In the Gender, Sexuality, Feminist, and Social Justice Studies (GSFS) 401 Winter 2020 semester class on Food, Gender, and Environment taught by Dr. Alex Ketchum, students are analyzing the ways that food accessibility and environmental threats are gendered, sexualized, and racialized within the global context. As part of the course, students visited McGill’s archives and special collections to have a hands on experience with historical cookbooks (more on that here: http://www.historicalcookingproject.com/2020/02/field-trip-to-mcgill-rare-books-and.html). The Special Series of Student Posts is a collection of student reflections on what information we can glean from cookbooks.
Author’s note: this blog post examines the way my family cookbook has moved through several generations, its recipes acting as both a binding common ground and a site for negotiating difference due to time, immigration, and personal values.
As a child, I treasured Mondays after school. They were the day that my mom – אמא (pronounced E-ma) - and I would cook beside one another, preparing the family’s meals for that week. Today, as an adult charged with the life-sustaining task of cooking, I am grateful for the practical skills and intuition that those Monday afternoons gifted me. The women in my family passed down a style of cooking that relied on a knowledge of family-specific measurements, of which cultural taste “season to taste” refers to, and a resourcefulness with time, effort, and ingredients that always resulted in full stomachs. This explains how, even though we spent hours in the kitchen together, my אמא and I often moved around each other in silence, dancing to an unchoreographed but nonetheless familiar tune of generations of familial cookery.
Ever-present on these Monday evenings was our family cookbook, marked by its long shape and red cover embossed with gold lettering that read “Photo Album” in too-fancy cursive. It was only recently that I realized that it is a plastic-bound photo album, filled with recipes written on index cards or loose scrap paper, magazine cut-outs, and printed articles. For me, this cookbook has always existed. To gather information about how exactly this cookbook made its way from Israel to Vancouver to Montreal, where I am now leafing through its pages, I called my אמא. Contrary to North American conceptions of Judaism and specifically Hanukkah, פסח (Passover, pronounced Pe-Sach), is the holiday where gifts are exchanged between friends and family. This book was given to my אמא from my סבתא (grandmother, pronounced Savta) in 1998, a year before I was born, half-filled with handwritten family recipes. Though gifted to my אמא , there is a dedication to my older sister on the first page under a pixelated image of a house (likely made on MS Paint) with the lyrics to שמחה רבה (Simcha Raba), a popular song for פסח. It was intended to be a vessel that my mother would fill with her recipes and later pass down to her daughters, who would then pass the tradition of handwriting and sharing recipes to future generations. Though they did not know it at the time, this book was being readied for movement; meant to pass through decades, this book has also travelled through space, becoming a much-desired heirloom among my sisters and I as we span across the globe.
Eidinger speaks to the shifting and diverse nature of Jewish food culture found in my family’s recipe collection by examining the values imparted by the popular Montreal community cookbook, A Treasure for My Daughter: A Reference Book of Jewish Festivals with Menus and Recipes. Published as a guide for Jewish women severed from Jewish tradition by way of diasporic immigration, A Treasure for My Daughter contains both recipes for dishes and instructions for the passing-down of Jewish identity (Eidinger, 407). Eidinger locates the many contradictions inherent to the book as sites which reveal the context under which it was written – the pressure to be both malleable to Canadian society and representative of Jewish identity is woven throughout the cookbook, responding to assimilative measures that erase Jewish Canadian livelihood while recreating them by obscuring diverse identities within Judaism (408). In this way, A Treasure for My Daughter projects the distinct community of Jewish immigrants in Montreal as one that must meet North American standards of white middle-class identity while desperately differentiating themselves by maintaining universalized Jewish traditions (Eidinger, 408). In Eidinger’s examination of A Treasure for My Daughter and immigrant Jewish communities, recipes serve to mask distinct immigrant communities of Jews in order to negotiate the Canadian context. Though it follows similar lines of immigration, my family cookbook, being a product of a mixed family of Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews, does the opposite of A Treasure for My Daughter. Rather than hiding the various migrant paths taken by my family, our cookbook strives to honour them, filling family dining tables with appetizers like Russian potato salad, entrées such as spicy Moroccan fish stew, and apple cake for dessert.
The symbolism of my family recipes being contained in what was intended to hold memories may be overly-literal, but it is nonetheless the perfect metaphor. In many ways, the comfort I received and the love that I have for these recipes is a product similar to that of a photograph: These recipes are evidence of a past, people, and a culture that I was removed from. These recipes are a collection of shifting languages, from my אמא’s Hebrew cursive to my English block letters. These recipes are a reflection of my family’s makeup and migration history, spanning from Frikadelki (Russian Meatball) Soup to Pickled Lemons to Vegan Brownies. These recipes are souvenirs of the strength that it took for my אמא’s sacrifice in leaving her family behind. These recipes are a space for the creation of new memories and the introduction of new people; for example, cue cards warning against the interruption of my childhood best friend and I’s “Cooking Club”. Similarly to photos, these recipes manage to capture emotion, movement through time and space, and the cultural investment of the women in my family.
Although it is considered a family cookbook, many of the recipes in this book are prefixed with a woman’s name. When I asked my אמא who these women were, I only recognized a few, showcasing the anonymized nature of “it takes a village” child-rearing. In the Israel my אמא grew up in, children would hop from apartment to apartment in search of friends to play with and snacks. Behind every plate was a different woman - אמא ,סבתא ,דודה ,אחות - who was then the one asked to write a recipe card for her dish. My family cookbook serves not only as a collection of family recipes, but as a disruption of normative images of “family”, extending beyond the nuclear family unit and into the kitchens of women I have never met.
Though I am not sure what the first recipe in it was, the oldest one in this cookbook is written on what seems to be a page torn from a calendar. On it are a few recipes: split pea soup, lentil soup, and chicken, chickpea, and spinach stew. Though they are in her handwriting, my אמא told me that these are her father’s, my סבא’s (grandfather, pronounced Saba) dishes. These recipes originate from Egypt and were heavily circulated among lower-class circles for their filling and inexpensive nature, becoming a staple in my אמא’s diet as she grew up under food rationing. These also happen to be the recipes I make most often, as they fulfil the college student’s dilemma of acquiring cheap, healthy, and easy-to-make dishes. The chicken, chickpea, and spinach stew was always my favourite - over the years, my אמא modified it to accommodate my vegetarian preferences and substituted the chicken thighs in favour of tofu.
Very recently, I sat with her on the phone, translating the recipe into English as she dictated it in Hebrew so that I could share it with my friends. My friend regularly makes this stew and adds corn to it. Although I would not recommend this addition - I think corn is too sweet, but to each their own! - it is evidence to how sturdy this recipe, and the others on this piece of paper, are. As I made this dish for what seems like the hundredth time for this assignment, I realized that though they may shift so much that they barely resemble their original form, the dynamic nature of these recipes is not a flaw but their strength. They are able to withstand immigration and separation, the blunt nature of translation, shifts in eating habits, and the introduction of personal taste. Despite their flexibility, they still maintain the delicious taste of nostalgia.
Memories You Can Taste:
A Photo Album-Turned-Cookbook and Generations of Family Dancing in Kitchens
by Adi Sneg
Author’s note: this blog post examines the way my family cookbook has moved through several generations, its recipes acting as both a binding common ground and a site for negotiating difference due to time, immigration, and personal values.
As a child, I treasured Mondays after school. They were the day that my mom – אמא (pronounced E-ma) - and I would cook beside one another, preparing the family’s meals for that week. Today, as an adult charged with the life-sustaining task of cooking, I am grateful for the practical skills and intuition that those Monday afternoons gifted me. The women in my family passed down a style of cooking that relied on a knowledge of family-specific measurements, of which cultural taste “season to taste” refers to, and a resourcefulness with time, effort, and ingredients that always resulted in full stomachs. This explains how, even though we spent hours in the kitchen together, my אמא and I often moved around each other in silence, dancing to an unchoreographed but nonetheless familiar tune of generations of familial cookery.
 |
| From left to right, my great-aunt, Eti, mother, Rinat, and grandmother, Miriam, cooking together in preparation for Rosh Hashanah |
Ever-present on these Monday evenings was our family cookbook, marked by its long shape and red cover embossed with gold lettering that read “Photo Album” in too-fancy cursive. It was only recently that I realized that it is a plastic-bound photo album, filled with recipes written on index cards or loose scrap paper, magazine cut-outs, and printed articles. For me, this cookbook has always existed. To gather information about how exactly this cookbook made its way from Israel to Vancouver to Montreal, where I am now leafing through its pages, I called my אמא. Contrary to North American conceptions of Judaism and specifically Hanukkah, פסח (Passover, pronounced Pe-Sach), is the holiday where gifts are exchanged between friends and family. This book was given to my אמא from my סבתא (grandmother, pronounced Savta) in 1998, a year before I was born, half-filled with handwritten family recipes. Though gifted to my אמא , there is a dedication to my older sister on the first page under a pixelated image of a house (likely made on MS Paint) with the lyrics to שמחה רבה (Simcha Raba), a popular song for פסח. It was intended to be a vessel that my mother would fill with her recipes and later pass down to her daughters, who would then pass the tradition of handwriting and sharing recipes to future generations. Though they did not know it at the time, this book was being readied for movement; meant to pass through decades, this book has also travelled through space, becoming a much-desired heirloom among my sisters and I as we span across the globe.
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| The cover of my family cookbook |
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| Here are the cue cards I found of the Cooking Club my friend, Camryn, and I had planned (and were obviously very protective over) |
The symbolism of my family recipes being contained in what was intended to hold memories may be overly-literal, but it is nonetheless the perfect metaphor. In many ways, the comfort I received and the love that I have for these recipes is a product similar to that of a photograph: These recipes are evidence of a past, people, and a culture that I was removed from. These recipes are a collection of shifting languages, from my אמא’s Hebrew cursive to my English block letters. These recipes are a reflection of my family’s makeup and migration history, spanning from Frikadelki (Russian Meatball) Soup to Pickled Lemons to Vegan Brownies. These recipes are souvenirs of the strength that it took for my אמא’s sacrifice in leaving her family behind. These recipes are a space for the creation of new memories and the introduction of new people; for example, cue cards warning against the interruption of my childhood best friend and I’s “Cooking Club”. Similarly to photos, these recipes manage to capture emotion, movement through time and space, and the cultural investment of the women in my family.
 |
| All of my grandfather's recipes that my mother wrote |
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| A screenshot of the veganized version of the recipe that I translated as my mother dictated it |
Though I am not sure what the first recipe in it was, the oldest one in this cookbook is written on what seems to be a page torn from a calendar. On it are a few recipes: split pea soup, lentil soup, and chicken, chickpea, and spinach stew. Though they are in her handwriting, my אמא told me that these are her father’s, my סבא’s (grandfather, pronounced Saba) dishes. These recipes originate from Egypt and were heavily circulated among lower-class circles for their filling and inexpensive nature, becoming a staple in my אמא’s diet as she grew up under food rationing. These also happen to be the recipes I make most often, as they fulfil the college student’s dilemma of acquiring cheap, healthy, and easy-to-make dishes. The chicken, chickpea, and spinach stew was always my favourite - over the years, my אמא modified it to accommodate my vegetarian preferences and substituted the chicken thighs in favour of tofu.
 |
| A screenshot of my friend's modified dish, dedicated to my mother |