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From matzo balls to Christmas pudding: the Jewish Cookery Book (1895)
By Erika Delbecque, on 22 April 2021
Dishes you would expect to find in a book entitled Jewish Cookery Book probably do not include jam roly-poly, shepherd’s pie and Cornish pasties. Yet, these traditional British recipes are all listed in this curious cookery book, which was recently acquired for UCL Special Collections.
A cookery curriculum for Jewish school children in London
M.A.S. Tattersall, Jewish Cookery Book, compiled for use in the cookery centres under the school board for London (London: Wertheimer, Leah & Co, 1895)
The Jewish Cookery Book, published in 1895, was written by Miss M.A.S. Tattersall, about whom little is known other than that she worked as the superintendent of cookery for the School Board for London. It was compiled for use in teaching cookery to Jewish pupils in schools across London. Miss Tattersall, who was presumably not Jewish herself, asked a “Jewish lady” to revise her draft to ensure that it met Jewish dietary requirements.
That lady is likely to have been Rachel Adler, who writes in a foreword to the work that she believes that the included recipes are “are in full accordance with the requirements of our dietary code”. She was the wife of rabbi Hermann Adler, chairman of the Jews’ College, which incidentally had links to what was then University College: at the time of Adler’s chairmanship, Jews’ College was located in Tavistock Square near University College, so that students could combine their religious studies with an academic degree course from the University of London (LSJS).
Kosher British cuisine
The Jewish Cookery Book presents a curriculum consisting of two courses, through which the student progressed by learning to cook increasingly complex dishes. Students move on from boiling eggs and making vegetable soup in the very first lesson to stewed veal with forcemeat balls by the end of the second course. The work includes standard British fare that has been adapted to meet the requirement for kosher food (the introductory section includes instructions on “koshering meat, poultry, etc.”), as well a small number of recipes for Passover dishes such as matzo balls and sassafras, a drink made of liquorice and aniseed.
Recipes including jam roly-poly and pea soup
As such, despite its title, the curriculum set out by this book essentially offered Jewish pupils in London an education in English cooking. It was part of a spate of cookery books in the late nineteenth century aimed at the rapidly increasing Jewish immigrant communities in London. The implicit aim of books such as Jewish Cookery Book was to “anglicise and integrate” these communities into British society, which explains the inclusion of, of all things, a recipe for a Christmas pudding in what purports to be a Jewish cookery book (Gerson, p. 303).
Selected by a student book collector
Recipes for Passover dishes
The work joins several other cookery books in our Jewish and Hebrew collections, including a copy of the Jewish Manual, published in 1846, which is regarded as the first Anglo-Jewish cookery book. This new acquisition for our collections was selected by Alexandra Plane, the winner of last year’s Anthony Davis Book Collecting Prize. It struck her as an “interesting as an example of assimilation of British and Jewish cultures”.
As well as the opportunity to work together with UCL Special Collection staff to select an item for the collections, the winner of the Anthony Davis Book Collecting Prize receives £600 and the opportunity to give an online talk on his or her collection as part of the UCL Special Collections events programme. We are accepting submissions for this year’s Prize until 30th April 2021. For further details, please visit our page for applicants.
The Jewish Cookery Book can be consulted in our reading room. If this blog post has inspired you to try some of Miss Tattersall’s recipes, a digitised copy from the University of Leeds Library is available here.
Further reading
David, Keren (2019). Miss Tattersall’s guide for the Jewish cooks of 1895, The Jewish Chronicle, https://www.thejc.com/lifestyle/food/a-%EF%AC%82avour-of-haimish-history-from-an-antique-cookery-book-1.493119 (accessed 22 April 2021)
Gerson, Jane (2010) From Bola d’Amour to the Ultimate Cheesecake: 150 Years of Anglo-Jewish Cookery Writing, Jewish Culture and History, 12:1-2, 297-316, DOI: 10.1080/1462169X.2010.10512156
LSJS (2018) About LSJS: A Brief History, https://www.lsjs.ac.uk/about-lsjs.php (accessed 22 April 2021)
2 Responses to “From matzo balls to Christmas pudding: the Jewish Cookery Book (1895)”
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Erika Delbecque wrote on 18 November 2021:
Dear Mrs Meyer,
If you can access it, I would suggest reading the following article, which is referenced underneath the blog post:
Gerson, Jane (2010) From Bola d’Amour to the Ultimate Cheesecake: 150 Years of Anglo-Jewish Cookery Writing, Jewish Culture and History, 12:1-2, 297-316
Gerson mentions two other Jewish cookery books that were published in the late 19th century:
Aunt Sarah’s Cookery Book for a Jewish Kitchen (liverpool: Yates and Hess, 1872)
May Henry and Edith B. Cohen, The Economical Cook: A Modern Jewish Recipe Book for Housekeepers (London: Wertheimer, Lea and Co., 1889)Another potential candidate for the book you have in mind could be The jewish Manual by Judith Montefiore (London : T. & W. Boone, 1846). It went through many reprints in the 19th century.
Erika Delbecque
Head of Rare Books
University College London
I would like to track down a very old UK kosher cookery book I once found, then lent and lost. It was NOT the Tattersall cookery book, but it was originally published at about the same time, the 1880’s, then reprinted a number of times. I remember nothing about it beyond the fact that the soft cover was dark blue and that it had an Invalid Cookery section. How would I go about tracking it down? Thank you.