97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (2 page)

Once a week the tenement kitchen served as a laundry room. Women and girls were responsible for hauling water up and down the stairs.
CSS Photography Archives, Courtesy of Community Service Society of New York and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

The premium on water shaped the way women cooked in the tenements. Climbing up and down three or four flights of stairs just to wash a dish is strong motivation to cook as simply and efficiently as possible. Lucky for Mrs. Glockner, Germans were expert stew-makers, a very useful culinary skill since it provided an entire meal using a single pot. Following German tradition, lunch was the heartiest meal of the day in the Glockner apartment. In the evening, the family might have boiled eggs, or bread and cheese, but lunch was a time to feast, time to fill your stomach with a good German fricassee of beef or veal or pork, served with boiled dumplings or maybe noodles.

Imagine, for a moment, a typical morning in the Glockner household. Mrs. Glockner is out, shopping for groceries, the baby is upstairs with a neighbor, so Mr. Glockner can attend to his accounts. At a small table by the parlor window, bent over his ledger, twirling the end of his rather bushy mustache, he loses himself in the rows of numbers. Very satisfying, he thinks, to see them all lined up so neatly. (After decades as a tailor, he appreciates good craftsmanship.) His thoughts are interrupted by the return of his wife. Hanging her cloak on a brass hook next to the door, she gives her hands a brisk rub to get the circulation back (the fall weather has suddenly turned cold) and lights a fire in the new black stove. Now she turns her attention to fixing the stew. The smell of browning onions reminds her husband that it’s time for his mid-morning snack, so he trots downstairs to Schneider’s Saloon, conveniently located in the basement of the building, for a quick pint of beer and a plate of herring. He spends an hour or so chatting with Schneider, by which time the stew is nearly ready.

Recipes for German stews of the period can be found in the
Praktisches Kochbuch
(
Practical Cookbook
), by Henrietta Davidis, Germany’s answer to Fanny Farmer. Originally published in Germany in 1845, the
Praktisches Kochbuch
offers a sweeping view of what Germans were eating in the nineteenth century. The book was tremendously popular, selling over 240,000 copies in the author’s lifetime. Some of those copies traveled to America in immigrant suitcases. Additional copies were shipped across the Atlantic and sold in German-language bookstores in the United States. In 1879, a German-bookstore owner in Milwaukee, a city with a large German community, published the first American edition of Henrietta Davidis under the title
Praktisches Kochbuch fur die Deutschen in Amerika
(or
Practical Cookbook for Germans in America
). A bestseller in immigrant circles, the book was reprinted several times. The first English translation, which appeared in 1897, reached a different and wider audience. It was for the immigrants’ children and grandchildren, people who spoke English as their first language, and who had perhaps lost touch with the cooking traditions of their German ancestors. But the book also appealed to ordinary Americans of any background, since by 1897, many had sampled German cooking and wanted to know more.

The
Practical Cookbook
contains many stew-like recipes, some called “fricassees” and some “ragouts,” but all of them savory concoctions of meat, vegetables, broth, and assorted seasonings. A recipe for stewed duck with dumpling uses pork fat, peppercorns, cloves, bay leaves, onion, and lemon peel to flavor the cooking stock. A recipe for stewed leg of mutton calls for the meat, which “should not be too fresh,” to be simmered in water and beer, and seasoned with “cloves, peppercorns, three bay leaves, a few whole onions, and a bunch of green herbs, such as garden rue, marjoram, and sweet basil.”
¹
The generous use of spices and fresh herbs, the hint of tartness from lemon or vinegar, make all these dishes typically German. But for even more concentrated flavor, the
Practical Cookbook
provides a recipe for spiced vinegar, a condiment for sprinkling over stews at the table, like a German form of Tabasco sauce. The potent mixture calls for a “half ounce of mace, some cloves (or, if preferred, garlic), ginger, one ounce of mustard seed, a pinch of whole white pepper, a piece of grated horseradish, a handful of salt, six or eight bay leaves,” all steeped in a jar of vinegar along with sixty whole walnuts.
²

In the world of German stews, perhaps no dish was more highly flavored than
hasenpfeffer
, a ragout made from wild rabbit. Immigrants brought their love for
hasenpfeffer
to New York, where German saloon-keepers gave bowls of it to anyone who paid for a drink. Below is a recipe for
hasenpfeffer
by Gesine Lemcke, a German immigrant who opened a successful cooking school on Manhattan’s Union Square. She also wrote cooking columns for the
Brooklyn Eagle
, which is where this recipe appeared in 1899:

H
ASENPFEFFER

Cut two well-cleaned rabbits into pieces, season them with one tablespoonful salt, put them in a bowl, add two large onions cut in slices, six cloves, twelve whole allspices, and half tablespoonful whole peppers, cover with vinegar; cover the bowl and let stand three days. When ready to cook, put the rabbits with the vinegar and all the other ingredients into a saucepan over the fire, add half pint water and tablespoonful sugar, boil till tender. In the meantime, melt one heaping tablespoonful butter, add one heaping tablespoon flour, stir until light brown, strain the rabbit broth, add it to the flour and butter, stir and cook to a smooth creamy sauce, lay the rabbit in a hot dish and pour the sauce over it. Serve with small browned potatoes cooked in deep fat or serve with potato dumplings.
³

The following is a recipe for German-style veal stew with celery root and dried pear. Lemon, mace, clove, and bay leaves are the main seasonings, a combination often found in German-American cookbooks of the period. Bringing together meat, root vegetables, and fruit is another common German touch.

V
EAL
S
TEW WITH
D
RIED
P
EAR

2 ½ pounds veal stew meat

½ pound veal or beef bones

3 tablespoons butter

1 large onion, chopped

½ cup chopped parsley root

1 rounded tablespoon flour

small pinch of mace (about 1/8 teaspoon)

2 whole cloves

1 ½–2 cups beef stock

6 stalks parsley

8 dried pear halves, cut in half lengthwise

1 medium celery root, peeled, cut in half then thinly sliced

½ lemon, thinly sliced into rounds

Rinse the meat and pat dry. In a large Dutch oven or heavy stew pot, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter. When it begins to foam, add veal in batches. Be careful not to crowd the pot or the meat won’t brown properly. Let the veal cook, untouched, five minutes or so before turning it to brown the other side. You should also brown the bones. Remove veal, bones and all, from the pot. To the same pot, add onion and parsley root. Sauté until golden, adding more butter if needed. Add the flour, and stir for a minute or so. Return veal to the pot, seasoning it with salt and pepper, mace and cloves. Add the beef stock, just enough to cover, along with bay leaves, 6 stalks parsley, and dried pear. Simmer very gently for about 1 ½ hours. Add celery root and cook another half hour. In the last ten minutes, add the sliced lemon.
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In German kitchens, the traditional accompaniments to stew were some form of dumplings. Bread dumplings, potato dumplings, flour dumplings, dumplings made with cabbage, bacon, liver, ham, sweetbreads, or even calf’s brain—these are just a few of the dumpling recipes found in early German-American cookbooks. In most volumes, an entire chapter is given over to them, both savory and sweet. The following bread-based recipe for “Green Dumplings,” flecked with bits of chopped parsley, spinach, and chive, is from Henrietta Davidis:

G
REEN
D
UMPLINGS
(
A
S
UABIAN [SIC] RECIPE
)

A handful of parsley, the same quantity of spinach, half as much chervil and chives, chop all together and stew in butter for a few moments. Then mix with 2 grated rolls, 2 eggs, salt and pepper, form into little balls, and let them come just to a boil in the finished soup, or they will fall to pieces. These dumplings are very nice in the Spring.
⁵

The alternative to dumplings was noodles, a Bavarian specialty that German cooks adapted from the Italians, their neighbors to the south. In the German state of Swabia, cooks perfected a technique for making the pebble-shaped noodle known as spaetzle. Bavarians made threadlike soup noodles and thick, chewy noodles eaten as a side dish. Here is Ms. Lemcke’s recipe from 1899:

E
GG
N
OODLES

Put one cup of flour in a bowl, add two eggs, a small piece of butter the size of a hazelnut, a pinch of salt, and two tablespoonfuls cold water, mix this into a dough, adding more flour if necessary, turn the dough onto a board and work it till stiff and smooth, divide it into four parts, roll each part out very thin, hang them over the edge of a bowl to dry, then roll each piece up like a music roll and if the
nudel
s are wanted for soup cut them as fine as possible, and if wanted to be served with fricassee in place of vegetables cut them half-finger wide. As soon as they are cut, shake them apart on a floured board and let them lie until perfectly dry.
⁶

In 1865, Orchard Street alone was home to at least ten grocery stores, most of them German-owned. Ten years earlier, the same stores would have been in Irish hands. As German immigrants flowed into the city in the 1850s, the balance began to shift. By 1860, the German corner grocery had become a New York fixture, not just on the Lower East Side but throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn too.

The trick to running a successful grocery was to “have a little bit of everything and no great quantity of anything.” These stores typically carried a small selection of fruits and vegetables, milk and butter, canned goods, coal, kerosene, kindling wood, sugar, soap, rolled oats, crackers, cigars, and for their German customers, imported delicacies like Westphalian ham, caviar, sausages, sauerkraut, and poppy-seed oil. But their bestselling item was alcohol, usually whiskey, which provided the grocer with most of his income. As it happens, 97 Orchard Street was literally flanked by grocers. If Mrs. Glockner needed a cup of milk or a loaf of bread, she could dash downstairs and buy it from either Frederick Aller at number 95 or Christian Munch at 99. Most likely, she bought on credit, the normal way of doing business for a grocer of the period. At the end of the business week, her husband would drop by the store and pay the bill.

For more serious shopping, Mrs. Glockner hooked her basket over one arm and headed for the public market on Grand Street, one of roughly a dozen scattered through Lower Manhattan. The public markets were large, shedlike structures with rows of individual stalls, the largest by far the Washington Market on the Lower West Side. Conveniently located near the busy docks along the Hudson River, this was the place where most of the food consumed in New York was bought and sold.

A quick scan of city newspapers circa 1860 reveals how much negative attention was generated by the public markets. The main complaint: dirt. The following “warning” ran in the
New York Times
in May 1854:

If you are going to market this morning, be pleased to put on thick, stout shoes, and a dress that will not readily show dirt. For of all the dirty places in the City, our Public Markets are the dirtiest. In the fish markets the floors are slippery and constantly wet. In the meat market, giblets are scattered about the floor, unsightly objects are obtruded at all points, and refuse meats are frequently only swept out under the eaves, and left to disgust all passersby.
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Aside from the filth, the condition of the buildings themselves, patched together and half-disintegrating, was deplorable. Among the most decrepit was the Fulton Market, “a filthy wood-shed with its leaky roof and tottering chimneys.”
⁸
For observers of the time, it was hard to reconcile the dirt and decay of the markets with the stature of New York, the largest, richest city in America. “The Metropolitan city of New York has endured the stigma of being, without question, the most illy-supplied with public food markets of any civilized centre of population of even one-tenth its pretensions,” is how one critic put it.
⁹

The attitude of shamed outrage was just about universal, but not quite. The many accusations hurled at the markets belied an immutable fact, one recognized by a select handful of supporters. The market system supplied New Yorkers with a staggering variety of meats, fish, fowl, vegetables, and fruits. The following description comes from
The Great Metropolis
, Junius Henri Browne’s 1869 guide to New York. At the Washington Market, he tells us,

Nothing is lacking to gratify the palate,—to delight the most jaded appetite. The best beef, mutton, veal and lamb the country affords are displayed upon the stalls. Those roasts and steaks, those hind-quarters, those cutlets, those breasts with luscious sweetbreads, would make an Englishman hungry as he rose from the table. Those delicate bits, so suggestive of soups, would moisten the mouth of a Frenchman. Those piles of rich juicy meats would render an Irishman jubilant over the memory of his determination to emigrate to a land where potatoes were not the chief article of food. What an exhibition of shell-fish, too! Crabs, and lobsters, and oysters in pyramids, yet dripping with sea-water, and the memories of their ocean-bowers fresh about them. And vegetables of every kind, and fruits, foreign and domestic, from the rarest to the commonest, from the melon to the strawberry, from the pine apple to the plum. Fish from the river and mountain stream, from the sea and the lake. Fowls and game of all varieties, from barnyard and marsh, forest and prairie.
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