As someone who grew up with The Settlement Cook Book, I couldn't wait to dig in to Nora Rubel's book. I learned so much about the importance of this classic in the development of our nation's cuisine as well as the role of the fabulous Lizzie Black Kander in propelling the recipes she collected to such great success. -- Joan Nathan, author of more than a dozen cookbooks, including Jewish Cooking in America From a pamphlet in 1901 to cookbook juggernaut almost a century laterthat is the story of The Settlement Cook Book, a hero in millions of kitchens and the protagonist of this book. In the hands of this gifted historian, a cookbook becomes a prism for understanding the world in which it evolved. -- Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Ronald S. Lauder Chief Curator, Core Exhibition, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews Just as generations of American home cooks have treasured The Settlement Cook Book, this is a book to be prized. Rubel, a leading scholar of Jewish food history, uses the cookbook to guide readers through over a century of American culinary history, deftly tracing the complicated Jewishness of this supremely American cookbook. -- Rachel B. Gross, author of Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice For someone obsessed with The Settlement since childhood, Rubels book is a dream come true, answering my every question about the life of Lizzie Black Kander, the juxtaposition of kosher and treif, the provenance of the recipes, and the community and society in which the book came forth and flourished. -- Bonnie Slotnick, owner of Bonnie Slotnick Cookbooks In this well-written and thoroughly researched book, Nora L. Rubel provides a new perspective on American Jewish life through the lens of a widely used yet rarely studied volume: The Settlement Cook Book. She makes a strong argument for culinary pluralism as a major component of Jewish acculturation and assimilation in the twentieth-century United States. -- Rebecca Alpert, professor of religion emerita, Temple University
