Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book

In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander compiled a cookbook for immigrant girls learning to cook "simple and nutritious food" in the American way. That modest volume became the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, outselling competitors for seven decades, finding its way into Jewish kitchens that weren't strictly kosher, and somehow managing to be, simultaneously, a tool of Americanization, a vessel of tradition, and a document of upward mobility.

Nora L. Rubel, a religious studies scholar, follows The Settlement Cook Book across forty editions and many decades, tracing how each revision responded to the world its readers were living in: waves of immigration, changing gender roles, suburbanization, and the rapid transformation of American Jewish life after WWII. The book's durability, she argues, came from its faith that ethnic identity and American identity were fully compatible—a conviction that made it relevant both to Jews fleeing Europe and to those whose families had been here for generations.

The story has a later chapter, too: as the 1965 Immigration Act opened the country to non-European, non-white, non-Christian immigrants, The Settlement Cook Book attempted to broaden its address beyond Jewish readers, becoming something closer to an all-purpose American kitchen reference.

This is food history written at the intersection of gender, immigration, and identity. For readers who want to understand how cookbooks function as cultural documents, it's a rewarding place to start.

Paperback. Black-and-white photographs.