A burst of nostalgic interest on social media in an old-fashioned sweet treat named ‘stuffed monkey’ has had me looking at the life and work of Florence Greenberg.
The Jewish Chronicle’s stalwart food columnist for 40 years is said to have devised and home-tested on a tiny domestic cooker more recipes in her astoundingly long and varied career than mere mortals dish up complete hot dinners in an average lifetime.
The London-born daughter of well-heeled Dutch immigrants, the former Florence Oppenheimer is also remembered as the wife of JC editor, Leopold Jacob Greenberg, whom she credited with kick-starting her work as a professional Jewish food expert.
Many of her readers would have been unaware that despite her father’s misgivings, Greenberg first became a nurse aboard military hospital ships in the Middle East during the Great War and was mentioned in dispatches. Then, barely 20 years later, came a job as a Ministry of Food lecturer in rationing and dietetics for the duration of World War 2.
At her career’s height, only two percent of British people owned a fridge and Anglo-Jewish women routinely soaked and salted raw meat before cooking it, with the idea of pre-koshered, packaged, shrink-wrapped goods being mere fantasy.
But as most of her generation and class were home-based wives and mothers, Greenberg’s burgeoning fan club would never have considered that she was ‘L J’s‘ second wife and that Ivan Greenberg, his immediate successor as editor, was her step-son.
Further, it appears that she had no children herself. This, at a time of continuing social pressure to produce children, must have been due in part to her being aged in her 30s when she was introduced to ‘L J’ only after returning home from military nursing duties in 1919.
So, as has been written about the late Anglo-American Catholic journalist Brenda Maddox, who also reared step-children when it was still an unspoken topic, Greenberg “couldn’t have had a harder job”.
For sure, in the era of feeding ‘stuffed shirts’ large helpings of ‘stuffed monkey’ this was how another fairytale of an evil step-mother may have been born.
Instead, I end by giving you Florence Greenberg: not simply a traditional if expert Jewish cook and model wife, but five-star best-selling food writer, nurse, dietician – and step-mother.
** Jewish Cookery, by Florence Greenberg Paperback – July 1, 1967. First published in 1947 by The Jewish Chronicle is still available on Amazon.
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