Jewish food in America doesn’t have a high gastronomic reputation. Criticized for stringy meat and starchy, schmaltzy sides, the censure is to some degree well earned. The peasant food of Eastern European immigrants reflects the landscape and lives from which it came – the winters were long, the vegetables few, and meat was left on the hob from sundown to sundown.

Yet Jewish cuisine is fixed in the American dietary consciousness via the kosher delis of yore, despite a reputation for gummy brown food. You can find a bagel anywhere in America. (Price Chopper carries bacon and egg bagels.) Corned Beef and Pastrami are in every supermarket in Minnesota. Matzo balls have made their way to Hawaii.

In America’s Great Delis, author Sheryll Bellman provides a timeline for deli culture, starting at 6000 BC when hunter gatherers boil water, which she declares the birthday of borscht. (Borscht Belt humor, thankfully, has not made it too far past the Catskills.) In a book that is lovingly produced with archival photos and the occasional recipe, Bellman pays homage to the transmission of Jewish culture through deli food.

Not all the recipes are good. There are two competing lokshen kugles: one with canned pineapple, the other with canned fruit cocktail. Recipes from the Carnegie Deli serve 20, where they could easily be divided for more likely home gatherings.

There is the occasional treasure: the Carnegie Deli Kreplach is exactly right, a perfect replica of my family recipe, the one I keep in my head from childhood shabbats around the original immigrants’ tables. But, I would hope there is no kitchen in America where 1 cup of flour and two eggs is enough to feed 30. Anyone accustomed to the portion sizes at Carnegie would recognize the typo - it makes 30 kreplach and is more likely to feed one hungry customer with a fistfull of pickles on the side. Careful editing and a more discriminating selection might have turned Americas Great Delis into a great book.

As it stands, America’s Great Delis is a nice book celebrating the Jewish impact on American heartburn.