I do that, I want to answer a question that everybody always asks, and that is, have you read them all? Have you cooked from them? Well, the answer is, yes. I have cooked from some of them. I have not read them all. But that's not what a library is about. And it's not what a collection is about. A collection, a library is a utopia of potential of possibility.

And over the years, I have no idea where in my wonderful, vast library I may find some treasures, some surprise that I had absolutely no idea I would find. And in some ways, collecting has been a series of those kinds of surprises. So let me start with the best seller of the 19th century, and that is that is a cookbook by Rebecca Woolf.

Now, the Rebecca Wolfe Cookbook, the very, very first edition of it.

It first appeared around the eighteenth let me think for a second it first appeared in 1851 and it went through fourteen editions and the last edition was in 1833. Now, what exactly was it? So let me show you a beautiful cover and you can see from the image on the cover the sort of style of this cookbook. Now, Rebecca Wolfe's cookbook and let me read you the title of it in English translation, and that is: it is a home manual for young brides and for young brides. And it basically provides them with everything they need to do about housekeeping, but also how to keep it kosher, how to keep a kosher kitchen. Now, it is really it was the most popular of what was the characteristic Jewish cookbook of the 19th century. The earliest Jewish cookbooks were published in German. In fact, there is some manuscript cookbooks that I found at the Jewish Museum in Prague that were probably for a cooking class for young brides or their housekeepers. And they were manuscripts in Yiddish and they were probably very, very early 19th century, maybe late 18th, but more likely early 19th century. So these 19th century kosher Jewish cookbooks were to be a Jewish cookbook in the 19th century it was kosher. Whether or not it said so, it was. These these cookbooks were of a very specific character, a very consistently.

And that is to say, they were an attempt to show a young bride and also those who would be cooking for her because she would have to supervise them, how to prepare elegant food that was kosher. So the issue was not how to make Jewish dishes. The issue was how to make beautiful food. And I call this genre kosher gourmet. And this is the this is really the earliest genre of basically of Jewish cookbooks they were in German in the 19th century. And they are, in a sense, a message to, I would say, Jews that are they were a kind of a I would say a guidebook, a manual of bourgeois, how to, in a sense, bring a certain kind of bourgeois style of life to the domestic sphere and to the table by what we prepared in the kitchen and then what was served. And so this is a very specific kind of cookbook, not about it was not about transmitting traditional or classic Jewish cuisine, but rather, I would say in this case, German and and largely French, if you will, find French influenced cuisine. And the message was you can be elegant, you can be a bourgeois, you can be very German as a German Jew, and you can keep kosher. Because one of the fears was that in attempting to be stylish and elegant and acculturated, that one might give up being kosher.

And it was a way of saying they use lard, will use goose fat, they mix milk and meat - we don't have to, but we can prepare the same dishes. And in many cases, there are cookbooks that give you recipes and tell you how to make it for a meat meal and how to make it for a dairy meal. So they were adapted to the kosher kitchen. So they're really marvelous. And in this case, this one was extremely popular. In fact, it was so popular that it appeared and it appeared in Polish in a Polish translation and it appeared in a Polish translation in 1877. And this is the earliest Jewish cookbook that we know of to appear in Poland. And what's interesting about it is that it should appear in Polish. And look what happened to the title. The title is Polska Kuchnia Koszerna. So however, there's nothing Polish about this cookbook. This cookbook is full of dishes from the German kitchen or, if you will, the German language kitchen. Because obviously when I say German, I mean not only Germany, but also you could be speaking also about Austria. So and especially in the 19th century, you could be talking about Vienna. So this is I think this is absolutely fascinating.

And of course, that also includes how to keep a kosher household, how to keep a kosher kitchen, how to keep kosher household. And it says clearly that it is a translation and it's published in Warsaw. Now, this this is basically what I'm holding in my hand is a facsimile edition of the earliest one, 1877, but the same there was also, in addition, the same, basically the same text, but published in 1904. And there's a facsimile edition of it as well. But since then, this book has become the basis for many, many adaptations and recent additions, so, for example, here we have it and here it's presented simply as Kuchnia Żydowska. So in the one that we have for Rebecca, for Rebecca Wolf, it is a cookbook for the Israelite women. That's what it is. Cookbook for is Israelishe Frauen. And that's very interesting also because the idea was not to refer to them as Jewish and not Judische, but Israelitische. And we see that in Polish as well as a as a kind of a more, I would say, polite, more elegant way to refer to Jews, because if you refer to them directly as Juden or Żydzi, that somehow didn't have the same connotation. So this is fur Israelitische Frauen.

So we got that. So we have it for. So for Israelite Jews, then we have the Polish kitchen kosher, which it's not. And then we have the Jewish kitchen, but not no make no mention whatsoever of it being kosher. And this is all of all part of our Barbara Adamczewska, in other words, reworked essentially.

So it's clearly a much smaller volume and it's and it's built on the back as being the the best Jewish, the best dishes from the Jewish kitchen in Poland. But it's not. This is from the German Jewish. This is basically from the the German Jewish kitchen. Nonetheless, there are many dishes here that I think would be completely recognizable in the Polish Jewish kitchen as well. So that's that is about Rebecca, Wolf. And there are many more I've only shown you only one of the many recent additions and variations.

And the covers are very interesting to some of the covers, a show, if you will. I would say shtetl Jews or Hasidim or they somehow rather try to position this collection of German Jewish recipes from the mid 19th century to position it as a Polish book, which, of course, it's not.

Now, let me now turn to the second one, which is quite fascinating. And it was a discovery that I made. And it's one of those wonderful, wonderful surprises that you only make when you're collecting. So this one and it really represents the completely other end of the spectrum. So now my original copy, of course, I couldn't afford at the time to buy one with the original covers. And because these are now really scarce, if not rare. So mine is without the cover, but it is Gastronomie Juive by Susanne Rohomovsky and obviously a kind of probably Russian name, and she is an author of romantic novels and plays.

And in other words, she was not a professional cookbook author. This is the only cookbook that she ever authored. And she's really better known for for her other for her other publications.

And let me share them with you, basically. Um, let me just see here she so so basically she was really interested in a kind of, I would say, romantic evocation of a lost world. So this one is Gastronomie juive,cuisine et patisserie de Russie, d'ALsace, de Roumanie et d'Orient.  From Russia, the Alsace, Rumunia and the Orient. So and of course, it says kosher, but only in Hebrew letters. So what does that mean? It means that if you don't read Hebrew or Yiddish, you don't know what it says. So in a way, it's secretly kosher. And in that way it is like the, uh, like the Rebecca Wolf. It is what I would call invisibly kosher.

Now, in the case of Rebecca Wolfe's book, it doesn't declare that it's kosher. Well, it does. It does say how to keep kosher household, but the food itself is what I would call invisibly kosher, and this one is definitely invisibly kosher. Now, what's wonderful about this is that, first of all, it is divided into smaller chapters, but it begins with a very romantic, very, very consistent with her other writing, a very romantic evocation of a lost world, a very nostalgic and it's about little David in the in a village.

In a village in.

Lwów or village of, um, of of live, I have to assume that it's Lwów, but I'm not sure. But in any event, it's set in Galicia, essentially it's set in the Austrian partition of the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth. And it begins with this little boy and he's the smartest kid in the class. And then it shifts to a domestic scene and a young married couple and learning to cook and all the traditional dishes. And it has this quality of an elegy of the world that we lost when we when we embrace modernity.

So I want to read to you the way in which she describes the book. She celebrates what she calls LA Cuisine Maternelle, in other words, mother's cooking or home cooking. And she says that, quote, The reader does not have to search here for quasi pharmaceutical complications of a cuisine that is too modern, nor the royal luxury of truffles, foie gras and champagne that when freely adds to also all souces, at least in the books.

Instead, expect a simple cuisine, home cooking. Now, that's that's how she feels it. Now, interestingly, almost half the book is the Russian, what she calls Russian cuisine. Then easily the next third of the book is Alsace.

And then just a few recipes from Romania, a few from North Africa, from Egypt and from Tunisia, which, of course, for a French republic, though, North Africa would be would be very meaningful.

But that is that is what they what what comes under the heading of the Orient and as far as what comes under the heading of Russia.

And this, I think is really is really, really interesting. So under the heading of Russia, let me tell you what she what she gives us, she gives us.

She gives us Pierogi. Latkes, Varnishkas, Kugel,Teiglach, Cholent/Chamin, raisin wine. She gives us also called beet borscht, shchav she gives us soup with hard boiled eggs, which of course is for the Passover Seder. Why would be the first soup in the book? I have absolutely no idea. Gefilte fish and she says "buy a live carp". And then she gives you instructions for how to kill it, where to whack it over the head. P'tcha, Cholent, Sauerkraut -how to make your own Cymes lokshen, farfel, mandlach, kreplach, kneidlach, holishkes. Absolutely.

One hundred percent page after page after page of absolutely classic dishes under the general heading of Russia and I think under the general heading of Russia. What she really meant was Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania. I think she meant basically the countries in the Russian partition of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and then of course Alsace, because Alsace was in a way, the relic area from a French perspective, and it was the relic area of traditional Jewish life. It was one of the last places where Yiddish was spoken as the first language, and it was considered to be a kind of very conservative area that preserved a lot of traditions, Jewish and non Jewish. Now, that's a very, very interesting cookbook. No, no question about it. And it has. And you can see I'll show you some of the illustrations and you'll see kind of how very, very well.

On the one hand, this kind of motif, which is the motif on the cover, is what signals the quote "Orient". In other words, the geometric design that we associate with Islamic ceramic tiles. But once we go inside and once we go to the first couple of chapters, I just want to show you some of the illustrations. You will see that it is really quite,it is quite nostalgic. So, of course, the classic image of a woman blessing the Shabbat candles and Shucheil and various other very classic Jewish traditional references. And so this, I would say, is well and nostalgic. It's yearning for a world that is now safe to long for modernity is well established. There's no turning back. There's no danger. And these dishes are a way of, if not re-living the past in the kitchen, at least in the cookbook itself. But the great discovery, which I think of all my surprises, this one was absolutely the best, was a little book by Boaz Saffron

“Die yiddisher kuch in alle lande”, so at first I thought, great, it's a Yiddish cookbook, is a cookbook in Yiddish “Verlag Gastronomia Warschau”. Now Gastronomie Juive” by Rohomovsky was published in 1929 and Saffron's “Die yiddisher kuch” was published in 1930. So I didn't think much of it and but then I see on the title page it's a completely different title page, “Die yiddisher kuch”, not “Gastronomie Juive” which is so French, “Die yiddisher kuch” - very Yiddish – “in alle lande” … and then how does it begin. It begins: “Poyln”

There's no Poland on the cover of this one. It's Russia, Alsace, Romania and the Orient.

And here it's Poland, Russia, Romania, Germany, Alsace, Morocco, Tunis, America. So I thought, oh, ok. Then I look further and to my astonishment I see illustrations that are very, very familiar. And I think to myself, where did I see these illustrations before? Well, I saw them in “Gastronomie Juive”? I thought, well, what is this? So what is this? This is a pirated Yiddish translation of Rohomovsky’s “Gastronomie Juive” but with extremely interesting differences and differences that make this cookbook so anomalous, so hard to understand.

So let me try to explain why. So first of all, let's go to first of all, who is this? Who is, uh. Well, first of all, let me, first of all, read to you from the introduction to this cookbook, because this I think it will give you something of an idea of what it's actually about. OK, so he starts in his introduction, not with a little elegy about little David in Galicia. No. He starts his edition by admonishing Polonized Jewish women. How dare they turn the health of their families over to servants rather than pursue the culinary arts themselves? Christian women, he pointed out, are more attentive to the care of their families. And so he writes something called "a word to our Jewish wives" and he reports a conversation he ostensibly heard between two young ladies. Now, I think he made it up. But here's the scenario and I'm quoting: "You have absolutely no idea Sabina, explained one to the other with a certain pride, how much I hate the kitchen, how much I can't stand it so much that I never set foot in it. Kill me if I know how to cook a little cereal or a pot of potatoes." "And you think I'm better?" added koleżanka, added her girlfriend coquettishly.

"A month ago my Leon had terrible stomach problems. The doctor ordered him on a diet and he had to have dumplings prepared for him, just his luck. The servant also fell ill and I let it never be said, had to be the cook myself. No, no. Don't ask what kind of dumplings I cooked?" Now Saffron goes on to explain quote" "Outside of Poland, a girl gets a diploma in public school and takes examinations in culinary arts. So it should be among us. He offered this cookbook as a step in that direction, notwithstanding its focus on down home cooking and the inclusion of North African Jewish cuisines. Now, when you look in this cookbook itself, there is no title to the first section and the first it doesn't say Poland, it doesn't say Russia. It's like almost half the book. And it's just all of the same recipes that you find in “Gastronomie Juive”, which are the classic classic recipes, then Alsace and then the other countries. And at the very end he added two sections, one called "Eggs aun milkh”- eggs and milk, how to conserve them and how to prepare, for example, sour milk and stuff like that. And another one on housekeeping. But really nothing, nothing special. And then all the things you'd expect.

Pierogi, Latkes, Varnishkas, Kugel, Teiglach, Cholent/Chamin, raisin-wine, shchav, beet borsht, farfel, mandlach, kreplach, kneidlach, holishkes, you know, all the things that you would expect.

in a book of Jewish dishes. Now, what is really astonishing about this? If this cookbook is truly addressed to these highly polanized women, why is he addressing them in Yiddish? If he really wants to address them, wouldn't he address them in Polish? So that's the first question. The second question is: is this a cuisine that these polanized Jewish women would be likely to cook? Do we expect them to be cooking these dishes from Tunis, Egypt, Romania, which are actually quite Middle Eastern?

Because those are dishes that included stuffed zucchini, stuffed eggplant and and that kind of thing.

So there is something... there's a kind of a disconnect between the Yiddish language of the cookbook itself - It is going to translate in any way so you might as well translate it to Polish and the nature of the cuisine and the mode of address.

So it is really an astonishing. So far as I know, it only came out in one in one edition. And in fact, so far as I know, the Wolf book also came out in a Yiddish translation of the 1890s, which I don't actually own, because that has got to be the scarcest thing on the Earth.

All I have for that is probably a microfilm, but of course I treasure that as well because at least I have the text itself. So these would be examples of, I would say a way of collecting that is surgical, that is a way of collecting in a way that is very a collector that is highly focused, collecting in depth. And it's a way of suggesting how much we can learn about Jewish life, Jewish values, Jewish culture, Jewish women in the 19th and first half of the 19th century, first half of the 20th century from cookbooks which, although they may seem to be nothing more than recipes, are actually much more. And I hope that I will have an opportunity to share other treasures from my collection at Future Jewish Food Festival events.

Thank you very much.