97 Orchard

Jane Ziegelman traces the immigrant experience in America through the foods that five families cooked, sold, and ate while living at 97 Orchard Street, a Lower East Side tenement, between 1863 and 1935. Each family represents a major immigrant group during the Age of Migration: The Glockners were German, the Moores Irish, the Gumpertzes German Jewish, the Rogarshevskys Lithuanian Jewish, and the Baldizzis Sicilian. Though these families quickly shed Old World identities, adopting American names, clothing, and language, they went to extraordinary lengths to preserve their traditional foods. Working in cramped tenement kitchens that doubled as sweatshops, laundry rooms, and bedrooms for boarders, immigrant cooks brought formidable ingenuity to the daily challenge of feeding their families. Ziegelman argues that while immigrants fed their own communities, they simultaneously revolutionized how the rest of America ate, introducing foods like wursts (German sausages), pretzels, knishes (potato pastries), and spaghetti to a nation previously defined by roast beef, pie, and oysters.

Lucas Glockner, a German tailor who arrived in New York around 1846, rose from garment worker to property owner and built 97 Orchard Street in 1863. The building stood in Kleindeutschland, or "Little Germany," a neighborhood stretching across the Lower East Side where German-owned businesses and German food shops defined daily life. Wilhelmina Glockner, Lucas's second wife, cooked hearty stews and fricassees using recipes from Henrietta Davidis's Praktisches Kochbuch, the German equivalent of Fannie Farmer's cookbook, with generous use of spices, lemon, mace, and bay leaf. Dumplings and noodles were staples, and each region contributed its own sausage varieties and baked goods. German grocers flanking 97 Orchard sold imported delicacies on credit, while the Essex Market on Grand Street supplied veal, cabbage, and herring. In the tenements, sauerkraut-making was a harvest ritual: Between late October and early December, housewives enlisted itinerant tradesmen called krauthobler to shave and salt cabbage for fermenting in barrels. German bakers took over the city's bread production by the late 1850s, and German yeast cakes, or kuchen, became what Americans know as coffee cake. German brewers introduced lager beer to New York in the 1840s, spawning dynasties including Miller, Busch, and Pabst. On Sundays, entire families crowded into cavernous beer halls, while downtown German lunch rooms served businessmen dishes including "Hamburger steak," among the earliest references to the future American staple.

The Irish arrived under very different circumstances. The potato blight that struck Ireland in 1845 caused near-total failure of the national staple, killing 1.5 million people and driving roughly 2 million to emigrate. Bridget Meehan arrived in New York in 1863 at age 17; Joseph Moore followed in 1865 at age 20. Unlike other groups who settled as families, the Irish migration was a movement of teenagers, most unmarried, with women outnumbering men. Bridget, like most Irishwomen, found work as a domestic servant, one of the few jobs available to her, and learned American food traditions at close range despite constant criticism from employers. In Ireland, the once-varied diet had contracted to roughly 12 pounds of potatoes a day, supplemented by buttermilk. In America, meat became an everyday food for the first time. The Moores settled at 97 Orchard around 1869; Bridget bore eight children, only four of whom survived childhood. Irish immigrants also shaped American public dining: Irish-born Daniel Sweeny opened a groundbreaking cheap eating house in 1836, and corned beef and cabbage appeared on menus at both cheap lunchrooms and luxury hotels. Initially distanced by socially prominent Irish Americans, corned beef was gradually reclaimed as a quintessentially Irish food, illustrating what Ziegelman argues is a broader pattern: The language of food is never fixed but perpetually evolving.

Natalie Reinsberg emigrated from East Prussia in 1858 and married Julius Gumpertz, a German Jewish immigrant who had arrived a year earlier. The family moved to 97 Orchard in 1870. Ziegelman opens their story with Mrs. Gumpertz preparing gefilte fish in the traditional stuffed-fish style for the Friday evening Sabbath meal. Despite its firmly Jewish identity, gefilte fish originated in the Gentile kitchen as a medieval court dish, later adopted by Jewish cooks and invested with religious symbolism. The Ashkenazim, Jews of northern France, Germany, and Eastern Europe, were prolific culinary borrowers who adapted local foods to Jewish dietary law. The Jewish Enlightenment, beginning in the late 18th century, encouraged some German Jews to adopt more relaxed approaches to religious observance, including food. Aunt Babette's Cook Book (1889), written by Bertha Kramer of Chicago, brazenly mixed traditional recipes with forbidden foods like shrimp salad and oysters on the half shell. Julius, unable to sustain steady employment, left the apartment in 1874 and never returned, joining the ranks of the East Side's many "missing husbands." The Jewish cook's reliance on poultry fat, or schmaltz, arose from the prohibition against using lard or butter with meat; Jewish women raised geese in tenement yards and basements, transplanting a rural industry to urban America. In 1911, Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco, a vegetable shortening that was pareve, or ritually neutral, making it compatible with both meat and dairy dishes and eventually displacing schmaltz in the Jewish pantry. In 1884, Natalie inherited $600 from her husband's family in Germany and moved to Yorkville on the Upper East Side, where she lived until her death in 1894.

Abraham and Fannie Rogarshevsky immigrated from Telsh, Lithuania, in 1901, arriving at Ellis Island with five children and an orphaned infant niece. Ellis Island's dining room served a thousand immigrants at a time, but the food was meager, and virtually none of it was kosher. Jewish immigrants often arrived malnourished and were rejected under the label "likely to become a public charge" when adequate food might have restored them. In 1911, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) convinced authorities to establish a kosher kitchen on the island. The Rogarshevskys moved to 97 Orchard around 1908. Abraham worked as a garment presser, had tuberculosis, and died in 1918. Fannie supported six children by taking in boarders and serving as building janitor. The pushcart markets on Hester, Orchard, and Essex streets were the most important food source for tenement housewives, offering familiar foods in quantities as small as a single egg. Food-sharing between apartments was a survival strategy sustained by communal living, where doors were rarely locked and neighbors made soup for the sick. Settlement houses like the Educational Alliance offered cooking classes to immigrant girls in "model flats" that simulated tenement apartments; the girls then served as "missionaries" to their foreign-born parents. The Jewish Lower East Side also supported an elaborate ecosystem of delicatessens, opulent Romanian Jewish eateries with Art Nouveau dining rooms, Hungarian coffee houses, and Russian cafés defined by feverish political debate. Knishes, baked dough pockets filled with potato or other savory fillings, cost just three cents, making them the quintessential East Side street food.

By the 1930s, the Lower East Side was depopulated and crumbling. Adolfo Baldizzi, born in Palermo in 1896 and orphaned as a young boy, came to America as a stowaway in 1923, jumping from a ship and swimming to shore to evade the quota laws restricting immigration. His wife, Rosaria Baldizzi, followed in 1924 with a doctored passport. The family moved to 97 Orchard in 1928, just before the stock market crash. During the Depression, Adolfo was largely unemployed, and the family relied on bread, pasta, beans, and free groceries from Home Relief, Franklin Roosevelt's 1931 assistance program. Rosaria used food as an antidote to poverty, serving meals on good Italian linen and presenting her children's dinners as edible gifts. For Sicilians, bread was sacred: A person who was good was said to be "as good as bread," and bread that fell to the ground was kissed. Stale bread was never discarded but transformed into bread crumbs, used to stretch meat, stuff vegetables, and replace grated cheese atop pasta. Italian pushcart markets on Mulberry and Elizabeth streets supplied foods unknown in the Jewish quarter: mussels, clams, squid, snails, and an extraordinary selection of greens. Italian women foraged for wild dandelions and grew herbs in tenement window boxes. Feast-day foods like meatballs and ragus had never figured in the peasant diet in Italy but belonged to the kitchens of landowners; in America, immigrant cooks made these foods a regular part of the Sunday table. The American romance with Italian food unfolded in two stages: Northern Italian restaurants attracted Bohemian diners in the 1850s, and after 1900, native New Yorkers ventured into Little Italy, discovering the spaghetti that would conquer the American dinner table. The Baldizzis' fortunes improved when America entered World War II: Adolfo found work in the naval yards, and Rosaria could finally afford meat. On New Year's Eve, she made sfinge, hole-less doughnuts fried at midnight and dipped in sugar so the children's first taste of the New Year would be sweet.