My mother, Harriet Lipman Sepinwall, was an ideal customer for the Osterizer. The daughter of Jewish immigrants from Poland, she was eager to make both modern “American” and traditional Jewish meals for her and her new groom, Jerry Sepinwall, after their marriage in 1963. But she was also a first-generation college graduate and dedicated teacher who could not spend all day cooking. Harriet’s new Osterizer made cooking much easier for a working wife. My mother’s mother, Ida Lipman, had made latkes for Hanukah as she had learned in Poland, laboriously grating potatoes by hand. But for my mother, the Osterizer sped latke preparation. By the time Harriet and Jerry had three children, and my mother was professor of education at the College of Saint Elizabeth in New Jersey, the Osterizer latkes had become our family’s favorite holiday dish. When I grew up and began cooking for friends, I continued to use this recipe, with a few tweaks. Most importantly, I only purée half of the potatoes in the blender and use a food processor to grate the others, which makes the latkes crispier and more delicious.
I use this story with students at California State University, San Marcos, in my course History 383: Women and Jewish History to illustrate how a recipe’s history can illuminate lived experiences. My latke story provides a basis for our culminating project: a cookoff or “acculturation lab.” The course introduces many processes affecting Jews in global history, from expulsions and migrations to resistance, Jewish nationalisms, Jewish feminisms, and the Shoah. After a unit on American Jewish life, the students and I turn to historical cookbooks. Each student (alone or in pairs) selects one recipe to cook and explain in a poster. The students then vote on their favorite sweet dish and favorite poster. The project helps students learn more about Jews in diverse parts of the world (whether Turkey, India, or Argentina) through experiential learning.
As I tell students, learning about Jewish women just by reading texts would be particularly ahistorical. Jewish women typically were not able to sit and learn as their male counterparts would in a yeshiva or as we do in the modern university. Especially without time-saving modern appliances, much of women’s lives revolved around food preparation and childcare. Doing the cooking—seeing how long it takes and the labor involved—helps students better understand women’s daily lives in the past. Tasting the cooking—and noting similarities and differences between spices and flavors in Jewish recipes from different regions, as well as how they compare to non-Jewish foods from the same regions—helps them understand multiple historical processes. These include migration (for instance, of Spanish Jews to multiple parts of the Middle East after 1492) and acculturation, as Jews kept distinctive food traditions even while adapting recipes to local foodways (such as using avocados in kosher food in California).