You have to remember that it is 1934. There are no frozen foods, you may be cooking on a gas or electric stove – or perhaps a modern coal stove. Refrigerators are a luxury. There are few kosher manufactured or processed foods and almost all recipes are made from scratch. Pea recipes start with “shell the peas”. Chicken is plucked, singed, drawn and trussed. And yet, here is a book full of interesting, simple and understandable recipes, many of which remind me of my grandmother’s cooking.
Florence Oppenheimer was born into a large Jewish family in London in 1882. She trained as a nurse from 1911 to 1914 and joined the Queen Alexandra Nurses Services Reserve, serving in the Middle East including Haifa Hospital, from 1915 to 1919. She was Mentioned in Dispatches for Gallipoli.
On returning to England, she married Leopold J. Greenberg, the Editor of the Jewish Chronicle, who encouraged her to write cookery articles for the paper. He died in 1931 and Florence, writing as “Mrs. L. J. Greenberg” wrote the Jewish Chronicle Cookery Book, which was published in 1934.
The printing plates were destroyed during the London blitz, and, now writing as “Florence Greenberg” she wrote a new cookery book, the famous one, which was published in 1947 and has been reprinted. But let us return to 1934. This is the original book. I have chosen a representative sample selection below which evokes the period of 90 years ago.
Jewish Miscellanies 