97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (5 page)

The Vienna Bakery arrived on the gastronomic scene like a visiting dignitary. Alongside the actual bakery, Fleischmann opened an elegant café that quickly became a favorite dining spot among German intellectuals and opera stars. It was also popular with New York society women, who flocked to the bakery after a strenuous morning of shopping on the Ladies Mile, the strip of department stores that once ran along Lower Broadway. Of all the dishes on the menu, Vienna bread was the star attraction. When Teddy Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York in the 1890s, he used to walk uptown from his office on Mulberry Street and stop at the bakery for a lunch of Vienna bread and milk. From Fleischmann’s bakery, Vienna bread spread to German bake shops around the city, but the stores most likely to carry it were on the Lower East Side. An 1877 article on the Vienna-bread phenomenon opens with the following observations:

One remarkable result of the Centennial exhibition is the striking and admirable fact that Vienna bread is now to be bought all over New York. Indeed, we are quite sure that the genuine article is now more easily procurable in this city than in the Austrian capital. You will find it in the Bowery, and in the streets crossing that elegant avenue; nay, you shall not enter a little baker’s shop in Mackerelville without finding at least Vienna rolls upon the counter.
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When Louis Fleischmann died in 1904, the Vienna Bakery had already lost its glamour, though it remained in business for several decades. The craze for Vienna bread was also starting to fade. The precise date is hard to pinpoint, but sometime after World War I, when Germans and their food fell out of favor, it began its final descent into obscurity. Even so, Fleischmann’s legacy continues, visible on every packet of Fleischmann’s Instant Yeast, the brand most used by American bakers for over a century.

The greatest contribution made by German bakers to the American kitchen came in the form of yeast-based cakes, which began to appear in East Side bakeries during the second half of the nineteenth century. Though all were made from the same basic dough, they came in an assortment of shapes and with a variety of toppings and fillings. There were round cakes crowned with apple slices, ring-shaped cakes filled with chopped nuts or poppy seeds, pretzel-shaped cakes, and cakes that were rolled up like snails then brushed with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar, and currants. The allure of these buttery confections quickly leapfrogged beyond
Kleindeutschland
into the wider city. The Germans called them
kuchen,
but we know them as coffee cake.

In the 1870s, the
New York Times
ran a food-related column on their women’s page, called “The Household.” Most columns opened with a round-up of what New Yorkers could expect to find at the market that week, which foods were in good supply, which were scarce, and current prices. The market news was followed by a selection of recipes and household tips covering a broad range of very practical topics, like how to make glue or how to stop one’s shoes from squeaking. The column ended with questions and requests from readers, including this one, which ran in 1876: “I would like a receipt for pumpkin pie and German coffee-bread or coffee-cake like you get in the bakeries in New York and which cannot be found in the country.—JEWEL”
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Unfortunately, it seems that Jewel never got a response, but over the next few decades, recipes for German coffee cake began showing up in American newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks. The following recipe for a kind of circular coffee cake called a
kranzkuchen
is courtesy of a German-American housewife who shared her kuchen-making technique with a New York reporter. It appeared in an 1897 feature under the headline “Toothsome German Dishes, Lessons To Be Learned From The People Who Eat Five Meals A Day.”

K
RANZKUCHEN

Take two pounds of flour, a pint and a half of milk, three eggs, a quarter of a pound of butter. Set a sponge with one pint of milk warmed, flour to make a stiff batter, and one cake of compressed yeast. When it has risen sufficiently, add the other ingredients, the butter being worked into the flour; then knead well. The cake should be rolled, or better, pressed out with the fingers very thin for baking…. The dough is…brushed over with melted butter, and upon the thin cake, sugar, cinnamon, chopped almonds, currants, and raisins are laid. The whole is rolled as a jelly cake, and then formed into a ring, Kranz, or double ring, pretzel, as desired, and also baked in a moderate oven. When this is done, a thin frosting of white of egg and sugar is spread over it, and the result is a very delicious cake, which is eaten with an excellent cup of coffee.
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Among the Germans’ most far-reaching gifts to American food ways wasn’t a food at all…. Beginning with the earliest settlements in Dutch New Amsterdam, our European ancestors displayed a keen fascination with the making and drinking of alcohol. There were practical reasons for this taste: drinking water during that era was often polluted. A strong taste for beer among seventeenth-century New Yorkers gave way in the following century to the widespread consumption of locally produced rum, the same throat-scorching drink that played such an important role in the colonial slave trade. (Throughout the eighteenth century, rum was the single most important American export, much of it shipped to Africa and traded for living cargo.) In the years following the revolution, as the American rum industry began to falter, farmers in western states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois turned their crops into liquor. Corn-based bourbon and grain-based whiskey soon eclipsed rum to become the new national drinks. Through most of this period, Americans continued to gulp down homemade forms of alcohol, including cider, apple jack, and dandelion wine. The one drink they did not have was lager, the crisp German-style beer so familiar to us today.

Before 1840, all beer produced in the United States was English-style ale, full-bodied and slightly fruity-tasting, with a deep caramel color and a high alcohol content. Following British brewing methods, it was made with a type of yeast that floats on the surface of the brew and ferments rather quickly at relatively high temperatures. German immigrant brewers brought to the United States a separate brewing tradition that was based on a different strain of yeast, one that sinks in the vat. Known as bottom yeast, it ferments more slowly and at much lower temperatures, producing a beer that is dryer, paler, and more refreshing than ale.

The first German breweries in New York were small operations employing five or six men. German brewers followed the same basic plan as immigrant bakers: under the watchful eye of a skilled brew master, the brewery workers put in sixteen-hour days of hard labor. In return, they received a small salary (between six and twelve dollars a month) plus room and board, along with all the beer they could drink. Since it took roughly one thousand dollars to open a brewery, the lager entrepreneur—unlike other immigrant businessmen—was a person of means. The great majority were established beer manufacturers who brought to America a lifetime of brewing experience, including their own closely guarded brewing formula. Two of the first to get started in New York were a pair of German brothers, Max and Frederick Schaefer, who opened their Manhattan brewery in 1842. At the time, most of the city’s lager drinkers came from within the German community, but that was soon to change:

When lager was first introduced to New York by the Schaefers, they kept a tavern on Seventh Avenue, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets. Americans, hearing the praises of the new beverage and seeing their Teutonic friends roll their eyes and smack their lips in ecstatic contemplation and enjoyment of it, used to make bold essays at its consumption, with the almost universal result of being intensely disgusted by its novel bitter taste. With many contemptuous ejaculations, wry faces, and much sputtering and rinsing of their mouths with the familiar whisky, they would revile and condemn the Deutscher’s delight. The first beer saloon downtown was started on Broadway, just a little below Canal street, where similar experiments and disappointments were long the order of the day. Soon after, lager beer saloons appeared with almost magical rapidity all over the City. New York seemed to have broken out with a rash of them scarcely more than five years later. It was not until about 1855, however, that any great number of Americans took kindly to the German drink. Gradually they began to like the stuff.
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The Schaefers represent only one of the German beer-making dynasties to emerge in nineteenth-century America. The complete list contains some very familiar names, including Frederick Miller, Adolphus Busch, Captain Frederick Pabst, and Joseph Schlitz.

For uptown New Yorkers, a cool glass of lager was the ideal warm-weather drink. For residents of
Kleindeutschland
, it was a daily staple, a fact which non-Germans marveled over: “They drink it in the morning, at noon, in the evening and late at night, during their labors and their rest, alone and with friends…They take lager as we do oxygen into our lungs—appearing to live and thrive on it.”
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Just about every block in the German wards had at least one beer saloon, establishments where men like Mr. Glockner went to read the daily papers, play cards, talk politics, and conduct their business. The East Side saloons were the working man’s version of a private club:

A German must have time for his libations. He cannot march up to the bar, pour out a drink, dash it down without the possibility of tasting it, toss the money over the counter, and rush out like an ignited sky-rocket, as the majority of Americans do. Tables, chairs, newspapers, cigars or pipes, and friends are not merely comfortable additions, but actual essentials to his enjoyment. Instead of a quarter of a minute he wants at least a quarter of an hour for the proper enjoyment of a drink. Conversation is another essential. However taciturn the German may appear among others, let him sit down at one of these tables and get his glass of lager beer and a listening friend, and if anyone desires to know how much talk a human tongue can reel off in any given period, then is the time to listen.
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Americans consumed their alcohol with a rebellious drink-to-get-drunk attitude. One result of that was the close association between drinking and brawling in American life. The Germans, by contrast, reveled in the communal spirit that developed after a glass or two of lager. They drank methodically, pacing themselves like marathoners to wring out every possible ounce of pleasure. Though Americans adopted beer as their national drink, they never fully acquired the Germans’ flair for savoring it.

For German home consumption, parents would send one of their kids down to the local saloon with a tin pitcher or pail—East Siders called them “growlers”—which the barkeep would fill for around fifteen cents. The sight of young East Side kids shuffling home with growlers full of beer was commonplace enough to catch the attention of Jacob Riis, New York’s best-known social reformer. In his now-classic
How the Other Half Lives
, Riis offers a possibly apocryphal story about one East Side boy, who spent his Saturday ferrying growlers to his father’s workplace. By evening, the kid was so drunk he disappeared into a cellar to “sleep off the effects of his own share in the rioting.” On Monday morning, after a weekend of desperate searching, the boy was discovered by his parents, dead and half-eaten by rats.
²⁴

In contrast to their American neighbors, the Germans saw beer as a family drink. On Sunday afternoon, entire immigrant families (babies included) celebrated their one day of leisure with a trip to the cavernous beer halls that lined the Bowery. The largest and best known was the Atlantic Gardens—a somewhat misleading name, since it wasn’t a garden at all, but a long, barrel-vaulted room large enough to hold a blimp, or maybe two. It was a highly functional space, designed to house as many people as possible. From the floor to the top of the ceiling, every interior surface was adorned with an intricate pattern of swirling plaster medallions and curlicue borders. The hangar-like proportions of the hall, combined with the fancy plasterwork, gave it the feel of a gilded shed. A raised gallery that projected into the room provided a stage for musicians. During the day, sunlight streamed in the hall from skylights at either end of the building. At night, it glowed with the light of three gas-burning chandeliers, each one of them six feet in diameter.

On a pleasant Sunday afternoon, when the room was full to capacity, the level of activity inside the Atlantic Gardens must have been dizzying. As an all-female band played from the gallery, a crowd of three thousand men, women, and children were drinking, talking, and laughing. The youngest family members, babies who were too young to sit at the table, were plunked on the floor by their mothers’ feet, where they presented a tripping hazard to the hurrying waiters, their trays loaded with beer mugs.