MUSINGS: FINDING FOODWAYS, PART II.

Research Column | Casarina Hocevar

In my last post, I introduced my upcoming exhibition project, Storefront Stories, and shared a bit about my research into the historical Jewish foodways of Kensington Market. In today’s post, we shall delve into a small tidbit from the research.

Communal Ovens

Perhaps one of my favourite things I have learned in researching Kensington’s Jewish history is a small anecdote about the use of communal ovens. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, it was common practice in the shtetlekh - villages - of Eastern Europe to use communal ovens to prepare meals for Sabbath. One of my favourite historians of Jewish foodways, Hasia Diner, writes eloquently about the importance of food and food preparation in Jewish life, especially celebratory meals:

The Jewish calendar moved from holiday to holiday, from Sabbath to the six days of the work week, from one life cycle to another, along a food trajectory … The Sabbath meals, three of them…stood out from the weekly food cycle for their richness and elaborateness. …Memoirs of Jewish life in eastern Europe recalled chicken soup, roasted meat, gefillte fish, tcholent (a mixture of beans, meats, potatoes, other vegetables) cooked long and slow, usually in communal ovens, and cakes and fruits, as the embodiment of Jewish family and communal life. - Hasia Diner, Hungering for America, 155 - 156.

As noted in Diner’s quote, meals like tcholent were cooked in a communal oven. Tcholent, similar to a slow-simmering stew, often was cooked overnight to be ready for the lunch/midday meal during Sabbath.

While searching for photographs and information about family businesses in Kensington Market for the exhibition, our team came across the accession file to the Lottman family who ran a bakery at 172 Baldwin St from the 1920s to '40s (and later at 181 Baldwin St. until 1984). In this file there is a note that reads, “[the bakery] had a brick oven and on Friday nights women would bring their pots to keep the chollent warm for the Sa[b]bath.” This short and sweet note indicates to us continuity in Jewish foodways from Eastern Europe shtetlekh to the little Jewish Market in early Toronto: the community followed a weekly routine of observing Sabbath, and to facilitate this, one of the neighbourhood bakeries shared their oven for communal cooking.

Unfortunately, at this stage of our research, we have little evidence or information about whether other bakeries in the market also participated in this practice or which women (and families) would have visited the Lottman bakery to leave their chollent overnight. Nonetheless, small moments like this help illustrate to us some aspect of the market’s foodways: weekly routines (preparing for the Sabbath meals), types of food (tcholent/chollent), division of labour (communal and gendered) and the geography (Lottman’s as a site of communal food production).

A glimpse into the past

Below are two family images of the Lottman's bakery at 172 Baldwin St. In the first: the three women are identified as Sandy Shabinsky, Katie Lottman Grossman, Ruth Berman, in the second: Bella Tichberg and her cousin Henry. Katie Lottman Grossman was Sam Lottman's daughter, who was one of the founders and owners of the bakery, and Bella Tichberg is one of his granddaughters. Later family photos include interior shots from the Lottman bakery and their more industrial kitchen; unfortunately, though, we have no known existing photographs of the original Lottman oven used for communal cooking.

The Lottman family's bakery is one of the businesses to be featured in Storefront Stories.