The (Food) Melting Pot
Reading about immigrant families who lived and sometimes even prospered in unthinkable surroundings arouses in me a strange longing, for I, too, was the daughter of immigrants. I lived in a tenement on the edge of the Lower East Side until I was six years old. The streets were alive with music: Vendors sang out their wares (fruits, vegetables, fish) from clattering horse–drawn wagons. Knife grinders and junk men added to the cacophony. Street musicians sang a capella; violinists played for pennies wrapped in paper and tossed from windows. Church bells rang often on Sundays, gently breaking the Christian Sabbath quiet with carillons.
Desperate to assimilate, I nagged my mother to shop at the A&P which, even as a child, I understood was the mark of a true American. But she refused, sticking to her old country ways and dragging me from grocer, to baker, to the fruit or fish or butcher shops. Occasionally, she bought fruit and vegetables from wagon peddlers.
Beautifully written and thoroughly researched, 97 Orchard brings this world vividly to life as it describes how America transformed the waves of late 19th-century immigrants and how they changed America. Based upon absorbing descriptions of the daily lives of the five families who successively lived at that address, Ziegelman weaves a rich, frequently astonishing social tapestry of the period—ranging from discussions of real estate and theater to include dozens of popular recipes: veal stew, dumplings, zucchini frittata and cranberry strudel, to name a few.
The story begins with the German Glockners, who built and owned the building and were its first tenants. It then chronicles the Irish Moores, the German–Jewish Gumpertz family, the Russian-Jewish Rogashevkys and finally, the Sicilian Baldizzis.
At 97 Orchard, tiny 300 square-foot apartments held a kitchen, parlor and windowless room for sleeping. The tenement lacked running water and interior bathrooms, and several of the families not only worked in their apartments but somehow managed at night to shoehorn six or seven children into the tiny room that by day served as workplace, sitting and dining room.
Every immigrant family had a unique history, but most were poor, subsisting on potatoes or flour made into noodles or bread. The Irish arrived with a limited culinary tradition; theirs had been decimated by the British landlord system. They “kitchened” potatoes by adding a bit of fat or spice. At home, the Irish had used seaweed as a condiment; here the poorest might add minuscule bits of salt fish or bacon. Germans brought a rich culinary tradition: stews, dumplings, spices, sausages, sauerkraut and, of course, their beer and baked goods. German Jews, who took many of their food habits from Germans, made their own versions of these dishes. They savored black bread and used peas and beans favored in northern Germany as a basis for filling soups. Even challah had been adopted from the special Sunday loaf of German gentiles and gefilte fish derived from a medieval recipe created by a court chef to serve his master. Because lard, rendered from pigs and vital to the German kitchen, was forbidden to Jews, they substituted goose fat (schmaltz) and like the Germans who used every part of the pig, the Jews used the entire goose, even the feathers with which they stuffed pillows.
As New York City grew and modified its sanitary codes, geese gave way to chickens, and by 1900 chicken fat replaced goose fat. After 1911 many turned to Crisco—a commercially developed fat that caught the interest of kosher cooks because it was “pareve” or neutral and could be used with both dairy and meat dishes.
Although ingredients were similar, preparation and rituals of eating differed sharply. “German East Siders held up their ancestral food as cultural trophies,” the author writes, “celebrating their German past in grand scale and very public eating events. The Irish…celebrated with drink, music and dance, but confined the serious work of feeding themselves to the privacy of their homes.’’ Jews, she writes, “...came to the dinner table with a distinct and highly developed zest for eating, a sensibility so evolved...it deserves a term of its own: food–joy...born of scarcity but…grounded in the elaborate system of culinary laws and rituals that transformed…eating into a sacred act.”
Food kept families together but the pressures of the new world sometimes fractured them when fathers, unable to find work, disappeared. Ziegelman tells of friendships between Italian and Jewish immigrants, and how neighbors shared what they had to help each other through difficult times. Her descriptions of how Ellis Island coped with hordes of hungry people are worth a book by itself.
The importance of food in maintaining identity led immigrants to establish eating places that eventually attracted curious Americans. The Irish created small eateries—sometimes only carts that served sandwiches, fish and oyster dishes. Better financed German establishments introduced the frankfurter and the hamburger, named for cities back home. Jews opened dairy restaurants and kosher delicatessens. Italians founded coffee houses, salumeria (cold meat shops) and small restaurants—a few of which still remain.
Germans and Irish escaped the contempt of Americans for their cooking, but eager social workers tried unsuccessfully to change the diets of Italians and Jews who were condemned for their use of “aromatic” foods. And just as the Jews had previously adopted German dishes like gefilte fish, the Irish, inspired by the comic strip characters Jiggs and Maggie and the Irish restaurant, Dinty Moore’s, came to think of corned beef and cabbage—known to all immigrants—as their national dish.
If you enjoy eating in ethnic restaurants —and even if you don’t—you will savor the intelligence and zest of Ziegelman’s wonderful book.
Gloria Levitas, an anthropologist, taught food and culture at Queens College, City University of New York. She is also a cookbook editor who often writes about food.
|
