This chapter uses the rise and fall of a popular Passover cooking ingredient to explore the role of competing European folkways to determine the religious course of American Orthodox Judaism. In the first half of the twentieth century, traditional-leaning Jews happily used peanut oil in place of chicken fat, relying on the Lithuanian position that peanuts were not considered a “legume,” a category of foods that Ashkenazic Jewry traditionally withheld from during the Passover holiday, in addition to leaven breads. However, late-arriving Hungarian and Israeli folkways fought and triumphed over the Lithuanian foodway by the final decades of the 1900s. This is emblematic of a broader religious confrontation with American Judaism. The use of a variety of sources––responsa, economic, archival, and periodical literature––underscores the importance of “lived religion” and the usefulness of folkways and foodways to gain a fuller appreciation of religious history.
