The Ellis Island Immigrant Cookbook just published its 31st Anniversary Edition
Author Tom Bernardin was a former National Park Service ranger at pre-restoration Ellis Island. During his three seasons there, he had the privilege of giving countless tours of the crumbling immigration facility.
After leaving in 1981, he began presenting his lecture, “Ellis Island-The Golden Door” to senior citizen centers and religious and ethnic groups. He had the good fortune of meeting people who passed through Ellis Island as children. Many of them not only shared their immigration stories but also told him about the food they were served at Ellis Island and how anxious they were to get into their new American kitchens to cook the foods from their homelands.
This became his inspiration to use their recipes from home to tell the Ellis Island story in a cookbook.
He conducted a nationwide recipe search by sending a press release to wire services, food columnists and newspapers across the country and included a note “feel free to share the story of the recipe.”
The recipes came flooding in and the stories of the dishes became the keystone of the book. Some of the recipes were from immigrants themselves but most were from their children and grandchildren. The first edition of The Ellis Island Immigrant Cookbook was published in 1991 and since then over 119,000 have been sold.
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