Lower East Side Tenement Museum in 2010

A fantastic and pointed social history of New York tenement dwellers and the vanished cuisines they brought to America, Jane Ziegelman’s 97 Orchard is a worthwhile read. The book explores the history of the site of the New York Tenement Museum.

In 1863, the Lower East Side was dominated by squat row houses, with multiple families per floor, with back lots occupied by machine shops, printers, brick and furniture makers, piano factories and other industries. The neighborhood was further divided among freed slaves and German residents of Kleindeutschland, buying Westphalian ham, pumpernickel bread and German-language newspapers. Lucas Glockner came to the US in 1850 and was recorded in the first census to track all household members. After registering for service in the Civil War, Glockner left his work as a tailor and became a property investor, buying up the Dutch Reformed Presbyterian Church for the land and built 97 Orchard St.’s five story tenement. The tenement building style first began to appear in the 1820s in Five Points — which later became Chinatown. A mucky pond known as the Collect was the center of the Five Points, an area of slaughterhouse, tanneries, brewing, rope and candlemaking operations. Although the pond was filled, it frequently flooded during rainstorms driving away old residents and bringing in poor new ones to occupy the homes. John Jacob Astor and others made fortunes off of tenement construction during the rapid increase in immigration between the 1820s and the 1840s.

The Glockners actually lived in their own tenement for 12 years, occupying the Italianate, 1860s style building. Each floor was made up of a dark room for sleeping, a parlor and a kitchen. Although he attempted to transcend his German roots with multiple fireplaces and salmon pastel colored walls, the building lacked indoor plumbing. Glockner had decided not to tap into the water main from the Croton reservoir and instead had a groundwater pump and a row of privies in the back courtyard. Women lugged hefty loads of coal and heavy pails of water many times a day to their apartments. Because of the inefficiency of hauling loads of water to wash dishes, the German residents focused on boiled eggs for breakfast and then a heavy lunch of fricasseed beef, veal and pork along with boiled dumplings and noodles. For extra flavor, vinegar, lemon, spices and herbs would be added. Many of the recipes were drawn from Praktisches Kochbuch an 1845 cookbook that sold 245,000 copies at the time. Lucas Glockner would eat herring and drink beer at the saloon in the basement while his wife made stew. German saloon keepers often served bowls of hasenpfeffer, a wild rabbit ragout, dished up with cloves, mustard, bay leaves, white pepper and grated horseradish.

Almost every meal was accompanied with bread dumplings, flour dumplings and potato dumplings, often loaded with parsley, spinach, chive, bacon, cabbage, liver, sweetbread or calf brain. From 1855 to 1865, the 10 grocery stores in the neighborhood transitioned from Irish to German ownership. Wives bought on credit and had their husbands pay the grocer at week’s end. For larger shopping excursions, wives would head to large, dirty shed-like markets on nearby Grand St. In spite of dirty conditions, the markets were loaded with food from beef and veal to oysters, lobsters and crabs. Thomas De Voe, a butcher at the Jefferson Market, became superintendent of markets for the city and in 1858 turned out The Market Book followed by the Market Assistant, compendiums of every type of food on sale in the city. The variety was copious from otter and moose to 17 types of perch borage, burdock, beach plum black gumberries and whortleberries. Germans, Irish, Bretons and Scots were major purchases of salted herring which arrived by the schoonerload in the city. Delicatessans began selling primarily herring in the 1860s, offering it fried in butter, as a salad or with sour cream and mayonnaise

Because 97 Orchard St is on a slight rise, it would have commanded views of particularly squalid tenements back of the road, furniture factories and masts crowded the river. Most of the Germans in Kleindeutschland were from urban areas, whereas more rural immigrants went through New York City and headed for the Midwest. Most worked as tailors, bakers, brewers, printers and carpenters. In the 1800s, they were more regional, with south Germans eating noodles, butter and dumplings while north Germans depended on potatoes, beans and porkfat. Sauerkraut was consumed universally by both the rich and the poor — wives would brine cabbage in empty vinegar barrels in the early fall. Henry Heinz set up a sauerkraut factory on Long Island in the 1890s. Peddlers would go around to saloons carrying boxes laden with potatoes, sauerkraut and sausage. Germans tended to dominate the grocery, baking and dairy industry, while the Irish were prominent in fishing. Germans introduced lager beer, overtaking English style dark ales most popular until the 1840s. Children would carry pales to the nearest saloon to fill up with beer for the family. Fleischman’s yeast is a holdover of a popular Vienna Bakery in New York City, started around the 1860s that survived into the early 1900s.

By the late 1800s, most Germans were part of Verein — social clubs centered on eating and drinking, organized around place of origin, occupation or hobbies.

Ziegelman offers a different account of the Irish potato famine, leapfrogging from an origin in Mexico to New England and then shuttling across the ocean in seed potatoes to Germany, France and England. New York went through a rapid transformation from an English city of mainly Anglicans to being one-third Catholic by 1860. Bridget and Joseph Moore each traveled alone from Liverpool to New York, arriving in 1863 and 1865 respectively. Passengers traveling in steerage played cards, sang songs, got drunk and smoked while battling not infrequent typhus outbreaks. They also brought and cooked their own food in the simple steerage galley, making tea, oatmeal, salt beef and potatoes. By 1848, the US and Britain had passed laws requiring ships to provide passengers 60 gallons of water plus ship biscuits and flour and by the 1860s, cooked meals were commonplace. Passengers ate porridge with molasses, salt fish, beef, biscuits and tea. Irish immigration was often a movement of unmarried teenagers, with parents left behind. Unlike other immigrant groups, women outnumbered men and soon came to dominate housework as servants. Initially, many women were drawn to shady “intelligence offices” to find work as cooks and maids, but often ended up in the city’s hundreds of brothels. In 1850, the New York State Commissioners of Emigration opened a Labor Exchange to find immigrants work. Because most Irish women had never experienced indoor plumbing or anything but an open peat fire for cooking, many were incompetent cooks.

With the arrival of potatoes from the New World, Irish contracted from extensive variety of seafood, wheat, barley, oats, buttermilk, cheese and butter eaten in chunks just as cheese. The contraction came from the removal of peasants to marginal land, where feast days involved eating some peas or pork. Meanwhile, Irish fields continued to produce and export huge quantities of wheat, oats and barley. Bridget gave birth to seven children and moved from the Five Points to 97 Orchard. Many immigrants were fleeced by runners upon their arrival, with their children or luggage taken away. Others found their way into nationality-based boardinghouses, of varying levels of repute, carved out of stately old homes. By the 1870s, some writers described New York, Boston and Philadelphia as one vast boardinghouse. The food was simple and gristly from hashes and pies to offal and soup.

Daniel Sweeny changed New York eating culture from drinking-centric taverns with higher quality cheap eating joints in the 1830s. At the time, the rich and the poor ate out while the nascent middle class ate at home. Eateries like his, which sprang up across the city featured oyster pie and corned beef. The beef is said to be “corned” mixed with large corns of salt and was an Irish fall tradition. Housewives also bought corned beef imported from Cork. Newsboys and poor families survived on pails of corned beef and cabbage. Ironically, corned beef and cabbage was often served at high end restaurants as well alongside foie grass and Maryland terrapins. Irish residents preferred beef filet and pig jowls for special occasions and it fell out of favor in some quarters in the late 1800s, experiencing a revival as a St. Patrick’s day standard by the 1940s.

Ziegelman introduces the East Prussian Jewish Gumpertz family with a weekend tradition of deboning a carp and then cooking it with onions and fish bones to create gelatin. Arriving in 1870 from Russia at a time when the neighborhood was still predominantly German and Irish, they witnessed its transformation to a Jewish neighborhood over the next 15 years. Hester and Norfolk streets were the center of a major Jewish pushcart fish market, catering to Sabbath shoppers. Jews were famed for steamed fish, served with aspic or if they were Bavarian Jews, made of fish in vinegar, sugar, beer and raisins with sauce thickened with ginger snaps. Prussian Jews made gefilte (stuffed) fish like the Gumpertz and was not originally a Jewish food. The rise of Rhineland Ashkenazi Jewish culture spread marzappan, spices and sugar around Europe, because many early Jewish arrivals from Spain were widely traveled rabbis. Many Jews also came from northern Italy, bringing vermslich noodle traditions first to Germany. Challah braided bread was also adopted from non-Jewish Germans. Jews from different locations prepared gefilte fish differently. Galician Polish Jews seasoned it with sugar, while Litvak Lithuanian Jews used peppers and Russian Jews served balls of carp cold with horseradish. Jews in Germany were evenly split urban and rural and often dominated the local restaurant and hospitality business, which they imported to the US.

Aunt Babettee’s Cook Book from 1889 reflected “modernized” Jewish attitudes imported from Europe as Jews abandoned kosher diets, shaved their beards and shifted to a secularized lifestyle. Her book includes many recipes that violate kosher rules from shrimp and oysters to matzo balls. By the end of the 19th century, most New York Jews ate shellfish, frequenting the city’s 850 oyster eateries, although many still hesitated about pork. Aunt Babette was obsessed with all-oyster dinners, including fried, raw and stewed.

Back in Prussia, Frederick the Great had commanded peasants to grow potatoes on a massive scale in 1744, distributing free seed potatoes and instructions throughout the country. Jews quickly adopted potato dishes, such as potato kugel made of grated potatoes with goose fat, egg and breadcrumbs. In America, Jewish food gained a reputation for bold seasoning and creativity, including dishes like stuffed turkey neck. Jews routinely skimmed every soup and dish of fat and saved it. With lard and to some extent butter off limits, they turned to poultry fat instead. In Europe, Jews kept flocks of geese which they force fed shortly before slaughter. Goose farms quickly cropped up in the tenements, picking up the urban farming tradition from the pigs that roamed the streets through the 1850s, eating garbage. Kosher slaughterhouses became the center of a major racketeering industry in the 1920s.

In the 1900s as chicken operations became more efficient, Jews switched to chicken fat and then to Procter & Gamble’s Crisco after its introduction in 1911. In the mixed neighborhoods, Jews ate white bean soup and hearty lentil soups. Natalie Gumpertz ended her 15 year stay in the Lower East Side after the influx of Yiddish speaking Russian Jews in the 1880s. The Rogarshevksy family immigrated from Hamburg to Ellis Island in 1901, coming from Lithuania. Immigrants arriving in steerage were welcomed to the US with a small apple pie and a mug of cider on the ferry ride to Ellis Island and many were most impressed by bananas and sandwiches. In spite of muckraking about Ellis Island’s poor conditions, many immigrants were impressed, particularly by the free food — and more meat at every meal than most ate in a month. The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society set up kosher food offerings on Ellis Island in 1911. Fischel, a Donald Trump style property developer was concerned rabbis and learned Jews, following strict kosher guidelines wouldn’t be allowed in the country because of thinness from undereating and persuaded Taft to allow a kosher kitchen.

Observant Jews took a leading role in peddler cart businesses because of flexible hours that allowed them to mark the Sabbath on Saturdays.

Delicatessans emerged in the 1880s and along with cafes in the Lower East Side catered to younger Jews. By the early 1910s, cafes took on a unique role as hubs of revolutionary philosophy, frequented by mixed audiences and people from Uptown ‘slumming’ for the evening. The Lower East Side produced specialized restaurants like knish shops and dairy restaurants that served vegetarian cuisine — including early imitation meats. Jews were increasingly Americanized through the efforts of the Board of Education and home economics classes in the 1920s and many moved Uptown, where complaints from neighboring apartments pressured many into abandoning sauerkraut and other European foods.

In 1900, 97 Orchard St was part of the most densely populated block in America, with over 2,000 people living on just two acres. By the 1930s, the neighborhood was significantly abandoned as owners couldn’t keep up with the property taxes. The building added indoor plumbing in 1905 and electricity in the 1920s but with a drop in immigration, many of the apartments were empty by the 1930s. Fifty-thousand Italians arrived in the 1880s to alleviate labor shortages, though unlike the Irish they were “lopsided” toward male immigrants. Italian men did their own cooking as they worked on construction sites, eating copious amounts of bread, beans, lentils and tomatoes. Italians dominated the rag-picking business and in many cases scrounged together food out of the trash.

The Italian arrivals circled the wagons and retained more of their former food cultures than other immigrant groups because of the uptick in anti-immigrant sentiment and a desire by many men to return home to their families. Many relied on imported food because of the disappointing quality of American vinegar or pasta. The Baldizzi family at 97 Orchard immigrated illegally in 1924. By the time they arrived in the Lower East Side, Italian women dominated the candy and garment industries. Street peddlers sold snails, periwinkles and mussels while truck farms in Brooklyn, Queens and Vineland, New Jersey shipped in peppers, broccoli, cow peas and other vegetable favorites.