97 Orchard Street: Dishing Up A Tale of the Immigrant Experience

(Published on Aug.1, 2010)

New York’s Lower East Side has been a corridor for immigrants since the mid-19th century, whether Germans fleeing the convulsions of 1848, Irish fleeing the preventable Hunger, or Jews fleeing the Okhrana. History can be disgraced by demagogues and faith can be abandoned after experience. A minority’s language can be stamped out and their seemingly solid customs can melt into air. Yet, immigrant traditions of the palate survive. Perhaps, in knowing the culinary history, forgetful middle-class Americans are less likely to forget. This is the intriguing new truth in Jane Ziegelman’s clever book, “97 Orchard.”

The book’s title is the address of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, a Manhattan National Historic Site. Its Brooklyn author has no time for the stereotypical suffering immigrant and instead writes a nuanced and delicious history of the great (culinary) migration and the “hash-eaters,” “cabbage-shavers” and “rag-pickers” involved.

Specifically, Ziegelman uses four New York families (the Glockners, Gumpertz, Moores and Baldizzis) to anchor her history of immigrant cuisine. While an elephantine work like Irving Howe’s “World of Our Fathers” details the social and political history of four decades of Jewish immigrants, Ziegelman’s nimble book instead peers into the disregarded mysteries of the immigrant stewpot.

For Ziegelman, the story of corned beef, Jewish delis, German beer halls, and sprawling Italian dinners simply illustrated a larger point — that for the 30 million European immigrants who came to America after 1820, food was “a medium to express who they were and who they wanted to become.”

The book is a bright and light introduction to America’s immigrant history, a tasty stew including savory and lesser-known recipes, Ellis Island’s menu, passages by obscure novelists, food critics, middle-class “slummers,” incisive cartoons, and the Tenement Museum’s collected family photographs, all seasoned with intriguing facts:

Did you know that Irish escaping the Great Hunger would never have seen corned beef and hash? Or that in the inferno of East Side pushcart markets one could buy anything from bear to moose snout? Or that Italian male slum dwellers, on average, ate 19 pounds of macaroni a month?

I think the author made a mistake in omitting a discussion of the mid-19th-century’s under-regulated food industry and the consequent malnutrition and infant mortality rate among the poor. But that mistake was one of very few in this delicious book.

Brett Warnke ( brettwarnke@gmail.com) is a freelance journalist who lives in Providence.