Joint Session - Cookbooks, Menus & Society

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Special Holiday Foods and Rituals Discovered in Jewish Cookbooks (Jean Moats)
Food is a tangible and tasty expression of Judaism. Preparing and eating certain dishes especially on holidays evokes memories of the past.  These different dishes add color as they help interpret the rituals surrounding the holidays. Recipes on slips of paper get passed down from generation to generation. Through the years, various authors have gathered recipes and helpful information together, creating cookbooks. For Jewish women who were far from their families, these cookbooks provided not only recipes, but also information about holidays, household hints, and even medical cures. When looking at cookbooks, they can be commonly divided into promotional, community/charitable, and individually authored.  In this paper, I argue by surveying a sample of Jewish cookbooks, it is possible to examine the information each one provides about holiday food rituals and how these books provide knowledge to Jewish women who were far from home. Cookbooks contribute richness to rituals especially with personalized headnotes found at the beginning of many recipes.


The airline menu as a cipher for social, socio-political and technological changes since 1929: the results of a documentary analysis (Dickon Weir-Hughes)
Airline food can create fairly extreme opinions and many of these views are reflected in numerous pieces of grey literature.  However, there are no published studies using documentary analysis. Only two sources of documents exist in this space, airline catering manuals and menus, the former rarely being available. Menus fall into the category of ephemera but this study has utilised rescued menus as a data source. More than 1500 meals from 97 airlines from 1929 to present have been analysed. The results include data on numerous topics including changes to the popularity of the dishes served and ethical and social changes to tastes, technology, the diaspora routes and the dominance of colonial cuisine, the Imperial Airways sandwich boxes of the 1930's (before ovens), the early dominance of the French chefs and the Escoffier methods through to the British charter airline infamous prawn cocktails and Liebfraumilch to the 'buy-on-board' offerings of the 2000's and recently the rise in vegetarianism and the removal of beef from some airline menus.