Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book, Author Nora Rubel in Conversation with Lilly Goren

In partnership with Boswell Book Company, the Stahl Center presents an evening with Nora L Rubel, author of Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of the Settlement Cook Book, in which she offers a new perspective on American Jewish life through the lens of a widely used yet rarely studied volume: The Settlement Cook Book, originally published in 1901 by the Settlement House of Milwaukee. Nora Rubel will be in conversation with Lilly Goren, Professor of Political Science at Carroll University.

In 1901, Lizzie Black Kander put together a cookbook based on the classes she taught at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. The Settlement Cook Book would go on to be the most successful charitable cookbook in American history, remaining a best-seller into the 1970s. Despite including nonkosher recipes, it became a mainstay in Jewish kitchens and an enduring touchstone of Jewish American culture. Recipes for the Melting Pot tells the remarkable story of The Settlement Cook Book, demonstrating how it shaped Jewish American identity and was in turn shaped by generations of Jewish women. Ultimately, The Settlement Cook Book is a record of American Jewish women’s history, told through the food they made and the lives they led.

Joan Nathan, author of Jewish Cooking in America, says: “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.”

Nora L Rubel is author of Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination and coeditor of Religion, Food, and Eating in North America and Blessings Beyond the Binary: “Transparent” and the Queer Jewish Family. She is the Elizabeth Denio Professor in of Religion and Classics at the University of Rochester.