The new exhibition at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, Chosen Food: Cuisine, Culture and American Jewish Identity, is not a full-course examination of what has traveled down the Jewish-American gullet. It is, rather, an appetizer plate, heaped with tantalizing tidbits. The visitor learns, for instance, that 86 percent of kosher-food consumers aren’t observant Jews; that, in 1935, at the request of a Georgia rabbi, Coca-Cola substituted cottonseed for beef tallow glycerin in its famous secret recipe; that when Iranian Jews immigrated to the United States, dried limes were so central to their cuisine they brought them in their pockets.
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