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An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement
Smithsonian
June 2010
On Sale: June 1, 2010
272 pages
ISBN: 0061288500
EAN: 9780061288500
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
In 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman explores the culinary life
that was the heart and soul of New York's Lower East Side
around the turn of the twentieth century—a city within a
city, where Germans, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European
Jews attempted to forge a new life. Through the experiences
of five families, all of them residents of 97 Orchard
Street, she takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable
tour, from impossibly cramped tenement apartments down
dimly lit stairwells where children played and neighbors
socialized, beyond the front stoops where immigrant
housewives found respite and company, and out into the
hubbub of the dirty, teeming streets. Ziegelman shows how immigrant cooks brought their ingenuity
to the daily task of feeding their families, preserving
traditions from home but always ready to improvise. While
health officials worried that pushcarts were unsanitary and
that pickles made immigrants too excitable to be good
citizens, a culinary revolution was taking place in the
streets of what had been culturally an English city. Along
the East River, German immigrants founded breweries,
dispensing their beloved lager in the dozens of beer
gardens that opened along the Bowery. Russian Jews opened
tea parlors serving blintzes and strudel next door to
Romanian nightclubs that specialized in goose pastrami. On
the streets, Italian peddlers hawked the cheese-and-tomato
pies known as pizzarelli, while Jews sold knishes and
squares of halvah. Gradually, as Americans began to explore
the immigrant ghetto, they uncovered the array of
comestible enticements of their foreign-born neighbors. 97
Orchard charts this exciting process of discovery as it
lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.
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