The World-Famous Ratner’s Meatless Cookbook was a cookbook of its times, aimed at Jewish families who practiced Kosher habits and did not want to compromise the heartiness of a meal by avoiding the use of meat in recipes where dairy is involved. The text would have also targeted another growing group: a new wave of vegetarians and pescatarians who were following the increase of plant based diets in the 1970s. With the Vilna Vegetarian Cookbook paving the way for other Jewish vegetarian cookbooks to follow in 1938, The World-Famous Ratner’s Meatless Cookbook undoubtedly provided a more contemporary take on plant-based recipes and diets. This book is a significant primary source because it provides direct insight into 1970’s food and surrounding culture, contextualizing the success of Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant and encapsulating the movement that created a market for this cookbook to succeed. The restaurant was “located in the heart of the ghetto… [catering] primarily to those who had fled Europe for the promises offered by the new world (in 1905). Serving quality food at reasonable prices… its meatless cuisine served as a model for other restaurants”. The cookbook discusses early New World settlers avoiding meat in their diets due to the expiration and expense of the food. Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant thus had an appealing market to tend to, whether it was due to Kosher tradition or financial strain.

Radical attitudes surrounding food in the later twentieth century were more accepting than the conservative attitudes during WWII and the Great Depression, and by 1971, Frances Moore Lappe’s influential cookbook Diet for a Small Planet was raising awareness for more eco-friendly and waste-reducing diets. Soon after, the American Vegan Society was formed, and by 1975, 1500 vegetarians met for the first time at the World Vegetarian Congress. These books, organizations and collectives were precursors to the development of a reliable market for The World-Famous Ratner’s Meatless Cookbook to succeed. Thus, this cookbook is a token of the times which contributed to its development, and it is representative of the vegetarian movement which prospered afterwards. It is one of the earliest books that appealed to a market beyond those who only followed a plant-based diet due to traditional Kosher restrictions. Though limited by the knowledge of the time, the cookbook shows awareness of the changing dynamic of diets, recognizing how diets had diversified over seven decades. At first, the meals served were traditional, “but the founder of Ratner’s predicted that tastes would change, that food based on blandness offered no lasting appeal. It had to be imaginative as well as delicious”. The introduction of the cookbook reminds the reader of its contemporary appeal: “America’s newly-founded preoccupation with ecology and health has, if anything, added to Ratner’s clientele. Young people, especially, have discovered the joys of meatless meals, fresh fish and green vegetables, a concept of dining pioneered by Ratner’s from the beginning”. The development of this cookbook must have been very exciting for those who visited Ratner’s Dairy Restaurant often and were nostalgic for traditional culture brought to their home tables, especially after their closing in 2002. Owning this book may have offered a feeling of sophistication, entwining international and traditional Jewish recipes with the increasing fad of plant-based diets of the 1970s.