One man’s search for the first Hebrew-lettered cookbook | Hacker News Reader

One man’s search for the first Hebrew-lettered cookbook

atlasobscura.com

36 pointsdrdee8 comments

The "soup made of fresh cherries" is probably meggyleves (pronounced "medge-levesh"). My family (Jews from the Pale) have a version of it, although I had a very hard time explaining it to a Hungarian friend (it had been corrupted into "meggy-lev-es" over the past 140 years.)

I like the reveal – I was wondering why the Yiddish of the book’s title seemed so weird!

No idea what you mean?

The Yiddish seems normal, the Hebrew on the other end is... Judeo-German (Hebrew-lettered German).

I meant regarding the title “Nayes folshtendiges kokhbukh fir die yidishe kikhe: Ayn unentberlikhes handbukh fir yidishe froyen und tokhter nebst forshrift fon flaysh kosher makhen und khale nemen, iberhoypt iber raynlikhkayt und kashrut”.

I started reading it assuming it was some non-standard transliteration of Yiddish, since it kind of looks like YIVO transliteration. And it wasn’t uncommon in those days to write Yiddish in a way that mimicked German orthography. But I couldn’t understand some of the words, which makes sense because it’s German and not Yiddish!

It's not quite German either. E.g. פֿרויען / froyen ("women") represents the Yiddish pronunciation, which would be rendered "Fräuen" in German orthography, while the Standard German cognate is "Frauen". So it seems to me like no attempt was made to represent the German pronunciation of the word and the familiar Yiddish spelling was retained instead. (Other features, like not distinguishing between German "i" and "ü" could perhaps be explained by Austro-Bavarian German also not distinguishing these.)

By the way, as a German speaker who can kind of read Yiddish except for Hebrew and Aramaic loanwords (i.e. kosher, khale and kashrut, though כשר was guessable from context), I'm curious which of the German words you couldn't understand.

I understood the gist from context, but unentberlikhes, nebst, and forshrift were not understandable to me. The Yiddish words are very different. I’m not a native speaker, I think a native speaker probably would have understood forshrift for example. The other two I doubt.

Hebrew script but not in Hebrew.

The first recipe in Hebrew would probably be Ezekiel 24(א) but it's all a metaphor for a badly behaved city (Jerusalem). Lots of dietary laws in there too, naturally, but also sitophilia:

  סמכוני באשישות רפדוני בתפוחים כי חולת אהבה אני (ב)

(א) 3 Thus saith the Lord God; Set on a pot, set it on, and also pour water into it: 4 Gather the pieces thereof into it, even every good piece, the thigh, and the shoulder; fill it with the choice bones. 5 Take the choice of the flock, and burn also the bones under it, and make it boil well, and let them seethe the bones of it therein.

(ב) Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples: for I am sick of love.

Thanks for posting this here! My maternal ancestry was part of the hapsburg empire and it’s possible one of my great great great grandmothers held a copy of this book. Passing this on to my family.

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