When ‘A Lady’ taught the English to cook kugel and Jews to be English

RITA ERLICH: The first Jewish recipes published in English reveal the place of accomplished Jewish women in 19^th Century high society

Among the welter of cookbooks published in 19^th century England, Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery for Private Families stands out for its clarity, its practicality, its occasional humour, and its inclusion of Jewish food.

First published in 1845, the book went into many editions. The 1855 edition included a section on Foreign and Jewish Cookery, and among the recipes was one for Jewish Almond Pudding. It was one of the few recipes Acton had not tested herself. “We have tasted the puddings … more than once and have received the exact directions for them from the Jewish lady at whose house they were made.”

A Jewish lady – presumably the same one – provided her, and thereby the readers, with the address of a Jewish butcher in the London suburb of Aldgate, from whom one could procure smoked beef and a chorissa sausage. Acton noted that “all meat supplied by Jew butchers is sure to be of first-rate quality, as they are forbidden by the Mosaic Law to convert into food any animal which is not perfectly free from all ’spot or blemish’“.  She also noted that the Jewish dietary laws which forbade the mixing of dairy and meat were “not very rigidly observed” by most English Jews.

The date of that book is striking. Jews were part of English society by 1855, with a Jewish Lord Mayor of London, Sir David Salomons, a leader in the campaign to allow Jews to sit in Parliament. Lionel de Rothschild took his seat in Parliament in 1858, following the passing of the Jews Relief Act. He had been elected a number of times; the sticking point had been the need to swear the oath “upon the true Faith of a Christian”.

Even if we did not know about the number of wealthy, highly regarded and influential Jews in London at that time, the fact that an author would include specifically Jewish recipes and shopping advice in a bestselling cookbook that also recommended Jewish butchers for the quality of the meat suggests strongly that there was companionable social exchange.