“Recipe for America: New York, Immigration, and American Identity through Culinary Culture” is a three-week school teacher institute for twenty-five participants on immigration, assimilation, and food culture in New York City in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The institute investigates immigration, cultural diffusion, and assimilation through a consideration of ethnic foodways, moving from early European immigration to recent experiences of African-American, Caribbean, Chinese, and Asian communities. The Institute is hosted by the New York Public Library (NYPL) and is presented in conjunction with a major NYPL exhibition about food in New York City, which draws from the Library’s extraordinary materials, including its unique cookbook and menu collections, as well as pamphlets and other ephemera. Throughout, the program addresses cultural traditions, the formation of ethnic neighborhoods, and interactions with the broad American culture. The directors argue that “[r]eligious belief, economic circumstances, geography, understandings of gender roles, and even technology can be understood through food.” The institute visits important sites related to immigration, including Ellis Island, the Lower East Side, and the Jackson Heights neighborhood in Queens. The large cast of visiting scholars includes Suzanne Wasserman (Gotham Center for New York City History), Hasia Diner (Judaic studies, New York University), Megan Elias (history, Queensborough Community College), Andrew Smith (food studies, New York University), Jane Ziegelman (independent scholar), and Edward O'Donnell (history, College of the Holy Cross). The reading list includes a general account of New York history, Gotham, by Mike Wallace and Edwin Burrows; Hungering for America, a major history of Italian, Irish, and Jewish immigrant foodways by visiting scholar Hasia Diner; Remaking the Mainstream, a book on contemporary immigration by Richard Alba and Victor Nee; and studies of immigration, food culture, and research methods by other scholars, including members of the institute faculty.
