Give Us Seltzer, That We May Drink

Abstract

From Hippocrates to Hannibal to the Perrier bottle on a French bistro’s table, drinking seltzer may be as widespread in Western culinary history as eating bread. However, seltzer has had different meanings for various cultures and eras. Today’s New York Ashkenazi Jews, for example, see seltzer as a food icon—a comestible metaphor for their own assimilation and success. (After all, seltzer is the “Jewish Champagne.”) Unlike most Jewish food icons, however, which have some connection to the old world, seltzer seems to have become Jewish suddenly in New York around the 1880s. This article explores thirst as a motivating factor for seltzer’s adoption into Ashkenazi heritage. In the absence of anything provably Judaic about the beverage, this article hypothesizes that seltzer was accessioned into the Jewish gastronomic pantheon by circumstance. New York’s abundant, aqueduct-fed water supply, although completed in the 1840s, was not often tapped by immigrant inhabitants of tenement buildings. Instead, for decades tenement dwellers were forced to make do with the city’s scarce, polluted, or simply undrinkable natural resources. Meanwhile, the city’s popular seltzer industry had begun to adjust, plying seltzer toward poorer masses. Around the time of the Jews’ diaspora, seltzer became the cheapest it had ever been. With seltzer now attainable for poor immigrants, the industry became an ad hoc water infrastructure, ascending into ubiquity among Jewish New Yorkers. Once Jews assimilated into the dominant American culture, seltzer, no longer needed for hydration, became an icon for the Jewish dichotomy of remembering historical strife whilst celebrating abundance.