Matzoh Ball Gumbo by Marcie Cohen Ferris; University of North Carolina Press' 344 pages; $29.95.
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AN EXCERPT
My mother was raised in a Jewishly observant home in Connecticut, while my father's Jewish family in Arkansas showed little interest in religion. My sister, Jamie, and I called it a "mixed" marriage. The different regional and religious backgrounds of my parents inspired heated discussions about food. My father, Jerry Cohen, owned a construction company, and during Christmas holidays we received food gifts from his business colleagues. Pecan-covered cheese balls, wild duck, hot tamales and milk cartons filled with frozen "crappie" – a local white fish – were not the problem. My mother placed these in the freezer behind her frozen matzoh balls and chicken soup. Her concern was the pile of country hams in our garage.
"Don't bring those hams into the house," mother told my father. "And don't expect me to do anything with them." Country ham was the contested food that forced my mother to draw a culinary boundary between her ethnic identity and her regional one. I wished that Mom would cook one of the hams so our family could eat like our neighbors. But this was not to be. I learned that we were different from other families in Blytheville, and my mother's refusal to cook ham was central to this awakening, as were the brisket, noodle kugel and matzoh balls that she did cook.
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This fascinating book, subtitled "Culinary Tales of the Jewish South," is not a cookbook, although it does contain more than three dozen recipes tucked in among Ferris's enlightening examination of American Judaism through the foodways of the Jewish South. She focuses on Charleston, S.C., Savannah, Ga., New Orleans, Memphis, Tenn., and Atlanta as she emphasizes the history and experience of women, traditionally the primary cooks within families. The author also explores the "free zone" where black and Jewish women bonded as they exchanged recipes for collard greens and matzoh balls. Black cooks learned the rules of Jewish dietary laws and were often better at preparing the faith's specialties than their employers were. Ironically, although blacks were central figures in Jewish kitchens throughout the South, Ferris finds that they have not been represented in community cookbooks until now.
Ferris reminds the reader that Jews joined exploratory expeditions from Europe to the New World in the 16th and 17th centuries, and many settled in Savannah and Charleston. These first Jewish settlers faced a dilemma: How could they be Jewish where there were no kosher butchers, no synagogues, no yeshivas and very few rabbis? Compromises had to be made to sustain Jewish life, and that meant some relaxing of dietary laws and customs.
While Southern Jews share the same religious heritage as urban Jews in the Northeast, they bond with non-Jewish neighbors in a unique way through Southern cooking. One great stride toward the merging of two cultures was the invention of Crisco, a vegetable shortening. Staples of Southern cuisine for generations – fried chicken, cornbread and biscuits – were now a guiltless part of a kosher diet. Where non-Jewish cooks used lard (a pork fat) for such delicacies, Crisco freed Jewish households to revel in the Southern delicacies.
Throughout the book Ferris treats the reader to interesting observations, such as the one about Memphis barbecue: "There is no stronger test of an observant Jew's commitment to his or her faith than being able to resist the aroma that wafts over east Memphis from Corky's Restaurant when the barbecue pits are slow roasting pork ribs."
Times are changing in Memphis, though. Corky's Restaurant, owned by two Jewish brothers, sells kosher smoked turkeys and beef briskets and a kosher barbecue sauce. Since the 1980s, the "world's only kosher barbecue contest" has been held there, and teams – now numbering in the 30s – compete under names such as "The Three Brisketeers," "Shofar Shogood," "Kosher Cardiac Cookers," "Cowch Potatoes" and "So Fine Bovine."
The book is generously illustrated with informal photos of individuals and families about whom Ferris writes, and interiors and facades of Jewish-run businesses, including one that certainly illustrates the theme of her work: New Orleans' "Kosher Cajun New York Deli and Grocery."
The book is really a history and an ethnographic study, an overview of the history of regional Jewish life in America as illustrated by anecdotes, oral histories and Ferris's visits to the kitchens in homes, synagogue banquet halls, kosher restaurants and social clubs. She mined recipe files, food ledgers, community cookbooks, banquet menus and club invitations to depict the ways that they shaped both the everyday Judaism of their families in the home and the communal expression of the faith in synagogues and organizations. This book should be on the shelf of every historian and sociologist; it is a dense study told ebulliently.
Marcie Cohen Ferris is associate director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies and assistant professor of American studies at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill. She is also vice president of the Southern Foodways Alliance.
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