Introduction: Everyday Life

Social Research, Spring, 1999 by Judith Friedlander

Anthropology teaches us that there is nothing ordinary about the ordinary, that is, if by ordinary we mean "usual" or "normal." Still, members of every culture believe that their way of doing things is normal. If we look at the world from the viewpoint of people living in a particular society, we can easily point to the ordinary pleasures, rituals and taboos that the culture associates with its food.

But ordinary does not only mean normal; it also means order or rule. In its nominal form, an "ordinary" refers to the same meal served from day to day, at the same price. Order and food are joined as well at the seder, or Passover meal, prepared by Jews to celebrate their escape from Egypt and liberation from slavery in the days of Moses. We might therefore consider "ordinary" in the title of this section as the rules people use to order--or give order to--what and how they eat.

There was a time in Anthropology when leading figures in the field tried to determine the rules of a culture by analyzing detailed sets of ethnographic data and making order out of them. For nearly two decades, for example, the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss studied what people ate and how different cultures prepared their food, through their myths, in order to identify the underlying structures of human thought. In every culture, he tells us in The Raw and the Cooked (1964), people put the food they eat into three broadly defined categories, two natural (raw and rotten), one mediated by cultural intervention (cooked). To help visualize the relationship, Levi-Strauss imagines a "culinary triangle":

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

According to Levi-Strauss people spend most of their time in almost every culture turning nature into culture, the raw into the cooked. But even when they value culture over nature, they frequently break their own rules, defying their own categories. Cultures may favor cooked food over raw and still prize delicacies that are uncooked. A French meal, for example, could easily begin with a half dozen raw oysters, followed by a boeuf bourguignon, which has stewed for hours, and end with a selection of (rotten) cheeses. Still cultures make choices: the French may eat slimy shellfish and stinky Camembert but refuse a serving of whale blubber crawling with maggots.

In her highly acclaimed study of kashrut, Mary Douglas tried to make order out of the dietary practices of Jews, focusing, in particular, on two central concepts in Leviticus: tehvel and kadosh. Usually translated as perversion, tehvel actually means mixing things up and confusion. Kadosh, on the other hand, while translated as holy, means to set apart or give the physical expression of wholeness. Mary Douglas argued that Jews are horrified by what is out of place, by what does not fit into a proscribed category, or is incomplete. "Holiness requires that individuals shall conform to the class to which they belong. And holiness requires that different classes of things shall not be confused." For the Jews of ancient Israel who tended their herds, "clovenhoofed, cud-chewing ungulates are the model of the proper kind of food for a pastoralist" (Douglas, 1966, pp. 53 and 54).

Biblical Jews may have written a set of logical dietary laws for pastoralists, but the Jews have spent long herdless years in exile. What passes for Jewish food today is a fascinating mixture of tastes and styles, reflecting the influences of many cultures and traditions. Technically, of course, the laws of kashrut still rule, but many Jews in the U.S. would challenge the prohibitions, offering examples of Jewish dishes cooked by their non-kosher forebears, by defiantly secular Jews who left East and Central Europe at the turn of the century, rebelling against their religion, but not their ethnic identity. And as these immigrant Jews made the U.S. their home, they began eating the food of their adopted country while introducing their own Diaspora favorites to so-called American cuisine, some of which, like the bagel, have become popular foods, among Jew and Gentile alike.

Accounts describing this culinary exchange go back 100 years, to the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the large immigration of Central and East European Jews to the United States. Among the best sources for tracing this process are the early cookbooks, prepared at the turn of the century. In 1889, to give one example, there appeared a non-kosher cookbook for Jews, with the folksy rifle, Aunt Babette's (cited in Nathan, 1979, p. 9). These recipes offered secular Jews a way to maintain ethnicties, while relaxing their commitment to Judaism.

Aunt Babette wanted to reach Jews who were assimilating into American society. So did Mrs. Simon Kander. Publishing her enormously popular Settlement Cookbook in 1901, the book quickly became a favorite source of recipes, both for Shavuot (cheese blintzes) and New Year's Day (a Virginia baked ham).

Immigrant Orthodox Jews had little use for American-style recipes. As Leonore Fleischer recalls in The Chicken Soup Cookbook, the very concept of a recipe was still foreign. Raised by her grandmother in Manhattan in the 1940's, when she married, she turned away from Jewish cooking and "became Frenchified":