Bloch Publishing Company - Notable Books

Notable Books

Bloch Publishing has published a wide variety of books of Jewish interest including such classics as A Book of Jewish Thoughts by Rabbi Joseph Hertz; Peony by Pearl S. Buck; Joseph Klausner’s Jesus of Nazareth; and Hugo Bettauer’s The City Without Jews.

Bloch Publishing is noted for a series of long-running Jewish cookbooks that were highly influential in the development of American-Jewish cuisine. “Aunt Babette’s” Cook Book was first published in 1889 and was the first truly successful American Jewish cookbook. Along with traditional Jewish recipes, it also contained an extensive selection of recipes for treif (non-Kosher) ingredients such as pork, oysters, and shellfish, and in this and other ways reflected its roots in the assimilationist tendencies of the 19th-century Reform Jewish movement. After many years of success, in 1918, Bloch replaced “Aunt Babette’s” Cook Book with a more Kosher-observant successor, Florence Kreisler Greenbaum’s The International Jewish Cook Book, authored by a Hunter College graduate; Bloch billed it (not quite accurately) as “the first strictly kosher cook book ever published in English in this country.” In 1941, Mrs. Greenbaum’s book was replaced by a more modern, expanded volume, The Jewish Cook Book, written by Mildred Grosberg Bellin, a Smith College graduate who had already written a successful, smaller menu planner/cookbook for Bloch called Modern Jewish Meals. Bellin’s encyclopedic, 3,000-recipe cookbook was most recently revised and reissued in 1983 as The Original Jewish Cookbook and it remains available from Bloch.