Media Morsels

Thursday, May 19, 2011

Reposting Prezi Link

https://prezi.com/secure/6c9be4be5c079072578d7f93e188e2d8ac64ad7a/

because Prezi was having an off-day, or something.

Please visit the link to view my Prezi, "Personal and Published Culinary Documents."

https://prezi.com/secure/6c9be4be5c079072578d7f93e188e2d8ac64ad7a/

I've posted a list of my sources below for reference, should anyone be interested in some light, tasty reading over the summer.

enjoy,
-Kim

•••

Works Consulted

Avakian Arlene Voski and Haber, Barbara. “Feminist Food Studies: A Brief History,” University of Massachusetts, 2005.

Beeton, Isabella Mary. The Book of Household Management. London, 1868.

Bower, Anne, “Recipes for Reading: Community Cookbooks, Stories, Histories.” Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. 1997.

Canton, Mary Ann. Fools and Fricassees, The Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D. C. 1999.

Cosman, Madeleine Pelner. Fabulous Feasts. George Braziller, Inc. New York, 1976.

Dorfman, Cindy. “The Garden of Eating: The Carnal Kitchen in Contemporary American Culture.” Feminist Issues (Spring): 21–38. 1992.

Dusoulier, Clotilde. Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily adventures in a Parisian kitchen. Broadway Books. 2007.

Farmer, Fannie Merritt. The Boston Cooking School Cookbook. Boston. Little, Brown and Company. 1896.

Flandrin, Jean-Louis and Massimo Montinari. English edition by Albert Sonnenfeld. Food, a culinary history. New York. Columbia University Press. 1999.

Freedman, Paul., ed. Food, the history of taste. Thames & Hudson Ltd., London. 2007

Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell. The Good Housekeeper, or The Way to Live Well and to Be Well While We Live. Boston. Weeks Jordan & Company. 1839.

Kander, Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld. The Settlement Cookbook. Milwaukee, The Settlement. 1903.

Kimball, Chris. Fannie’s Last Supper. Hyperion. 2010

Simmons, Amelia. American Cookery: Or, the Art of Dressing Viands, Fish, Poultry and Vegetables, and the Best Modes of Making Pastes, Puffs, Pies, Tarts, Puddings, Custards and Preserves, and All Kinds of Cakes, from the Imperial Plumb to Plain Cake, Adapted to This Country, and All Grades of Life. Hartford: Hudson & Goodwin. 1796.

Tannahill, Reay. Food in History. Crown Publishers Inc. 1989.

Wheaton, Barbara. “Finding real life in cookbooks: The adventures of a culinary historian.” Humanities Research Group Working Papers, 2006.

Wizenberg, Molly. A Homemade Life. Simon and Schuster. 2009.

Wolley, Hannah. The Queen-like Closet or Rich Cabinet. 1672.

Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Appendix: images

Final Paper Uploading

American as Apple Strudel?

The Settlement Cookbook as a Medium of Social Influence and Acculturation in Immigrant Kitchens

Cookbooks occupy little space in our homes, tucked away in kitchen cabinets, but these unassuming instruction manuals can be understood as a powerful medium of persuasion.

Food occupies an important space in human lives and when it is consumed socially, we bond with our fellow diners. As a creative medium, food allows us to express our identities. Perhaps we cook particular regional or ethnic dishes to honor our heritage and affiliations. Or maybe we eat in a particular way for spiritual reasons. Perhaps we abstain from cooking foods such as meat or dairy as a political or ethical statement. We might proudly purchase locally grown or fairly traded ingredients as a statement of our economic values. These preferences and values influence how a person interacts in the community, where and how he or she spends money and which goods he or she buys.

Frederich Kittler wrote, “media determine our situation,” (xxxix). If that statement holds true, a cookbook – an instructional and persuasive guide – can shape the way a reader interacts with food and culinary culture. Consider how a reader might mentally enframe the kitchen and the act of cooking after learning from a cookbook by an author who advocates a particular philosophy of cooking: Perhaps the author instructs readers to use precise measurements and employ professional techniques and specialized equipment. Thus, the reader might approach cooking with a strict sense of formality, following recipes in a disciplined manner, not unlike students in a chemistry lab. In contrast, a cookbook with a more relaxed philosophy might guide readers through a free-form preparation method, encouraging the cook to taste and adjust the ingredients as he or she cooks. This author’s instructions might be better described as approximations, and might offer suggestions for ingredient substitutions and variations, leading readers to take creative liberties with the basic recipes.

By reading each of these cookbooks, a reader would gain a different philosophy of cooking and dissimilar ideas about how to interact with the kitchen as a food preparation space. Is the kitchen a chemistry lab in which raw materials and precise technique can produce a desired final product? Or is the kitchen an artistic space in which to manipulate and transform ingredients into an edible expression of creativity? Thus, by providing instructions and advice, a cookbook can mediate the reader’s experience with food and the activity of cooking.

The Settlement Cookbook is one example of a cookbook meant to instruct and persuade. To explain how this could be accomplished, I will first present the cookbook and outline its contents, discussing tone, organization and style. I will briefly describe the time and place in history when the cookbook was produced. The cookbook was produced by a particular group of people, for a specific audience. I will introduce the cookbook authors and discuss the intended readership, as well as explain the change in attitudes and behaviors the authors hoped the cookbook would encourage the target audience to adopt.

• • •

Introducing The Settlement Cookbook

Authority and Precision in Design and Layout

The Settlement Cookbook was originally published in Milwaukee in 1901, under the title, “The Way to a Man’s Heart,” (Fritz, 44). The paperback facsimile edition of the 1903 reprint is 228 pages and measures about five inches wide and eight inches tall (see Appendix for a sample of pages). The 1903 edition features an art nouveau illustration of a woman in a flowing dress playing an ancient double recorder-type instrument surrounded by a flowering vine motif. Perhaps she’s one of the muses?

The book’s title is displayed in an old-fashioned, decorative font similar to gothic black letter-style calligraphy, while ‘“the Settlement” Cook Book’ is written in a thin, upright font that looks more contemporary compared with the calligraphy. “Milwaukee, Wis.” appears in the lower left, in a decorative art nouveau font with a swirling underline. Three different fonts and a large illustration fill the small space on the cover and the overall effect seems a little overdone to modern sensibilities. But could these design elements have suggested refinement to a 1903 Milwaukee audience?

Inside the book, the index outlines the content: Rules for the Household; Beverages; Bread; Kuchen (German, for “cake”); Mixtures with Baking Powder[1]; Fried Cakes; Cereals; Eggs and Omelets; Soups; Fish; Meat; Vegetables; Salads and Dressings; Entrees; and several more dessert sections – in all, ten chapters contain sweets – followed by Preserving and Pickling.

The contents are arranged in two columns of serif font with page numbers listed for each recipe. Chapter headings appear in capital letters with Roman numerals centered over the section’s recipe titles. The neat, formal layout suggests solemnity, orderliness and precision.

Following the index of the 25 chapters is the book’s reason for being: the “Course of instruction as given by “the Settlement” Cooking Classes.” The book was originally compiled as the textbook for cooking classes taught at The Settlement, a settlement house in Milwaukee, a topic to be explored later in this examination. Some of the book’s authoritative tone can likely be attributed to this use as an instructional text for teaching young women to cook in a formal setting.

Tone, Audience, and Implications

The cookbook’s title, “The Way to a Man’s Heart,” does not explicitly speak to this use as the text for a formal cooking class, however. Feminist scholarship has generated commentary on the book’s title[2] and close scrutiny of this and other similarly titled culinary manuals is outside the scope of this examination. I would, however, point out that the title indicates several assumptions about the cookbook’s readership: First, it suggests that the reader is a woman and that this female reader is not cooking for herself, but rather, for a man. It also implies that culinary skill is necessary to attain and maintain the goal of a happy man. If proper skill and attention are applied, her cooking will win her favor with the man for whom she cooks, and this manual can tell her how to do it.

The Settlement Cookbook provides just that sort of authoritative instruction, in a scientific manner. The book begins with “rules for the household” (Kander and Schoenfeld, 1) and presents a classification scheme of different types of foods and their relative values, according to the nutritional wisdom of the times. These values are presented as figures calculated to a tenth decimal point and arranged in columns, further emphasizing the exacting, scientific foundation. “It has often been claimed that an egg was equal to a pound of beef in nutrition. Such is not the case,” the text states.

Disputing common wisdom may have helped frame the advice in this cookbook as the latest in scientific knowledge.

Detailed instructions for a variety of household activities, such as setting the table, placing and removing dishes, waiting on the table, washing dishes, building a fire, and dusting a room describe the appropriate equipment and tools to use and how to approach and complete the task. By providing specific instructions for tasks that otherwise might be presumed to be “common knowledge” hints at the author’s opinion of the audience: The audience did not possess this knowledge and did, in fact, require proper training.

Many sections of the cookbook preface the recipes with “general rules” sections. For example, the bread chapter explains how to properly store flour, yeast, and the bread itself and describes the activities of yeast in relation to leavening bread dough. For example, a basic bread dough recipe begins the chapter, and variations follow it, describing how to use the dough to make twisted loaves, bread sticks, rye bread and brown bread (Kander and Schoenfeld, 16). This arrangement suggests that the book offers thorough instruction. Armed with the basic knowledge of how to make bread, and with suggestions for applying bread-making knowledge to similar preparations such as biscuits, gingerbread and breadsticks, the novice cook can quickly become an expert. Further, it subtly encourages the reader, implying that the skill can be mastered – simply build from that foundation.

•••

Judaism and Food Culture

Spirituality and Social Connections

It is necessary to depart briefly from discussing the cookbook itself to provide additional context for the attitudes about food and cooking among the Jewish creators of The Settlement Cookbook, and those Jewish immigrants who were among its target audience.

First, it is important to acknowledge the sacred place food occupied in the Jewish faith. Consuming food as part of ritual was (and remains) essential in Jewish tradition, and food is strongly associated with spiritual and cultural identity. Dietary laws, or kashruth, represent a pact the followers entered into with God, and these ways of eating reflected a particular understanding of the order of nature as God’s creation (Solar, 49). Further, the term “food-joy” is meant to underscore the sacredness of eating and its connection to religious practice. Obeying the laws transformed mealtime into a sacrament (Ziegelman, 119).

Traditionally, women were responsible for the culinary aspects of religious custom and maintaining a kosher home. Examining such issues as the division of domestic labor along gender lines, and the fine points of culinary ritual in Jewish religious practice are outside the scope of this commentary. Rather, it should be noted that feeding the family was a particularly valued contribution because of the elevated role food played in religious practice and cultural identity.

For the traditional Jewish homemaker, food was an expression of faith and a means of connection to a cultural and historical past. Knowledge of food preparation and expertise in Jewish food laws were passed from mother to daughter, an exchange transacted over the course of a girl’s childhood and transition into young adulthood. The young woman learned by helping, gradually absorbing quantities of food knowledge which she would employ when she married and began to manage her own household (Ziegelman, 95-7). The knowledge, passed orally from the older generation to the younger one, is an example of strengthening the social bond through language. David Graeber writes in his essay, “Exchange,” about the hierarchical relationships between parents and children, among others (222). The act of giving and receiving bonds the two individuals together.

Reform Judaism departs from traditional Orthodox practice in ways that can inform one’s understanding of The Settlement Cookbook. Briefly, Reform Judaism originates with an eighteenth century German movement called the Haskala.[3] Followers engaged with secular society to a greater extent than traditional Jewish communities and gradually adopted secular social practices. Food practices also relaxed, and individual cooks retained some food traditions and rejected others (Ziegelman, 95-7).

Defining and interpreting kosher cuisine is nuanced and complex, and many devote lifetimes to studying the subject. At the time, some in the Reform movement offered an explanation for relaxing the rules. Bertha Kramer, author of the 1880s Reform Jewish cookbook, “Aunt Babette’s,[4].” explains her perspective on kosher and treyf this way; “nothing is trefa that is healthy and clean,” (Ziegelman, 95-7). Through Aunt Babette, an authority with decades of culinary experience, the cookbook offers “modern-thinking” cooks permission to dispense with traditional practices. However, for those who maintained Orthodox traditions, The Settlement Cookbook represented a departure from the familiar and acceptable. Like Aunt Babette’s, The Settlement Cookbook includes a variety of “treyf” or impure foods such as lobster, shrimp and oysters, that fall outside the culinary guidelines of traditional Jewish practice.

• • •

The Authors and The Milwaukee Jewish Community in 1901

Elizabeth “Lizzie” Black Kander and The Settlement Cookbook co-author Fannie Greenbaum Schoenfeld were Milwaukee residents of German Jewish heritage. They were followers of Reform Judaism, and this affiliation helped to inform their food traditions and social reform work, (Fritz, 38). As middle-class women who associated with non-Jewish others, they, and others like them, defined their faith on ethical and religious concepts, rather than ceremonial practices that might distance them from wider society (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 80).

Scholarship suggests that women such as Kander and Schoenfeld identified as members of an elite society. Kander’s husband Simon Kander was a businessman and served in state government (Fritz, 38). For these women, their choice of cuisine reflected their refinement and status; by recommending others adopt their habits, they invite the reader to become a member of their ranks (Bower, 144). The Settlement Cookbook combines both traditional and treyf recipes, along with German recipes which would have appealed to the Milwaukee community at large.

Relying on a Network

Publishing and Connections

Though the Settlement Cookbook is sometimes cited as an example of a highly successful charity cookbook, Kander’s purposes for publishing were educational, first. High school students comprised the majority of her cooking class students and they fit lessons in after school. Copying each lesson was a lengthy process that took time away from actual cooking, so Kander and fellow settlement worker Schoenfeld sought to publish the lessons and recipes as a convenience for the students, first, (and a saleable product second). Famously, The Settlement executive board declined to contribute the printing costs, so the women and their publisher sought alternatives (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 97).

By selling advertisements to businesses within the German-Jewish community (Fritz, 44), Kander used her authority to recommended to her audience the goods and services of this select group of merchants. Many of these merchants would have been among her social circle, due to her husband’s business and political connections. In Alexander Galloway’s essay “Networks,” he defines people engaged in a market economy as a network (283). Kander’s recommendation to patronize the sponsors of The Settlement Cookbook can be understood as an invitation for readers to join the community (Bower, 144), and follow its norms.

The Settlement cookbook was not a “come as you are” invitation. Lizzie Kander’s statements to fellow women’s club members reflected genuine concern for the living conditions of Milwaukee’s Jewish ghetto, which at the time was inhabited by Russian and Polish immigrants (Fritz, 41). When calling for Americanization efforts among the immigrant Jewish community, however, Kander is quoted, “… not alone for their own sake and for that of humanity, but for the reputation of our own nationality. Their misdeeds reflect directly on us and every one of us, individually, ought to do all in his power to help lay the foundation of good citizenship in them,” (Fritz, 43).

Kander’s concern for maintaining the social status of German Jews in Milwaukee and avoiding anti-Semitism seemed to take on a paternalistic tenor.

•••

Domestic Science Foundations

Precision Instruction

The precedence for scientific precision and some of the preachy instruction in cookbooks can be attributed to domestic science and home economics. The domestic science field, newly emerging at the time, took cues from an elevation of the feminine, self-sacrificing role, termed the “cult of domesticity,”[5] (Dorfman, 3). According to the principles of domestic science, the home was a woman’s laboratory and she approached her tasks with scientific methods, applying chemistry, sanitation, dietetics and physiology.

A scientific laboratory was not a space with which very many American women would have been familiar. Vito Acconci observed that because it appeared in the home as furniture, the television acculturated the average American consumer to sophisticated technology (372). Similarly, one could understand that science, translated into the familiar methods and processes of household tasks reframed the latest developments for the homemaker. Advice manuals of the time, such as “Treatise on Domestic Economy,” by Catherine Beecher supported such an approach to household work by addressing topics such as kitchen functionality and organization as well as managing household staff (Dorfman, 3-4).

Cookbooks of the time, including The Settlement Cookbook, adopted this domestic science perspective and its unimpeachable scientific authority. As previously mentioned, classification tables such as the “composition of bread” break down a common food into technical components: Protieds 9%, Fats 2%, Mineral Matter 1%, Water 32% and Carbohydrate 56% (Kander, 15). Scientific precision is further supported with guidelines for measuring, setting the table, and clearing up after dinner (Kander, 5), as well as through defining terms and ingredients.

Advice Literature’s Influence

Cookbooks can be understood as a branch of advice literature. Such documents and the wisdom they contained were directed at middle and lower classes, presuming that readers among those groups were striving to rise socially. Correspondingly, advice literature authors believed in a trickle-down system of behavior modification. They presumed that their guidance would eventually reach its true target audience, the lower classes, by first influencing the middle class. If the middle class would adopt the correct habits and sensibilities that are the foundations of ideal home life, the authors believed the lower classes would emulate the habits of their social superiors in hopes of improving their own situation, (Dorfman, 4). The drive to assimilate is strong and in their essay on consumer culture, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer quote Tocqueville, commenting on the social pressure of conformity:

‘“Tyranny leaves the body free and directs its attack at the soul. The ruler no longer says: you must think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do; your life, your property, everything shall remain yours, but from this day on you are a stranger among us.” Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually – to be “self-employed.” When the outsider is excluded from the concern, he can only too easily be accused of incompetence,’ (11).

What Was American and Milwaukee Like in 1901?

What Was Happening?

To better understand the social environment of Milwaukee at the turn of the twentieth century, acknowledging a few world events may provide some perspective. A financial panic in the 1890s created an economic downturn with a long, slow recovery (Kimball, 13). The Alaska gold rush, workforce strikes, conflicts with Native Americans, the Spanish-American War and Boer War and the Dreyfus affair[6], would have occupied newspaper headlines around the time. Steamships made transatlantic crossings faster, and immigration surged in the late 1890s (Kimball, 151).

Immigrants and the Settlement Movement

Immigrants arriving on those transatlantic steamships found a unique resource upon arriving in large American cities such as Milwaukee. The settlement house movement combined aspects of advice literature, domestic science, and philanthropic outreach in an effort to assist and Americanize recent immigrants. Founded in 1900, “The Settlement” in Milwaukee joined a tradition of social aid that began in Britain in the 1850s and carried on at organizations such as Hull House in Chicago and the Neighborhood Guild on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (Ziegelman, 160). Such philanthropy can be understood as another example of unequal exchange between humans of unequal social status, as in David Graeber’s essay, “Exchange.” Philanthropy would have been seen as benefiting both the charitable giver and those who received the charity. The settlement house mediated the interaction between these two groups while preserving the social stratification (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 96).

Among their services, settlement houses offered kindergartens, gymnasiums, reading rooms, and vocational training for women. Classes in literature and the arts offered “refinements” while English classes, civics and American history courses were available to acculturate the foreign-born. Cooking classes offered settlement workers another way to Americanize the newly arrived immigrants and “improve” their culinary practices (Ziegelman, 160). To the contemporary observer, the paternalistic tone of such “improvements” may sound judgmental and intolerant of others’ values, but it should be noted that many of the services settlement houses offered were actually used by immigrant populations.

Kander’s cooking class at The Settlement reflected the wider trend of introducing immigrants to standard American cuisine. Generally, these cooking classes taught plain, simple American foods such as soups, roasts, fish, breads and desserts, echoing the mainstream culinary preferences of the cooking class instructors. However, settlement houses such as Milwaukee’s that served Jewish populations adapted the cooking classes to kosher laws at the request of their students. A New York city settlement worker is quoted as saying “There are some kosher laws that have to be followed, else the teaching would go no further than the classroom and would never show practical results,” (Ziegelman, 160). However, because of the strong tradition of oral learning associated with Jewish food and culinary traditions, cooking classes were not universally successful ventures for settlement houses: Jewish homemakers felt they already knew how to cook (Ziegelman, 160).

By the 1890s, Russian Jews comprised 39 percent of the Jewish population of the city, which was of predominantly German ancestry(Fritz, 38). The German Jewish community was comprised of primarily artisans and merchants. Polish Jews also arrived in greater numbers during the late 1890s (Fritz, 42). Conditions in the enclaves were grim (Fritz, 41) and Kander saw her mission of outreach as twofold. In addition to the humanitarian aspect, she cautioned, when addressing her social club peers, “We must be careful lest history again repeats itself and the outcome of t all these religious wars, again, culminate in the persecution of the Jews,” (Fritz, 43).

Kander’s mission included a number of services for immigrants including a bathhouse and educational outreach, all designed to encourage American habits and standards of living.

Perhaps the American public school wielded stronger influence than any of these efforts, though, because members of immigrants own families – their children – demanded the change. From the authoritative position of educators, the public school was able to modify attitudes and behaviors through modeling and conformity. Public schools nation-wide incorporated cooking classes similar to those Kander taught at The Settlement as part of home economics programs, with the expectation that students would share their knowledge with their families.

Kander was instrumental in establishing vocational education for girls in the Milwaukee Public Schools, and the program also spun off “American” housekeeping extension courses for women (Fritz, 49). The typical public school home economics courses were based on the domestic science approach using model home kitchens, and resembled the formal programs taught at universities. To reinforce the culinary lessons, home economics teachers visited their pupils at home. School lunches acculturated immigrant children to American foods, and aimed to steer them away from foods judged less desirable by nutrition experts of the day (Ziegelman, 160).

•••

Conclusion

The Settlement Cookbook encouraged assimilation by projecting a vision of refinement and sophistication through the social status of its prominent authors. It’s impossible to gauge precisely how significantly the cookbook and cooking classes changed the food habits of immigrant populations in Milwaukee, but we can say that cookbooks do wield persuasive power, even if the change takes generations. Immigrants used food as a medium of expression. It helped them define who they were, and how they wanted others to see them. Their relationship with food evolved, depending on context and conditions, and future generations carry forward some of those traditions, reshaping them and adapting.

“The language of food, like any expressive medium is never fixed, but perpetually a work in progress” (Ziegelman, 82).

•••

References

Acconci, Vito, “Television, Furniture & Sculpture: The Room with the American View, 1984.” 20_21 Collection. Gloria Moure, ed. Barcelona. 2001. pp. 371-377.

Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Andy Blunden, translation, 1998. www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm

Bower, Anne, “Our Sisters’ Recipes: Exploring “Community” in a Community Cookbook.” The Journal of Popular Culture. 1997. Vol. 31(3), pp. 137-151.

Dorfman, Cindy. “The Garden of Eating: The Carnal Kitchen in Contemporary American Culture.” Feminist Issues (Spring): 21–38. 1992.

Galloway, Alexander R., “Networks.”Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2010. 280-296. Print.

Graeber, David. “Exchange.” Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2010. 218-32. Print.

Fritz, Angela. “Lizzie Black Kander & Culinary Reform in Milwaukee 1880-1920,” The Wisconsin Magazine of History, (Spring 2004), pp. 36-49.

Kander, Mrs. Simon and Mrs. Henry Schoenfeld. The Settlement Cookbook. Milwaukee, The Settlement. 1903. Print.

Kimball, Chris. Fannie’s Last Supper. Hyperion. 2010. Print.

Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, “Kitchen Judaism,” Getting Comfortable in New York, The American Jewish Home, 1880-1950. Braunstein, Susan L. and Jenna Weissman Joselit, eds. New York: The Jewish Museum, 1990, pp. 75-105.

Kittler, Frederich A., “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter.” Stanford University Press, Stanford. 1999. Print.

Mitchell, W.J.T. and Mark B.N. Hansen. Introduction. Critical Terms for Media Studies. Eds. W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark B.N. Hansen. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2010. vii-xxii. Print.

[1] Baking powder, a mixture of baking soda and cream of tartar, would have been a fairly recent culinary development at the time The Settlement Cookbook was published. The mixture has been refined and improved since its invention (Kimball, 194).

[2] The cookbook was published under its original title, “The Way to a Man’s Heart,” well into the 1960s (Dorfman, 9), after which time, this became its subtitle and the book became known as “The Settlement Cookbook.”

[3] In addition to seeking a secular German language education for Jewish school children, Jewish followers of the Haskala movement kept their shops open for business on the Sabbath, men shaved their beards and women discarded traditional head coverings. Congregations also adapted some practices of Christian churches such as black robes for clergy and organs and choirs in the synagogue, (Ziegelman, 95-7).

[4] Kander was not the first Jewish cookbook author to depart from traditional recipes and she may have taken her cues from an earlier cookbook. A cookbook published as “Aunt Babette’s” was originally compiled as a family recipe compilation from Mrs. Bertha Kramer to her daughter (Braunstein and Weissman, 78). Published in 1889 “for young Jewish homemakers of the most modern-thinking sort,” (Ziegelman, 97) it is one of the first Jewish cookbooks to include a variety of treyf foods such as wild game, pork, shellfish, blood, and recipes that mix meat and dairy, along with traditional Jewish dishes, matzoh recipes, gefilte fish, and foods specific to Jewish holidays.

[5] Beginning in the 1850s, women were regarded as the moral strength of society, responsible for channeling their gentle, nurturing instincts toward raising good, productive citizens (Dorfman, 3).

[6] A Jewish man in the French military, Albert Dreyfus, was accused of treason and exiled to a penal colony, then later acquitted. Emile Zola’s open letter to the French president, “J’accuse,” charged the government with anti-Semitism. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_affair#.C3.89mile_Zola.27s_open_letter)

Friday, May 13, 2011

Reflection on the contrasts between working in Prezi and working on papers

I think the biggest difference between planning a paper and planning the prezi was the crazy drawing and scribbling it took to organize the prezi.

I started with a list of the documents and ideas I wanted to include in the prezi. Then I tagged the documents in my list according to applicable themes, to see how I could arrange them. Chronological didn’t seem appropriate, because the themes didn’t flow linearly and that arrangement would mean bouncing between the themes. Some of the documents drew on more than one of the themes, so I redrew the arrangement to try to group the documents close to the themes I would be calling out in the text.

My husband peered over my shoulder when I had the prezi screen zoomed all the way out and open to the “path” function and said it looked like modern art. I agree. The order of my presentation looked like a big, messy spider web.

One tries to make a paper flow from one thought to the next, very efficiently progressing in a single direction. Prezi seems to encourage the user to discard the linear thinking we often associate with persuasive presentations (and the PowerPoint/sales pitch organization strategy) and makes it OK to revisit a screen or text block. For me, that was a new way to think about conveying information.

Had I not had “permission” to bounce from one era to another because I was approaching the ideas instead of the dates of the documents, I would have arranged the presentation differently. I would have probably focused on chronological organization, and tried to lead the viewer through it from that perspective, instead, even if it didn’t make the recurring themes as obvious.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Final Project

Please visit the link to view my Prezi, "Personal and Published Culinary Documents."

I've posted a list of my sources below for reference, should anyone be interested in some light, tasty reading over the summer.

enjoy,
-Kim