Food Preparation and Cookbooks as a Medium of Everyday Contact between Jews and Christians in the Habsburg Monarchy and Imperial Germany

Abstract

In the early nineteenth century, Jewish cookbooks appeared on the Central European book market for the first time. So far, these manuals have been studied primarily from the perspective of the preservation of Jewish identity, that is, as a marker of the extent to which kashrut could be preserved in the face of increasing acculturation to non-Jewish society. Little attention was paid to aspects of transfer or entanglement between Jewish and non-Jewish foodways despite the central role of food in everyday life. In my paper, I try to map possible encounters between Jews and Christians in the area of food preparation and eating outside one’s home before analyzing several Jewish and general cookbooks appearing in the Habsburg Monarchy and Imperial Germany. The fact that also non-Jewish cooking manuals integrated dishes perceived as Jewish indicates mutual influence and makes it evident that there was more Christian interest in Jewish foodways than assumed.