The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook as an American Community Cookbook
The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook shows its connections to American culture in other ways as well. It reflects broader trends in American eating habits (consider the relatively recent and growing popularity of quinoa, which is indigenous to Peru and Bolivia), and lifestyle patterns (for example, the growing emphasis on convenience and time-saving short-cuts) that are common across the United States.
The Sephardic Heritage Cookbook offers a superb example of the American community cookbook genre, too, because its editors introduce their volume as a conscious exercise in group building. This volunteer-driven, civic element has been a defining feature of American community cookbooks since the 1860s, when historians believe the earliest works in this genre appeared.
Our class had the opportunity to speak to three of the women who led the initiative to produce the Sephardic Heritage Cookbook. They explained how their project, from its inception, aspired to connect more established members of the congregation (descendants of migrants from the Mediterranean region) with newer families of Iranian origin, who now form a majority of the congregation. To write the book, they held parties where they shared food and swapped recipes. Preparing this cookbook brought them together.
The cookbook also reflects the community’s collective consciousness of its own diverse immigrant origins in the United States. Writing recipes down, and citing examples of parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, forms part of a concerted effort to preserve culture and memories for the next generation. As such, production of the cookbook, which the society distributes mostly by selling copies to fellow congregants, has functioned as an exercise in heritage conservation.