A new book reveals how The Settlement Cook Book became an unlikely guide to immigration, assimilation, memory, and belonging.
A pinch of curiosity.
A dash of interest in food and history.
Heaping spoonfuls of research.
Combine and let marinate, occasionally stirring, for 14 years.
This may have been what ultimately led to Nora Rubel's long-awaited new book Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book (Columbia University Press, 2026). But it wouldn't make the grade for cooking instructions in the iconic book Rubel profiled-one that would become the most successful charitable cookbook in American history. Every recipe in The Settlement Cook Book, which has sold more than two million copies and evolved through more than 40 editions since its 1901 debut, is tested, retested, and standardized using exact measurements and detailed directions.
This precision helped cement its enduring reputation-a reputation that intrigued Rubel, the University of Rochester's Elizabeth Denio Professor in the Department of Religion and Classics, as far back as her time in graduate school in the early 2000s.
In the intervening years, "I did go down quite a few rabbit holes," admits Rubel, a first-generation American Jew whose scholarship focuses on understanding the religions, identities, and diversity of American Jews. "The research took twists and turns as I thought about the life stages of this book and how it meant different things to different people."
What is the historical significance of The Settlement Cook Book?
"The significance of The Settlement Cook Book is that it emerged out of a period of immigration in an attempt to teach Jews how to become American. Later, it became an icon of American Jewish material culture," explains Rubel.
On the surface, The Settlement Cook Book is a compendium of recipes with nutrition information, serving procedures, and household management advice. Recipes include "Matzos Pancakes" (matzo brei), chicken stroganoff, and banana cream pie. (Its original subtitle, The Way to a Man's Heart, lasted until the 1970s and reflects the initial target audience: young women and homemakers.)
But the book also represents deeper themes that Rubel explores in Recipes for the Melting Pot. Immigration is one of those themes. In the late 19th century, southern and eastern Europeans came to the United States, and settlement houses emerged to help Jews learn English, prepare for employment, take citizenship classes, and adapt to life in America.
This period also saw the rise of community cookbooks, a subgenre of cookbooks that were frequently fundraising projects taken up by a group, including women's and activist groups.
This is where Lizzie Black Kander comes in.
Reflecting-and shaping-American Jewish identity
Rubel spent a good amount of time learning about the woman who created the original Settlement Cook Book based on her kosher cooking classes at the Milwaukee Jewish Mission. Kander, from a middle-class Jewish family, was a go-getter. When the mission's all-male board denied her request to fund the cookbook's first print run, she created sponsorships through advertisements and sold out of 2,500 copies by the end of 1902.
The late 19th century also saw Reform Jews rejecting ritual elements such as kosher dietary laws, preferring to focus on ethical teachings, according to Rubel. The Milwaukee mission's kitchen, however, kept kosher "so people would feel comfortable coming to the settlement regardless of whether they kept kosher at home," she explains. Even so, she adds, the women who ran the kitchen did not keep kosher at home, "which is why you see all kinds of non-kosher recipes in The Settlement Cook Book from the beginning, such as oysters, ham, and frog legs."
"There's an understanding that there are certain foods that are seen as Jewish, even if they just became Jewish in the United States. Like bagels and pickles."
The cookbook changed over time as the Jewish community in America evolved.
"Jewish food becomes a very big part of cultural Jewish identity when people become less affiliated with religious institutions," Rubel says. "There's an understanding that there are certain foods that are seen as Jewish, even if they just became Jewish in the United States. Like bagels and pickles-they're not necessarily Jewish in Europe, but they become Jewish here."
These days, pickles are having a moment-so much so that Rubel joked that "it's possible we've hit peak pickle."
Foods that have become associated with Jewish identity point to a larger truth about migration and memory, shares Rubel. She points out that people lose things when they move to new places-either by choice or circumstance-and "food is one of the things that continues to linger in memory." While Jews aren't exceptional in this regard, she notes, they do have a full calendar of holidays and observances closely tied to food, including the weekly Shabbat.
"There's such a connection between smell and memory and pleasure when it comes to food," Rubel says. "There's so much joy there."
More than food for thought
Aside from working on Recipes for the Melting Pot at several writing retreats, Rubel wrote the book mostly from a comfortable, well-lit home office she fashioned from "a glorified storage space" during Covid. (Most importantly, the room is a respectable distance from the television and coffee maker.)
In 2012, she submitted the manuscript to the publisher. During the intervening years until the book's recent release, Rubel let it simmer on the back burner, so to speak-working as a full-time professor, starting and raising a family, serving as director of the Susan B. Anthony Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, and chairing the Department of Religion and Classics.
As co-owner of Grass Fed, Rochester's first vegan butchery, Rubel brings more than a scholarly interest to the subject of food. In fact, she once wanted to write a cookbook, but the project took a backseat to the aforementioned academic pursuits, including authoring Doubting the Devout: The Ultra-Orthodox in the Jewish American Imagination (2009) and coediting Religion, Food, and Eating in North America (2014), both published by Columbia University Press.
She recalls: "I thought, 'Alright, I have other things I could be doing right now. I'll come back to this.'"
Some ideas need time to marinate.
