In his memoir, “Lucky Bruce,” Bruce Jay Friedman gave three reasons why there are relatively few Jewish junkies: 1) “Jews need eight hours of sleep.” 2) “They must have fresh orange juice in the morning.” 3) “They have to read the entire New York Times.”

In his obsessive, melancholy and hungry-making new book, “The Dairy Restaurant,” the writer and illustrator Ben Katchor suggests that orange juice is hardly the primal elixir of the Jewish diaspora. About New York City at the end of the 19th century, he writes: “For the poorest Jews of the Lower East Side, healthful affordable milk was a taste of paradise.”

Katchor’s new book is a study of, and love song to, the American dairy restaurant and the development of the expressive “milekhdike,” or dairy, personality (consider Zero Mostel sighing over a platter of blintzes). Dairy restaurants began to flourish in New York City and elsewhere in the late 1800s; a century later, nearly all were defunct.

Katchor offers multiple descriptions of this cuisine, and prints delectable old menu cards. He derives an early description of the food from the writing of Sholem Aleichem (1859-1916), whose short stories about Tevye the Dairyman were the basis for the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” “The stories remind us of the wide range of dairy dishes,” Katchor writes. “The potato knishes, the milkhiker borscht, the cheese kreplekh, the varnishkes, the pirogen, blintzes, buttermilk, and for dessert pudding and poppy cakes — the food of a Jew’s pastoral dream.”