Roberta Saltzman shopped a lot on eBay. Often, her purchases fit into one narrow category: Jewish cookbooks, the more obscure, the better. Never mind that Saltzman, who died in 2013, was by all accounts not that interested in cooking. Over the years, she accumulated 700 Jewish cookbooks, with a particular focus on community cookbooks from small-town America. Despite being chief assistant librarian at the New York Public Library’s Dorot Jewish Division, Saltzman used her own money to build her collection, which she donated to her workplace before her death. Now, at more than 2,500 books, the collection is likely the largest in existence, drawing researchers from around the world.
That number of books is something of a lowball estimate, says Dorot Jewish Division research librarian Amanda Seigel. She admits that she doesn’t know whether the collection is the world’s largest or not, since many other Judaica collections around the world also own flourishing cookbook collections. But the entire Dorot library, cookbooks and all, is one of the largest Judaica collections on the planet, at a quarter-million items.
While the Dorot Jewish Division continues to acquire new culinary material, the process is slower without Saltzman at the helm. “It’s really her collection,” says Seigel. While newly published Jewish cookbooks are constantly being added to the shelves, Saltzman’s interest in regional, often community-made cookbooks made her acquisitions unique. Choice examples include The Bah-Haimisha Cookbook, put out by a congregation in the Bahamas in 1960, as well as Blast Off With Blintzes from the Sequoia Chapter of Hadassah in Palo Alto, California. The collection’s range, though, stretches far beyond the Americas. “We have cookbooks from Switzerland, from Panama, from Venezuela, [and] from the Philippines,” Seigel rhapsodizes.
But the collection isn’t just humble, comb-spined community cookbooks. There are lavishly decorated tomes, such as Die Israelitische Küche, published in Germany around 1910, as well as flimsy marketing pamphlets with recipes sent out by big brands interested in catching the eye of mid-century Jewish housewives. One such booklet, by the Crisco shortening company, has recipes for Southern-fried chicken and macaroni salad, printed in both the Hebrew alphabet and English. Saltzman herself donated one eyebrow-raiser, 25 Unorthodox Things To Do With A Hebrew National Salami.
Despite their diversity, Seigel says that Jewish cookbooks are nevertheless a single genre due to religious observances and customs, especially cookbooks focused on holidays. “During most Jewish holidays—not all, but during most—there are categories of work that are religiously prohibited,” she says. “For example, lighting a fire. So a lot of these recipes were developed to cook very slowly and safely or to be kept warm over a flame.”