robm on May 17, 2020

This is more of a curiosity than a useful cookbook. It will give you an idea of the dishes eaten in American Jewish households in the 1870s, but Mrs. Levy is not a great cookbook writer. Many of the "recipes" are really her own personal memory-joggers and not complete instructions for preparing a dish. Ingredients and key steps are missing in many of the recipes, so unless you can find versions of them in other books from the period there is no way to reproduce them at home. Still, it's interesting. One surprise is that, as in British cookbooks from this period, lots of strong spices are used in savory dishes: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, ginger, pepper, curry powder, and cayenne! By the end of the century seasonings had toned down considerably. I'm not clear what caused that shift in tastes, but by the time many of our own grandparents were born food was much blander. Or, shall we say, more subtly spiced?