97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (16 page)

Many of the potato dishes made by German Jews were crossover foods, their origins in the Gentile kitchen. The potato dumpling was one of them. Early immigrant cookbooks offer a narrow sampling of the thousands of variations that must have existed, each cook playing with the basic dumpling formula to match her tastes and budget. Dumpling dough was typically made from cooked potatoes, egg, and just enough flour to form a workable but not-too-stiff dough. The dough was rolled into balls and boiled, then baked or lightly fried. A typical dumpling filling was bread crumbs or cubed bread, both fried with onion. Aunt Babette gives a recipe for “Wiener” potato dumplings, using these standard elements, only her version is formed like a jellyroll that is cut into segments so the dumplings are sausage-shaped. Once boiled, the Wiener dumpling is bathed in onion-scented goose fat. As accompaniments, she recommends “sauerkraut, sauerbraten, or compote of any kind.” If the dumpling itself was a mild-flavored food, the Jewish cook surrounded it with strong tastes–savory, sweet, aromatic, and sour—sometimes all on one plate. Jewish cooking today has a reputation for blandness, not entirely unearned. A hundred years ago, however, the label would have never stuck. The nineteenth-century Jewish cook specialized in bold flavors and complex flavor combinations, sweet with sour being a particular favorite. As a result, native-born Americans often looked down on Jewish cuisine as “too highly seasoned,” which in their eyes was both unhealthy and uncouth.

Noodles and potatoes were largely interchangeable in the Jewish kitchen, receiving many of the same treatments. Both foods, for example, could be savory or sweet, cooked with liver and onion on one hand, or sugar and cinnamon on the other. Like noodles, potatoes were sometimes paired with fruit.
The Famous Cook Book
gives a recipe for potato puffs (the dumplings’ new American name) stuffed with cooked prunes. Here, the boiled dumplings are dotted with butter, baked, and “served as a vegetable,” or, as the author suggests, sprinkled with cinnamon and sugar to make a dessert. In middle-class kitchens, dumplings were reduced to the status of side dish. In the tenements, potato dumplings with sauerkraut or fruit-filled dumplings with sour cream made a cheap and flavorful midweek supper.

As immigrant Jews moved up and out of the tenements, they took along the old foods of necessity. These were the dishes they had once depended on for survival. Noodles and potatoes were just two of them. Another was stuffed turkey neck, along with many comparable stuffed or filled creations—a time-honored strategy for stretching protein, now eaten just for pleasure. There were also holiday foods like latkes and matzoh brei, which transcended the uptown/downtown divide. A more fundamental link, however, centered on the issue of fat, a traditional preoccupation of the Jewish cook. Aunt Babette, for example, betrays her fat fixation each time she instructs readers to “skim off every particle of fat,” from any simmering soup or stew, but not to discard it, as the modern cook would. On this point she is very clear. “I would like to suggest right here,” she writes, “never throw away fat.” Instead, she tells readers to save it for use as a seasoning, a cooking medium, or a shortening in baked goods. Aunt Babette’s instinct for the preciousness of fat cut across distinctions of class, connecting well-heeled immigrants with reformed sensibilities to their working-class cousins. Even more, it transcended regional distinctions, connecting German Jews with their brothers and sisters from Eastern Europe.

The Jewish concern with fat was born in Germany at the dawn of Ashkenazi culture. As we already know, the Ashkenazim were prolific culinary borrowers, adopting many local staples from the German peasantry. One staple, however, was strictly off-limits. For Gentile cooks, the pig was a veritable walking larder. The peasant housewife fed it on kitchen scraps, and it supplied her with hams, sausage, bacon, feet for pickling, and blood to make puddings. Most valuable of all, it supplied her with lard, the peasant’s primary cooking fat. Lard, of course, was forbidden to Jews and so was beef tallow. Butter was problematic, because of the prohibition against mixing meat with dairy. Historically, Mediterranean Jews had relied on olive oil, an impractical option in northern climates. So, the Ashkenazim turned to poultry fat, the food we know today as schmaltz.

In its first incarnation, schmaltz was derived not from chicken but from geese. As early as the eleventh century and possibly before, German Jews had taken up goose farming, raising birds that were stunningly plump, veritable fountains of schmaltz. Their secret was force-feeding. Jewish-raised geese led normal lives until their final weeks. A month or so before slaughter, they were subjected to a rigorous feeding regimen in which compacted pellets of grain or dough were pushed down the animal’s throat. As German Jews migrated east, they carried the technique into Poland and Russia, where goose farming developed into a Jewish niche occupation most closely identified with women.

In towns across central and eastern Europe, Jewish women kept two or three, or, in some cases, a small flock of geese. During the summer months, the birds were free to walk the streets, their mistress trailing behind, waving a switch. In late autumn, they were put into a “goose house.” Now the force-feeding began. The nineteenth-century German cookbook author Rebekka Wolf gives the following instructions for goose fattening or
“Ganse zu nudelen,”
literally translated as “to dumpling geese”:

Make dough from coarse meal and bran, adding a handful of salt, some beechwood ashes (if you have some) and water so it forms a good ball in your hand, and make from it dumplings a half a short finger long and a fat finger thick and then dry them on a hot pan or at the baker. In the beginning a goose receives four pieces per serving, which is given four times a day or 16 per day. Do this for three or four days and then for a few days give seven pieces per serving, then nine, then 11 and then at most 13 pieces, where you stay until the goose is fat, which is best felt on the bottom of the bird.
¹³

Just before Hanukkah, women brought the geese to the local
shochet
(ritual slaughterer) to give them a proper death. It was the women’s own job, however, to disassemble the bird. Geese had to be plucked, salted (to draw out the blood), scalded, then broken down into parts. The breast was smoked, the skin fried to make
gribenes
(the kosher answer to bacon); the neck was stuffed and roasted or stewed, while the wings, feet, and giblets were saved for the soup pot. The feathers were used for bedding. The bird’s enlarged liver, the food we know as foie gras, was roasted and dutifully fed to the children as a nutritional supplement, the same way American children were given doses of castor oil. Finally, the fat was rendered and poured into earthenware jars for use throughout the year, or as long as the cook could stretch it.

The Jewish cook used goose fat for frying, baking, braising, enriching, moistening, and seasoning. It was a stock ingredient in her best, most succulent foods. These were the dishes prepared for the holidays, the kugels and cholents and kreplach, to name just a few. Warming, satiny, with a faintly nutty aftertaste, it imbued foods with a pleasing heaviness, a liability, perhaps, to the modern diner, but for the calorie-deprived a virtue. To the Jewish palate, fat represented the essence of goodness. The nineteenth-century Jewish homemaker brought her reliance on geese and all its by-products to the Lower East Side, where she continued her traditional role as a poultry farmer. Amazingly, immigrants raised geese in tenement yards, basements, hallways, and apartments as well, transplanting a rural industry to the heart of urban America.

Tenement goose farms belonged to a well-established tradition of animal husbandry on the Lower East Side. During the first half of the nineteenth century, neighborhood streets served as a communal feeding trough for wandering pigs, a common sight through the 1850s. East Side pigs were the property of poor New Yorkers who had set their animals free to scavenge for food, feasting on refuse until they were ready for slaughter. In life, they acted as street cleaners; in death, they supplied their owners with an abundance of virtually free meat. The majority of New York’s pig keepers were recently arrived Irish immigrants, veteran pig farmers from way back. In the years following the Potato Famine, as the number of New York Irish ballooned, so did the number of swine. In 1842, the city was home to roughly ten thousand wandering pigs. Before the decade was up, that figure had doubled.

Until the 1860s, repeated attempts to rein in the pigs were only marginally successful. The work of removing the animals from Lower Manhattan fell to the newly created sanitary police, a specialized unit within the larger police force, which was established to protect the health and safety of New Yorkers during a period of very rapid population growth. The squad’s four main areas of responsibility were ferries, factories, slaughterhouses, and, most relevant to our story, tenements. Creation of the sanitary police was the first of several related developments in the campaign for a cleaner, more salubrious New York that unfolded in the 1860s. In 1865, the Citizens’ Association, a group of reform-minded New Yorkers, launched a comprehensive, block-by-block, sanitary survey of Manhattan with special focus on conditions in the tenements. The fruit of their labor was the 504-page
Report of the Council on Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizen’s Association of New York upon the Sanitary Conditions in the City
. One year later, at the council’s strong urging, the city established the Metropolitan Board of Health, America’s first permanent public-health agency.

With the pig situation under control, “sanitarians” shifted their energy to a new problem: the tenement poultry farms, which began to spring up in the 1870s in heavily Jewish areas of the Lower East Side. Where urban pigs were on public display, tenement poultry farms posed a more insidious threat, hidden away as they were in the same living space as humans. Sanitary inspectors were aghast. While they strived for a professional tone, the sense of horror in their reports is palpable even over a century later. The following description is from 1879:

One who has only seen poultry kept in the country, where the only nuisance attributable to them is scratching up seeds, can hardly realize what a terrible nuisance they may cause in the city. Where many fowls are huddled together in contracted quarters, they keep up an incessant clucking and cackling, and the odor that rises from them is overpowering. In New York the Board of Health has carried on a struggle for some years, with occasional breathing-spells for both combatants, against the practice of keeping poultry for sale in the manner practiced by Polish and Russian Jews. On the plea that their religion requires them to eat only those fowls that have been killed in their sight by a killer authorized under their ritual, they fill the places where they live with chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese. These poor fowls are huddled together in coops, or crowded into pens, generally in the basement of the house, and make an incessant noise. The smell, too, from fifty or a hundred geese is indescribable and intolerable. And these people live in an adjoining room, and wonder that any person finds their practice obnoxious.
¹⁴

Thursdays and Fridays, Jewish shoppers would descend on the farms and select their bird by blowing between the tail feathers for a glimpse of the skin. The yellower the skin, the fatter the bird. With the housewife looking on, the animal was slaughtered in the yard by an itinerant
shochet
, his only equipment a curved knife and a barrel filled with sawdust to collect the blood.

Though East Side farmers trafficked in all types of domestic fowl, their bestseller was geese. In tenements along Bayard, Hester, Essex and Ludlow streets, where basements doubled as goose pens, East Side goose farmers did a booming business despite frequent raids by the sanitary police. Some were issued fines, others were hauled off to jail, but Jewish farmers persisted, just as the Irish had done a generation earlier. The Jewish demand for goose meant steady profits, and East Side farms continued to multiply along with the Jewish population.

In later years, Jewish goose-farming expanded from a cottage industry to a major commercial enterprise, with large poultry yards lining the East River. By the 1920s, the kosher poultry trade was lucrative enough to attract organized crime, and a racketeering operation grew up around the city’s kosher slaughterhouses.
¹⁵
By 1900, the tenement goose farmers had been reduced to piecework as “dry pickers,” or feather-pluckers, paid just a few cents per bird. Jewish women were also hired as “goose stuffers,” using skills they had acquired centuries ago and passed down from mother to daughter. A widely printed newspaper story from 1903, titled “Some Queer East Side Vocations,” describes what became of the birds’ yellowy-beige, overgrown livers:

They are made up into a sort of paste, chopped fine with onions, garlic, and other strong-smelling seasoning, or are fried in fat, after being dipped in cracker crumbs…. When these delicacies are to be had on the menu of a kosher restaurant, a card is hung on the window to that effect just as a Christian restaurant announces the fact that it has soft-shell crabs or North River shad.
¹⁶

As for the fat-laden skin, it was diced and heated to produce “the rich, thick grease” better known as schmaltz.

If a whole fattened goose was beyond the means of the tenement homemaker, she could buy odds and ends—giblets, necks, wings, and skin—cheap but flavorsome parts, if one knew how to handle them. A savvy cook, for example, could create a faux foie gras using goose fat, giblets, and regular chicken livers:

IMITATION PATE DE FOIE GRAS

Take as many livers and gizzards of any kind of fowl as you may have on hand; add to these three tablespoons of chicken or goose fat, a finely chopped onion, one tablespoon of pungent sauce, and salt and white pepper to taste. Boil the livers until quite done and drain; when cold, rub into a smooth paste. Take some of the fat and chopped onion and simmer together slowly for ten minutes. Strain through a thin muslin bag, pressing the bag tightly, turn into a bowl and mix with the seasoning; work all together for a long time, then grease a bowl or cups and press this mixture into them; when soft cut up the gizzards into bits and lay between the mixture. You may season this highly, or to suit taste.
¹⁷