Ashkenazi Jewish Food
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Lecture
Yiddish Civilization 101 Series Admission: Free Registration is required. |
In celebration of YIVO's 101st year, join us for our new Yiddish Civilization 101 series. Each program will highlight key topics in Ashkenazi history and culture, including shtetl life, Jewish humor, and Ashkenazi foodways, amongst others. Guided by expert scholars, each lecture will provide a greater understanding of Jewish life in Eastern Europe and its diasporas.
Ashkenazi Jewish foodways embrace numerous regional culinary cultures from Eastern and Central Europe. They are notable for using locally available ingredients to conform to the rituals of Jewish life, most distinctively the slow-simmered stews that developed for the Sabbath. Robust grains like barley and buckwheat, tangy dill pickles and pickled herring, comforting chicken soup with matzo balls or kreplach, and sweet pastries stuffed with poppyseed and nuts are some of the most characteristic flavors. When masses of Jews migrated to America in the late nineteenth century, they faced not only unfamiliar foods but also challenges to their culinary practices. This lecture by Darra Goldstein will discuss how Ashkenazi Jews adapted to life in their new country by adopting unfamiliar ingredients and engaging in debates about nutrition and the importance of domestic traditions, all the while keeping the beloved flavors of the Old Country intact. The lecture will conclude with a look at the American Jewish foodscape today.
About the Speaker
Darra Goldstein is the Willcox B. and Harriet M. Adsit Professor of Russian, Emerita at Williams College and Founding Editor of Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, named the 2012 Publication of the Year by the James Beard Foundation. She has published widely on literature, culture, art, and cuisine and consulted for the Council of Europe on using food to promote tolerance and diversity. Goldstein has also authored five award-winning cookbooks, including The Georgian Feast (1994 IACP Julia Child Cookbook of the Year) and is series editor of California Studies in Food and Culture (University of California Press). In 2013, she was named Distinguished Fellow in Food Studies at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, and in 2016 held the Macgeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.