Jewish Invention Myths: The Cafeteria
Kathryn Bernheimer over at ‘Boulder Jewish News’ has claimed that jews invented the Cafeteria (1) but I am unable to find any actual evidence to support that contention so as is my way: I went off to figure out on what basis Bernheimer probably made this claim.
What I came up with is the fact a Helen S. Mosher is credited by a couple of different journalists with creating the term ‘Cafeteria’ in May 1905 as applied to a dining experience/style of restaurant.
For example, Charles Perry claimed in the ‘Los Angeles Times’ in 2003 that:
‘The cafeteria craze started in May 1905, when a woman named Helen Mosher opened a humble downtown L.A. restaurant where people chose their food at a long counter and carried their own trays to their tables. Using the slogans “Food That Can Be Seen” and “No Tips,” she called it the Cafeteria.
The idea of a self-service restaurant was in the air; restaurateurs had been moving toward it for more than a decade. There had been experiments in Eastern cities with smorgasbord service, where you filled one plate at a counter, paid and took it to your table. In 1898, the Childs restaurants in New York took the crucial step of letting you slide a tray along on rails so you could load it up with several plates at a time.
The word “cafeteria” wasn’t first used in Los Angeles (in 1893 a man named John Kruger had opened a place in Chicago modeled on European smorgasbords and called it the Cafeteria), but it was tailor-made for L.A. In 1905, all things Latino seemed long ago and far away around here. They conjured up dreams of California’s romantic past: the Mission Days, the fabled Days of the Dons! Hard though it may be to imagine now, Mosher might have chosen the name “cafeteria” because it sounded ... colorful. In any case, the cafeteria phenomenon that swept the country in the ‘20s was acknowledged to come from California, not New York or Chicago.’ (2)
Unfortunately, this is a bunch of nonsense sandwiched – pun intended – between a few facts.
In the first instance Helen Mosher wasn’t the first California caterer to use the cafeteria model and nor was she responsible for its spread from California – which is a contested position not widely ‘acknowledged’ – and the likely candidate if it does come from California is in fact the Stillwell family and chain of cafeteria style restaurants and nothing to do with Helen Mosher (who they may even predate). (3)
In the second instance Perry deliberately plays down the fact that John Kruger quite literally invented the cafeteria – both the name as applied to a restaurant and the restaurant concept – in Chicago in 1893.
As ‘Cuisine Net’ explains:
‘At the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, John Kruger opens a self-service restaurant based on the idea of the Swedish smorgasbord. He chooses to call it a cafeteria (the Spanish word for coffee shop).’ (4)
To summarize: Kruger came up with the name (Mosher didn’t), he came up with the concept (Mosher didn’t) and we even know where he got the idea of the cafeteria from (Swedish culture; probably from local immigrants from Sweden).
Nor was the cafeteria tray – which Perry tries to imply was really Mosher’s invention – anything to do with Mosher but rather the invention of William and Samuel Childs in 1898 in New York City (5) which then formed the basis for their massively successful – peaking in the 1920s and 1930s – chain of cafeteria style restaurants. (6)
Thirdly Bernheimer seems to have (falsely) assumed that Helen Mosher was jewish probably because Mosher looks an awful like the jewish surname and first name Moshe, so Bernheimer presumably thought ‘Mosher’ was an Anglicization of ‘Moshe’.
This also isn’t true because we find records of non-jewish ‘Moshers’ at the time (7) but the name ‘Mosher’ isn’t jewish, but rather is French-Burgundian name of rather ancient pedigree (8) and could also be a variant of the English surname ‘Moger’ from the county of Lancashire. (9)
So, despise Bernheimer’s assumptions the origins of the cafeteria are exclusively non-jewish and northern European!
References
(1) https://boulderjewishnews.org/2009/an-informal-list-of-jewish-inventions-innovations-and-radical-ideas/
(2) https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-nov-05-fo-cafeteria5-story.html
(3) https://homesteadmuseum.blog/2021/01/27/from-the-homestead-kitchen-the-cafeteria-craze-of-los-angeles-part-1/
(4) https://web.archive.org/web/20000418023908/http://www.cuisinenet.com/digest/custom/restaurant/timeline.shtml
(5) Ibid.; https://web.archive.org/web/20080508160846/http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3190/is_nSPEISS_v30/ai_18091875
(6) https://www.nytimes.com/1943/08/29/archives/childs-companys-ups-and-downs-touch-eating-and-investing-public.html
(7) For example: https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1011002196
(8) https://www.houseofnames.com/mosher-family-crest/
(9) https://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=mosher