András Koerner’s Early Jewish Cookbooks makes an important contribution to our understanding of the diversity of Ashkenazic Jewish cuisine, namely, Hungarian Jewish cuisine. Furthermore, Koerner demonstrates how to use cookbooks as historical sources and notes the importance of cookbooks and cuisines as strategies for modern European Jewish acculturation. For those unfamiliar with Koerner’s work or with Hungarian Jewish cuisine, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who is probably better known to Gastronomica’s readers, provides an excellent preface to the book, situating Koerner’s work in the general study of cookbooks and the particular study of Ashkenazic Jewish food.
Koerner’s book shows how late nineteenth- to pre-World War II twentieth-century Hungarian Jewish cookbooks represent Hungarian Jewish acculturation strategies expressed in middle- to upper-middle-class aspirations. Koerner stresses the importance of a close reading of the language of the cookbooks (usually German), their sources, the specifics of their publication, or in the case of his great-grandmother’s cookbook,...
University of California Press