by Joel Denker

“I love Jewish food, but when you eat it,seventy-two hours later, you’re hungry again.”

This line, from the late New York Times writer Richard Shepard, mirthfully conveys the Jewish food experience, which I recount in my book, The World on a Plate: A Tour Through the History of America’s Ethnic Cuisine. This tradition is steeped in the “heartburn of nostalgia.” For me, learning about Jewish cooking gave me an insight into my father’s past.

My father, reared in Brownsville and the first in his family to go to college, was enthralled with the culinary monuments in mid-town Manhattan, far from his old immigrant Brooklyn neighborhood. He introduced me to Lindy’s, the Times Square delicatessen founded by Leo Lindemann, the son of a linen peddler who, at 14, apprenticed in a Berlin delicatessen. My father, who was also moving up, was excited by Lindy’s success
story.

He told me of the exploits of this impresario and his haven for gangsters, comics, and other denizens of The Great White Way. I lusted after the strawberry cheesecake displayed in the restaurant window.

I didn’t know then that these experiences would be the wellsprings of a future book. After many more forays into the ethnic food world, after meals of Indonesian gado gado, Trinidadian roti, and Hong Kong Singapore Noodle, I realized I had a story to tell.

“The Horse Started the Business”

I discovered stories aplenty of colorful merchants who left their imprint on our food. Charles Lubin, a Jewish baker in Chicago, named his cheese cake “Sara Lee” after his eight-year-old daughter because it sounded “wholesome and American.” In early twentieth-century New Orleans, Giuseppe Uddo, a Sicilian immigrant, drove a horse drawn cart carrying cans of tomato paste to sell to Italians farming outside the city. As his son Frank remembers it, this was the beginning of Progresso Foods: “The horse started the business.”

And there was the improbable saga of Jeno Paulucci, the son of a Minnesota miner, who created the Chun King Chinese food business. As I wrote The World on a Plate, I laughed along the way.
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