Maxwell House promotional Haggadot

Between 1880 and 1914, some two million Yiddish-speaking Jews immigrated to the United States from Eastern and Central Europe. Most made their new homes in urban enclaves, where they attempted to recreate much of the Old World food tradition – even while partaking of the new and exotic ingredients (bananas! squash! salmon! cream cheese!) offered by America. An 1899 survey of New York’s Lower East Side found more than 600 food purveyors within only a few square blocks, including 131 butcher shops, 36 bakeries, 10 delicatessens, 7 herring stands, 10 sausage shops, 20 soda-water stands, and 28 wine shops.

Jews also began to discover the pleasure of eating in restaurants; a new Yiddish word, oysesn (eating out) appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward in 1903. Restaurants such as Manny Wolf’s, the Café Royale, the Monopole, and Moskowitz & Lupowitz, and cafeterias such as the Garden Cafeteria, offered Jewish immigrants convenient and inexpensive meals that could be enjoyed while shmoozing with friends and neighbors and, in so doing, participating in the communal life of the city.

The millions of recent Jewish immigrants created a huge new consumer market that was quickly seized upon by food manufacturers.  Scores of products appeared with labels in both English and Yiddish, to catch the eye of the Jewish housewife as she did her shopping; some of them shown here include spice tins produced by the Streit, Horowitz-Margareten, and Hudson companies, and a salt box made by the venerable American company Morton. Probably the most successful marketing was done by the Maxwell House coffee company, which began producing Passover Haggadot in 1933. Shown here is a kit produced by Maxwell House for American grocery stores; it directs the stores to advertise and display the free Haggadot, and thereby promote the sales of Maxwell House coffee. Many large food companies issued free recipe books intended to familiarize Jewish housewives with the company and its products. The Hecker’s Flour company, for instance, produced a Yiddish-language brochure with recipes for traditional Jewish foods such as challah, knishes, and honey cake; all the recipes called for the use of Heckers mel – Hecker’s flour. A somewhat later Yiddish-English recipe book produced by the Manischewitz Wine company similarly featured traditional Jewish foods – chremslach, kneydlach, matzo kugel – but now also included recipes for American fare like cream puffs (translated as the Yinglish kriem-pofs) and strawberry shortcake (stroberi shortkeik).