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purejuiceGripped is not exactly the word for what I felt when I first encountered the Tenement Museum in New York City. Swept away is more like it, the museumization of the poor and undocumented, as opposed to the official biographies of 300 white guys in Paris, being unprecedented.
Today's NYT brings news of a book of the recipes of five families who lived in the tenement before it was closed in 1935. The Amazon review calls 97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement a book of "forensic gastronomy", which actually suits more the contents of the Ice Man's stomach than documenting the foodways of five immigrant families who lived at 97 Orchard between 1850 and 1935.
(I've been thinking about the Ice Man, too. He was almost lost to posterity due to the idiocy of the Italians. The first cop on the scene tried to extract him from the ice with a chain saw, which destroyed like half the evidence before the cretin's saw ran out of gas. A tourist stole the penis of the unsecured treasure. Having extracted the 10,000 year old non-mummified body, they entertained reporters who smoked cigarettes while he thawed on a slab and started to grow fungus from dirty humans' breath.)
Aaaaaanyway. I have learned half of what I know by reading recipes and cookbooks. The significance of it came to me years ago as I pondered my Sicilian mother-in-law's meatball recipe. It calls for mint. Other allegedly Italian meat dishes she made had cinnamon in them. This is what people in north Africa eat. Cinnamon and mint. Recipes are an oral and sensual history which historians until recently have been too snotty to credit as evidence of trade routes and so on -- the so on being, ohhhh let's say the curiously nappy texture of my husband's Guido hair -- dining parochially and locally as they do on roast beef and claret.
I am interested also -- I have been thinking, in honor of our mutual friendfj, about the genius of the Dutch. Huizinga is not exactly a Nouvelle Vague historian -- I think he died, like so many of his courageous countrymen, in the 1940s during a stint in a Nazi prison camp -- but he made the remarkable sane historiographical point that history is not simply the vintage store you go to, to identify the origins of what you're wearing now. It also contains many other things, including recipes, which are about trends which were dying then and happenings that had no historical resonance of which we are aware at all. In other words, it was like reality, not full of portents. Backshadowing historical events, that is, blaming Jews for not getting out of Europe before the Nazi genocide, is one of the historiographical issues historians of genocide have been told to grapple with but which they pretty much don't. You can't know how bad the genocide is going to be in 1937, and you can't blame people who stayed in Europe -- the other former husband's, referred to here as the Old Husband, seven aunts and their entire families -- for being stupid.
In short, history has been run by the white boys way too long, still is, and the history of recipes and Huizinga and the possibilities of 1937 are still grossly underestimated.
Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
July 27, 2010
In a Tenement’s Meager Kitchens, a Historian Looks for Insight
By DWIGHT GARNER
97 ORCHARD
An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement
By Jane Ziegelman
Illustrated. 253 pages. Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. $25.99.
When Richard Dreyfuss, in “Jaws,” wanted to trace the eating habits of a tiger shark, he cut open its stomach and let the contents — a few fish and a Louisiana license plate among them — spill out onto a dock.
America’s growing population of food historians have similar instincts, if gentler research habits. The exploding interest in who ate what, and when, has them ransacking old cookbooks, menus, novels, letters and grocery lists, looking to see what strange news about our earlier culinary habits flutters to the floor.
I am prepared to be cynical about this new food historicism. I await the titles that pare this subject into micro-thin slices, books I suspect will be on the order of “Sesame Seeds: The Nutty, Delicate, Crunchy Little Plant Ovules That Revolutionized American Foodways and Changed the World,” or “1897: The Year the Oysters Tasted a Bit Dubious.”
In the meantime we have Jane Ziegelman’s modest but absorbing “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.” The story it tells, about Old World habits clashing and ultimately melding with new American ones, is familiar. But Ms. Ziegelman is a patient scholar and a graceful writer, and she rummages in these families’ histories and larders to smart, chewy effect. Ms. Ziegelman, whose previous book, “Foie Gras: A Passion,” occupies a place at the plummier end of the food history spectrum, introduces us to the Glockners, the Moores, the Gumpertzes, the Rogarshevskys and the Baldizzis, who all lived at 97 Orchard Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, between 1863 and 1935.
These busy families wanted many things: assimilation, esteem, easier lives for their children. Most of all, it seems, they wanted full bellies and tastes of home. They were fiercely loyal to the dishes they left behind.
In part, “97 Orchard” is about real estate. Ms. Ziegelman traces the history of tenement buildings in Manhattan, noting that they were the “first American residences built expressly for multiple families — in this case, working people.” By the start of the 20th century, she writes, “97 Orchard Street stood on the most densely populated square block of urban America, with 2,223 people, most of them Russian Jews, packed into roughly two acres.”
That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and Ms. Ziegelman details not merely how the Jews from Russia stocked their meager kitchens, but also how immigrants from Italy, Germany and Ireland did so as well.
These days 97 Orchard Street is the site of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. During most of the years Ms. Ziegelman writes about, the building’s tiny apartments had no indoor plumbing and no refrigerators except windowsills in winter; the kitchens had wood- or coal-burning stoves. Tenement housewives were “human freight elevators, hauling groceries, coal, firewood and children up and down endless flights of stairs,” Ms. Ziegelman writes. “Their most burdensome loads, however, were the tubs of water needed for laundry, bathing, housecleaning and cooking. It was sloppy, muscle-straining work.” All that climbing made these women experts in efficient, single-pot cooking.
In Ms. Ziegelman’s hands these individual women come alive more than their husbands, who were usually off struggling to find work. Sometimes these men couldn’t stand the strain of their difficult lives and simply vanished. That happened to Natalie Gumpertz, a Jewish immigrant from Germany whose life is chronicled in “97 Orchard.” Her husband, Julius, “buckled completely” and fled, leaving her to raise their children alone. “Abandonment,” Ms. Ziegelman says, “was a special class of hardship reserved for East Side women.”
Ms. Ziegelman writes well about the types of culinary workers, once popular in and around these tenements, whose trades have vanished. These included “the German krauthobblers, or ‘cabbage-shavers,’ itinerant tradesmen who went door to door slicing cabbage for homemade sauerkraut,” she notes. There were also “the Italian dandelion pickers, women who scoured New York’s vacant lots for wild salad greens,” as well as urban goose farmers who raised poultry in basements and hallways.
Ms. Ziegelman hasn’t merely pored through old cookbooks and newspapers; she also has an admirable ability to pluck the most piquant details from them. Thus she quotes the journalist Benjamin DeCasseres, reminiscing in 1931 about the sprawling German saloon Luchow’s: “The ultra Teutonic waiters, the dripping bar, the mounded free lunch, the heavenly odor of pig’s knuckles, sauerkraut and Paprika Schnitzel — all of the things saturated me with an indescribable feeling of contentment.” DeCasseres went on: “Dill pickles and tiny raw onions burst in my throat and sprayed my brain with a fine tickle.”
“97 Orchard” dispels a pile of myths about immigrant foodstuffs. Corned beef and cabbage isn’t an Irish invention. Gefilte fish and challah did not originate with the Jews. She tracks the immigrant origins of many well-known brands — Breakstone’s, Fleischmann’s — and she is not a snob about time-saving inventions. Beginning in 1911, Crisco began to replace schmaltz (chicken fat) in many Jewish kitchens. Ms. Ziegelman writes about the harried kosher cook and imagines “the freedom awaiting her in the blue-and-white can.”
Ms. Ziegelman writes well, too, about Ellis Island and about what she calls “the first all-important point of contact between the United States government and its future citizens.” Hearts and minds needed to be won, and stomachs too. The food at Ellis Island improved with time, she writes, thanks to men like Frederick Wallis, immigration commissioner from 1920 to 1921, who wisely observed: “You can make an immigrant an anarchist overnight at Ellis Island, but with the right kind of treatment you can also start him on the way to glorious citizenship. It is first impressions that matter most.”
Once they’d passed through Ellis Island, immigrants moved into tenements and became used to do-gooders telling them that they lived in filth or that they were eating the wrong things. One would-be reformer, the dietician Bertha Wood, thought that highly seasoned foods made Jewish people nervous.
“This excessive use of pickled foods destroys the taste for milder flavors, causes irritation and renders assimilation more difficult,” she wrote.
Jewish immigrants, Ms. Ziegelman observes, clung zealously to their bagels and bialys, their pickles and brisket. The only ones she has pity for — at least in terms of their stomachs — are those who made money and moved uptown. They were left, culinarily, with bubkes.
“Uptown Jews were plagued by a new and irksome self-consciousness,” she writes. If they craved brisket or sauerkraut, it was impossible to make at home: the aromas would waft through buildings and make neighbors gripe. Old favorites, like organ meats, became tokens of poverty.
If uptown Jews wanted a real meal, Ms. Ziegelman writes, they knew what to do. They’d sneak back down to a restaurant near Orchard Street, blissful smiles on their faces, “for a plate of chopped herring and a basket of onion rolls.”
Today's NYT brings news of a book of the recipes of five families who lived in the tenement before it was closed in 1935. The Amazon review calls 97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement a book of "forensic gastronomy", which actually suits more the contents of the Ice Man's stomach than documenting the foodways of five immigrant families who lived at 97 Orchard between 1850 and 1935.
(I've been thinking about the Ice Man, too. He was almost lost to posterity due to the idiocy of the Italians. The first cop on the scene tried to extract him from the ice with a chain saw, which destroyed like half the evidence before the cretin's saw ran out of gas. A tourist stole the penis of the unsecured treasure. Having extracted the 10,000 year old non-mummified body, they entertained reporters who smoked cigarettes while he thawed on a slab and started to grow fungus from dirty humans' breath.)
Aaaaaanyway. I have learned half of what I know by reading recipes and cookbooks. The significance of it came to me years ago as I pondered my Sicilian mother-in-law's meatball recipe. It calls for mint. Other allegedly Italian meat dishes she made had cinnamon in them. This is what people in north Africa eat. Cinnamon and mint. Recipes are an oral and sensual history which historians until recently have been too snotty to credit as evidence of trade routes and so on -- the so on being, ohhhh let's say the curiously nappy texture of my husband's Guido hair -- dining parochially and locally as they do on roast beef and claret.
I am interested also -- I have been thinking, in honor of our mutual friend
fj, about the genius of the Dutch. Huizinga is not exactly a Nouvelle Vague historian -- I think he died, like so many of his courageous countrymen, in the 1940s during a stint in a Nazi prison camp -- but he made the remarkable sane historiographical point that history is not simply the vintage store you go to, to identify the origins of what you're wearing now. It also contains many other things, including recipes, which are about trends which were dying then and happenings that had no historical resonance of which we are aware at all. In other words, it was like reality, not full of portents. Backshadowing historical events, that is, blaming Jews for not getting out of Europe before the Nazi genocide, is one of the historiographical issues historians of genocide have been told to grapple with but which they pretty much don't. You can't know how bad the genocide is going to be in 1937, and you can't blame people who stayed in Europe -- the other former husband's, referred to here as the Old Husband, seven aunts and their entire families -- for being stupid.In short, history has been run by the white boys way too long, still is, and the history of recipes and Huizinga and the possibilities of 1937 are still grossly underestimated.
Reprints
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
July 27, 2010
In a Tenement’s Meager Kitchens, a Historian Looks for Insight
By DWIGHT GARNER
97 ORCHARD
An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement
By Jane Ziegelman
Illustrated. 253 pages. Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins. $25.99.
When Richard Dreyfuss, in “Jaws,” wanted to trace the eating habits of a tiger shark, he cut open its stomach and let the contents — a few fish and a Louisiana license plate among them — spill out onto a dock.
America’s growing population of food historians have similar instincts, if gentler research habits. The exploding interest in who ate what, and when, has them ransacking old cookbooks, menus, novels, letters and grocery lists, looking to see what strange news about our earlier culinary habits flutters to the floor.
I am prepared to be cynical about this new food historicism. I await the titles that pare this subject into micro-thin slices, books I suspect will be on the order of “Sesame Seeds: The Nutty, Delicate, Crunchy Little Plant Ovules That Revolutionized American Foodways and Changed the World,” or “1897: The Year the Oysters Tasted a Bit Dubious.”
In the meantime we have Jane Ziegelman’s modest but absorbing “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.” The story it tells, about Old World habits clashing and ultimately melding with new American ones, is familiar. But Ms. Ziegelman is a patient scholar and a graceful writer, and she rummages in these families’ histories and larders to smart, chewy effect. Ms. Ziegelman, whose previous book, “Foie Gras: A Passion,” occupies a place at the plummier end of the food history spectrum, introduces us to the Glockners, the Moores, the Gumpertzes, the Rogarshevskys and the Baldizzis, who all lived at 97 Orchard Street, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, between 1863 and 1935.
These busy families wanted many things: assimilation, esteem, easier lives for their children. Most of all, it seems, they wanted full bellies and tastes of home. They were fiercely loyal to the dishes they left behind.
In part, “97 Orchard” is about real estate. Ms. Ziegelman traces the history of tenement buildings in Manhattan, noting that they were the “first American residences built expressly for multiple families — in this case, working people.” By the start of the 20th century, she writes, “97 Orchard Street stood on the most densely populated square block of urban America, with 2,223 people, most of them Russian Jews, packed into roughly two acres.”
That’s a lot of mouths to feed, and Ms. Ziegelman details not merely how the Jews from Russia stocked their meager kitchens, but also how immigrants from Italy, Germany and Ireland did so as well.
These days 97 Orchard Street is the site of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. During most of the years Ms. Ziegelman writes about, the building’s tiny apartments had no indoor plumbing and no refrigerators except windowsills in winter; the kitchens had wood- or coal-burning stoves. Tenement housewives were “human freight elevators, hauling groceries, coal, firewood and children up and down endless flights of stairs,” Ms. Ziegelman writes. “Their most burdensome loads, however, were the tubs of water needed for laundry, bathing, housecleaning and cooking. It was sloppy, muscle-straining work.” All that climbing made these women experts in efficient, single-pot cooking.
In Ms. Ziegelman’s hands these individual women come alive more than their husbands, who were usually off struggling to find work. Sometimes these men couldn’t stand the strain of their difficult lives and simply vanished. That happened to Natalie Gumpertz, a Jewish immigrant from Germany whose life is chronicled in “97 Orchard.” Her husband, Julius, “buckled completely” and fled, leaving her to raise their children alone. “Abandonment,” Ms. Ziegelman says, “was a special class of hardship reserved for East Side women.”
Ms. Ziegelman writes well about the types of culinary workers, once popular in and around these tenements, whose trades have vanished. These included “the German krauthobblers, or ‘cabbage-shavers,’ itinerant tradesmen who went door to door slicing cabbage for homemade sauerkraut,” she notes. There were also “the Italian dandelion pickers, women who scoured New York’s vacant lots for wild salad greens,” as well as urban goose farmers who raised poultry in basements and hallways.
Ms. Ziegelman hasn’t merely pored through old cookbooks and newspapers; she also has an admirable ability to pluck the most piquant details from them. Thus she quotes the journalist Benjamin DeCasseres, reminiscing in 1931 about the sprawling German saloon Luchow’s: “The ultra Teutonic waiters, the dripping bar, the mounded free lunch, the heavenly odor of pig’s knuckles, sauerkraut and Paprika Schnitzel — all of the things saturated me with an indescribable feeling of contentment.” DeCasseres went on: “Dill pickles and tiny raw onions burst in my throat and sprayed my brain with a fine tickle.”
“97 Orchard” dispels a pile of myths about immigrant foodstuffs. Corned beef and cabbage isn’t an Irish invention. Gefilte fish and challah did not originate with the Jews. She tracks the immigrant origins of many well-known brands — Breakstone’s, Fleischmann’s — and she is not a snob about time-saving inventions. Beginning in 1911, Crisco began to replace schmaltz (chicken fat) in many Jewish kitchens. Ms. Ziegelman writes about the harried kosher cook and imagines “the freedom awaiting her in the blue-and-white can.”
Ms. Ziegelman writes well, too, about Ellis Island and about what she calls “the first all-important point of contact between the United States government and its future citizens.” Hearts and minds needed to be won, and stomachs too. The food at Ellis Island improved with time, she writes, thanks to men like Frederick Wallis, immigration commissioner from 1920 to 1921, who wisely observed: “You can make an immigrant an anarchist overnight at Ellis Island, but with the right kind of treatment you can also start him on the way to glorious citizenship. It is first impressions that matter most.”
Once they’d passed through Ellis Island, immigrants moved into tenements and became used to do-gooders telling them that they lived in filth or that they were eating the wrong things. One would-be reformer, the dietician Bertha Wood, thought that highly seasoned foods made Jewish people nervous.
“This excessive use of pickled foods destroys the taste for milder flavors, causes irritation and renders assimilation more difficult,” she wrote.
Jewish immigrants, Ms. Ziegelman observes, clung zealously to their bagels and bialys, their pickles and brisket. The only ones she has pity for — at least in terms of their stomachs — are those who made money and moved uptown. They were left, culinarily, with bubkes.
“Uptown Jews were plagued by a new and irksome self-consciousness,” she writes. If they craved brisket or sauerkraut, it was impossible to make at home: the aromas would waft through buildings and make neighbors gripe. Old favorites, like organ meats, became tokens of poverty.
If uptown Jews wanted a real meal, Ms. Ziegelman writes, they knew what to do. They’d sneak back down to a restaurant near Orchard Street, blissful smiles on their faces, “for a plate of chopped herring and a basket of onion rolls.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 04:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 06:16 pm (UTC)does tex mex admit of all the organ meats that mex does? around here in abq there are tacos of brains, tongue, then tripe in menudo -- i haven't seen kidneys, pigs' ears or tails yet. i'ma keep looking.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-28 11:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 04:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 01:09 am (UTC)But it will have to wait until I finish all my other books.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 04:09 am (UTC)http://events.nytimes.com/recipes/6696/2001/09/19/Onion-Poppy-Seed-Rolls/recipe.html
no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 01:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-31 04:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-29 02:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-01 04:19 am (UTC)I just take it for granted, as does my mother, that there's Middle Eastern/North African blood all over her Sicilian side of the family, it only makes sense. I've always vaguely pondered taking that DNA test to find out how much of it there might be. (Now amusedly recalling an Iranian man who flirted with me by telling me I looked "just like a real Iranian girl," maybe he had a point.)