Translating, Researching, Interpreting, and Cooking Recipes from the Alsatian-Jewish Community

What can a recipe tell us about the past? What questions does it evoke? My senior project explores three different recipes from the Jewish community in the Alsace region of France. I translated each recipe from French to English and then expanded on different questions, which I discovered as I crafted these translations, in the form of annotations. These annotations fall into three categories: historical, translation, and cooking. The three annotation types often converged when I was conducting my research. However, categorizing the annotations into three groups has helped me as I organized my interpreting processes, and is meant to help the reader to trace my discoveries more clearly. The historical annotations give the reader necessary background to understand certain cultural ideas, practices, and customs of Jews (and non-Jews) from this region. The translation annotations serve to translate different terms from French (and also German and Yiddish) to English but also to reflect on specific French cultural ideas and how they relate to their American cultural counterpart. The cooking annotations highlight and give clarity to unknown measurements or limited information about the cooking methods. I also included references and explanations of Jewish food law, known as kosher or kashrut, throughout all the annotations. In summary, this project focuses on an engaging and non-traditional way to research, share, and appreciate culture through a food lens.