Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South. By Marcie Cohen Ferris. The University of North Carolina Press, 316 pages, $29.95.
Her mother wouldn’t let a country ham past the back door. A pork roast was out of the question. But prepackaged sliced ham, the kind that someone could mistake for turkey or chicken, was eaten at home.
In her new book, Matzoh Ball Gumbo: Culinary Tales of the Jewish South, Marcie Cohen Ferris, an assistant professor of American studies at Carolina, explains that many Reform Jews in the South followed a “Southernized kashrut” so they could “enjoy forbidden foods with a minimal sense of guilt.”
Ferris says that exploring foodways—the places where food and culture intersect—reveals how people came to terms with being Jewish in a land where pork barbecue is king. Some families kept strictly kosher, taking pains to order food by mail, telephone, or internet. Others gradually ignored the rules and embraced Southern food.
Long before her academic career began, Ferris discovered her interest in food when she inherited her grandmother’s recipe box. Looking through the recipes, she says, is like seeing her grandmother’s “culinary journey from Russia to New York to Arkansas.” Ferris says, “It was fascinating to see the connections between women in her life, both Jewish and Gentile. She moved between concentric circles of community and we ate in all those worlds.”
Ferris uses food as a way to explain the Southern Jewish experience. “The most tangible way to understand Jewish history and culture in the South is at the dinner table,” she writes. Southern Jews defined their regional and religious identities by mixing local flavors and spices with traditional foods. In the recipes scattered throughout the book, matzoh balls are spiced with Creole flavors and served with chicken gumbo, while matzoh crackers are blended into a Passover-time apple pudding. But, Ferris adds, “Often Jewish cooks in the South modified traditional dishes so they wouldn’t appear too Jewish or too ethnic.”
From Memphis to Mississippi, regional differences have shaped Southern food. Ferris faced a challenge when deciding on a gumbo recipe for the book. Recipes usually call for shrimp, crab, sausage, or ham, but Ferris says, “I wanted a gumbo that all Jews could enjoy, even the most observant.” She consulted with a variety of cooks from different places and ascribing to different styles and faiths—Creole and Cajun, Catholic and Jewish, Louisiana and Mississippi—before choosing Chicken and Sausage Gumbo. Ferris writes, “If you keep kosher, make the gumbo with kosher smoked beef sausage or knockwurst.”
Woven into stories of Southern Jews are stories of the Gentile friends and neighbors who swapped recipes and cooked with Jewish women. “Southern women pride themselves on being good bakers,” Ferris says. “There’s love that goes into making a cake.” Ferris’ favorite recipe, Rosh Hashanah Jam Cake, is a recipe from her mother’s Methodist friend, Julia Haralson, who always made the cake during the Christmas season. Ferris’ mother, Huddy Cohen, adopted the rich, deeply colored cake for Rosh Hashanah.
Working as domestic workers and cooks in Jewish households, African American women left an indelible mark on Jewish cooking. They introduced local spices and traditional Southern foods such as biscuits, grits, and corn bread to Jewish families. Even if the black housekeepers did most of the cooking, Ferris notes that Jewish community cookbooks from the South rarely mentioned their work—a sign of the era’s racial attitudes.
But, Ferris says, Jewish and African American women often bonded and exchanged recipes while cooking meals. “Since colonial times, they’ve shared an unlikely alliance as outsiders—Jews due to their religion and blacks due to their race,” she says.
Recipes that combined both Southern and Jewish cooking styles—sweet potato kugel, barbecue brisket, and Sabbath fried chicken—came out of the close interaction among Jews and African American women cooking in the kitchen. Ferris writes, “Relationships were embedded in the shared recipes and food that traveled between Jewish and African American homes.”
Marcie Cohen Ferris is also the associate director for the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies.