When Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin made his now sadly overused declaration that it was possible to know the essential character of individuals by learning what it was they ate, he may well have been laying down the basics for an entire field of anthropological theory. Contemporary thinking, it is clear, has caught up with the great French gastronome’s insight, revealing the complexity of the relationships between food and history, food and culture, even food and individual psychology. And “food” itself is not simply a nutritive substance. It has to be gathered or grown, it has to be harvested, stored, perhaps preserved or packaged; then it must be marketed, then purchased, then prepared by cooks in homes or elsewhere, served, and eaten—all of this in accord with a staggering welter of cultural decisions. And that is simplifying it.
It is all very exciting. We are discovering that as we think about food in depth, we can become better in the way we relate to it—as shoppers, suppliers, cooks, or guests at the table. Cooking, in particular, we’ve come to appreciate, is more than a set of operations performed in a kitchen; our cookbooks have begun to incorporate elements from the broader background of biology, economy, culture, and the highly conditioned worlds of taste and of memory. And as we get glimpses of not just the “how to” but also the “how it came to be,” we grow, and we give ourselves both new competence and new pleasures. Why, we begin to ask, do we always flavor a certain dish with butter and salt, while others may choose milk and honey? Why are some foods seen day in and day out, others only once or twice a year? Is there a reason that this dish or that is traditionally served in a particular vessel? Why is it that sometimes only hand chopping will satisfy? Why do we abhor some foods and ache for others? What is science in the kitchen and what is a pack of old wives’ tales—and, at bottom, how great is the difference between the two in providing satisfaction?
Clearly, no cookbook can begin to provide all the detailed answers to the hundreds or thousands of questions that could be asked. What we can ask for, though, are books that raise our consciousness to the many components of the food-making and food-consuming experience. It is just that very consciousness and the resulting blend of history, culture, and personal story that makes Sonya and Gabrielle Gropman’s book on German-Jewish food so appealing and so useful. The authors, however, are—much for the better—little concerned with theory, largely confining themselves to substance. They have stories to tell and good foods to offer us, and it is from this loving example of times and of people past and present that we are enabled to see that the mélange of experience underlying all our food traditions turns out to be even more complex, more thought-provoking, and much, much more fun than we might ever have imagined.
Crafting a book of this sort is challenging, first because it deals not with one simple food tradition but with an immensely rich amalgam of origins—a history that ranges over the centuries and across an ocean that is at once geographically significant and culturally overwhelming. The Jewish immigrant experience is a tale that, in any case, can be told only in fragments—and mainly through the minds and the experiences of disparate individuals. That makes it frustrating as narrative but amazingly rich in texture. The second source of complexity is, of course, that the stories themselves are taken not from one memory but from two—a mother and daughter, each reaching to tell her own story, or possibly, even better, to tell one story in two separate voices. That can, perhaps, never be fully achieved, but what the Gropmans are offering us is, in every way, a highly valuable contribution to the literature of cookery, of immigration, of Jewish history, and of the massive combative forces of cultural change and deeply held tradition. It is an effort for which we should all be grateful.
NACH WAXMAN
Kitchen Arts & Letters
New York City