To help immigrants adjust to their new country, Settlement Houses were established. These sometimes included demonstration or model kitchens (often with refrigerators.) These were laboratories of a sort where immigrants might try the newest ideas in household management and nutrition (with controlled conditions and guidance) (Levenstein 1988:104-107; Leavitt 2002:76-82). Not only was the immigrant diet deemed unhealthy and unsanitary but also uneconomical because it was concocted from mixtures of foods purchased from various sources, which ‘required uneconomical expenditures of energy to digest’: ‘one whiff of the pungent air in the tenements or a glance into the stew pots was enough to confirm that the contents must wreak havoc on the human digestive system’ (Levenstein 1988:104). A bland, white-sauced diet with surprisingly large quantities of fresh (presumably chilled) milk was considered superior. What immigrant women living in crowded apartments with no appliances were to do with their new cooking skills was another problem.
Many unforeseen consequences resulted from the campaign to sanitize the foods of immigrant Jews. Refrigeration provided the material circumstances for two significant shifts in first- and second-generation American Jewish immigrant eating habits in the first decades of the twentieth century. According to Joselit and Diner, these were the ‘steady irrevocable decline’ of kashrut (observance of the Jewish dietary laws), and the rise of Jewish restaurants and delicatessens and the Jewish predilection for eating-out (oyesessen) (Joselit 1994: 177; Diner 2001: 200). Since neither Joselit nor Diner trace these shifts specifically to refrigeration, it is worth showing how refrigeration in early twentieth-century American food culture shaped American Jewish immigrant food preferences.
Refrigeration of meat made it much less expensive and more readily available than it had been in the new immigrants’ countries of origins (Friedberg 2009). For Eastern European Jews, ‘where food was sacred for all, but in which scarcities loomed for most [it] was a rare text – novel, poem, short story, personal memoir – that failed to connect the sanctity of Jewish food to the inequitable distribution of resources’ (Diner 2001: 147). […]
This common conceit of eating holiday foods on weekdays became a reality for new Jewish immigrants that deeply affected their food expectations and preferences. The general accessibility of food outside the home, especially in delicatessens and restaurants, “complicated the meaning of food to people who had once lived with hunger. … By eating foods once the reserve of the Jewish upper classes, they engaged in an act of class reversal. The formerly poor started to eat blintzes, kreplach, kasha-varnitchkes, strudel, noodles, knishes, and most importantly, meat every day. Their once meager cabbage or beet borschts now glistened with fat pieces of meat.” (Diner 2001: 179-80)
Thus one Romanian Jewish immigrant exclaimed, ‘In New York, every night was Friday, and every day was Saturday, as far as food went’ (Diner 2001: 180). None of this would have been possible without refrigeration in processing, storage and transportation that made meat inexpensive enough to become everyday food. […]
Presumably, it wasn’t the refrigeration per se, but rather the pungent, aromatic spicing of these cold cuts that made them particularly palatable to their Jewish immigrant clientele. While corned beef tended to be flavoured with peppercorns and bay leaves, pastrami possessed a particularly ‘heady mix of spices – including allspice, bay leaves, cinnamon, cloves, coriander, ginger, juniper berries, paprika, pepper, and garlic’ (Marks 210: 450). Jewish immigrants’ taste for these spicy, pickled, smoky flavours typical of deli and restaurant food was noted both in the fond reminiscences of their consumers and in the criticisms of well-intentioned nutritionists who sought to ‘cure’ them of these unhealthy preferences (Diner 2001: 214-19). So on the one hand, we have Alfred Kazin remembering the delicatessen food in his Brownsville neighbourhood as ‘our greatest delight in all seasons …hot spiced corned beef, pastrami, rolled beef, hard salami, soft salami, chicken salami, bologna, frankfurter “specials” and the thinner wrinkled hot dogs always taken with mustard’ (Diner 2001: 201).
On the other hand, we have Jewish nutritionists in the home economics movement, like Mary L. Schapiro, identifying ‘high seasoning’ as one of the major ‘Jewish Dietary Problems’. She observes ‘the limitations of the diet, when unchanged by instruction, are evident. It is inadequately balanced, over-rich, and over-seasoned’ (Schapiro 1919). Yet the fact that Mary Schapiro, S. Etta Sadow and other Jewish women themselves embraced ‘American nutrition culture’ suggests the relations between new Jewish immigrants and the home economics was not as one-sided as it may have first appeared. Indeed Jewish nutritionists like Schapiro and Sadow played an important role explaining Jewish foodways to their Gentile colleagues, and advocated accommodations to Jewish kosher rules (like respecting the prohibitions against pork and mixing milk and meat) and tastes for pickles and highly seasoned food over fresh vegetables, in order to win over their Jewish clients to adopt what contemporary science viewed as more nutritional and hygienic diets (Diner 2001: 214-219). Ultimately, the home economists successfully persuaded many Jewish immigrants to change their diets, ironically at the cost of the very kosher rules for which they urged respect.
The ‘steady irrevocable decline’ of kashrut in this period was made possible by the home economics movement and Jewish deli/restaurant culture, both dependent on refrigeration technology. First, easy access to inexpensive meat enticed many Eastern European Jews to America, and many of those immigrants were already less observant than those who remained (Diner 2001: 158-77). Second, the autonomy of ‘rational consumption’ advocated by the home economists appealed to Jewish women. ‘Rational consumption’ that ‘embraced the values of sanitation, health, cleanliness, economy, and efficiency [were] hallmarks of new identity, secure points of reference through which to demonstrate that they belonged to this social group’ of ‘modern American homemakers’
(Goldstein 2012: 13). Kashrut often opposed these values, like making milk part of every meal (especially children’s), storing it next to meat in one’s home refrigerator or purchasing meat economically (Schapiro 1919; Goldstein 2012: 126). Jewish women organized protests against kosher meat’s high cost (Diner 2001: 206-207). Dr Noah Aronstam’s defence of kashrut on microbiological grounds acknowledges the adoption of home economical values by Jewish homemakers. Jewish women’s insecurity about home-cooking may also have weakened attachment to old kosher ways. A running joke in the Jewish community was that Jewish men deserted their wives because of bad cooking (Diner 2001: 215). In any case, home economics culture empowered Jewish women to make decisions about diet traditionally made by male Jewish authorities.
Finally the options the new Jewish delicatessen/restaurant culture offered Jews to eat out (oyesessen) resulted in new ways to express their American Jewish identity: ‘selectively treyf’ and ‘selectively kosher’.
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