Cookbooks: From 1860 to World War I: Immigration and Ethnic Recipes

The great waves of immigration, mostly from Europe but also from Asia and the Middle East, that transformed America during the late nineteenth century naturally broadened American eating habits and cookbook publishing. The new immigrants needed to know how to cook with American equipment using American ingredients and satisfying American tastes, as well as how to cook foods and recipes from their original homelands. This body of cookery literature is usually difficult to find. Prior to 1920 the American housewife could purchase books on the cuisine of dozens of other cultures, sometimes in English, sometimes in the original language, and sometimes with bilingual text. The books contained American recipes or ethnic recipes or, in many cases, both. In addition to British, Dutch, German, and French works, books from the following cultures were available: Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Bohemian, Austro-Hungarian, Polish, Lithuanian, Central American, Mexican, South American, Italian, Spanish, Greek, Norwegian, Danish, Finnish, Belgian, Russian, Armenian, Turkish, Syrian, and Hindu. These works include the first Jewish cookbook published in America, Esther Levy’s Jewish Cookery Book (1871); the charity cookbook St. Paul’s Bazaar-Kochbuch und Geschaeftsfuehrer (1892); the bilingual Svensk Amerikansk Kokbok (1895); May E. Southworth’s One Hundred and One Mexican Dishes (1906); Sara Bosse and Onoto Watanna’s Chinese-Japanese Cook Book (1910); Ardashes H. Keoleian’s Armenian and Turkish The Oriental Cook Book (1913); Mina Walli’s Finnish bilingual Suomalais-Amerikalainen Keittokirja (1914); George Haddad’s Syrian Mount Lebanon to Vermont (1916); and K. D. Shastri’s Hindu Dietetics (1917). According to its introduction, this last book was made possible by “the influence of Hindu thought on the life of the American people since the Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893.”