97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (9 page)

Though food in the United States was more varied and abundant than it had been in Ireland, hunger was still a daily presence. After all, the bounty of the American market extended only to people with work, which, in bad times, could be elusive. Alice McDonald emigrated to the United States around 1866, during the rocky economic years directly following the Civil War. In a letter to her mother, Alice sums up her troubles. (The spelling and punctuation are her own.)

I take this opportunity of writing these few lines to you hoping to find you all in good helth as this leves me in at present…I wish I nevr came to New York it is a hell on earth…times is bad here for the last to years flour is 16 Dollars per barel beef 35 per pound…Butter by retell is seventy cents per pound you may think how the money has to go.
¹⁰

Their dream of a better life gone sour, struggling immigrants had nothing to look forward to, so they looked back instead, savoring the foods of a former existence. Mary Anne Sadlier, born in Ireland in 1820, was a popular nineteenth-century author of didactic or instructional novels for immigrant readers. This is how one of her characters, a near-destitute immigrant, compares America’s scarcity to the good foods he remembers in Ireland:

Things are not so plentiful here…We haven’t the big fat pots of bacon and cabbage, or broth that a spoon would stand in; no, or the fine baskets of laughing potatoes that would do a man’s heart good to look at.
¹¹

The hulking pots of cabbage and bacon may have never existed in precisely the way he remembers. In all probability, they were three-quarters empty, but in his memory the hungry immigrant was free to embellish his culinary past, filling the pots and thickening the broth. Cabbage and bacon and boiled potatoes were poor people’s food, according to some, but to this homesick immigrant they represented the height of abundance.

The above excerpts notwithstanding, references to food in early Irish-American writing are extremely hard to find. Like many immigrants, the Irish never imagined that their daily diet was worthy of documentation, and as it happens, the rest of America seemed to agree. Their potato-based cuisine was far less intriguing to outsiders than Italian pasta or German sausage, and journalists largely ignored it. As a result, the Irish immigrant kitchen is a world largely closed to us. However, a quantitative picture of the Irish-American cook can be found in the multiple cost-of-living studies published in the first decades of the twentieth century. Several were conducted by the United States Department of Labor to help establish fair working wages. The question of household budget and how it was dispensed was also taken up by academics of the era, including a sociologist named Louise B. More, who organized a detailed study of how working-class New Yorkers earned and spent their money. Over the course of two years, she followed two hundred families living in Greenwich Village, an ethnically diverse neighborhood with a hefty percentage of Irish. Her report,
Wage-Earner’s Budgets
, provides us with a rare glimpse of Irish-American home-cooking a generation after the Moores.

According to More, the Irish-American housewife controlled the family purse strings, spending more on food than any other item, including the rent. The study also tells us exactly how she stocked her kitchen. Here, for example, are the weekly food expenses for a family of ten:

Milk, 2 bottles a day: $1.25

Eggs: 50

Three cans of condensed milk for tea (“and to spread on bread when the children have no butter”): 27

One quart of potatoes a day at .10 a quart: 70

Vegetables: 70

Bread, 5 loaves at .05=.25 a day: 1.75

One and one-half pound of butter at .30 a pound: 45

Jam, .05 a day, except on Sunday: 30

One-half pound of tea, no coffee: 20

One can of Baker’s cocoa: 18

7 lbs of sugar at .20 for 3½ lbs: 40

Meat .25 a day: 1.75

Sundries: 18

Total
:
$8.50
¹²

Potatoes, milk, oatmeal, and butter were core staples among the working-class Irish families, all foods familiar to the immigrant, though not perhaps in the same quantities. Cabbage, onions, and turnips, the few vegetables consumed by Irish-Americans, were familiar too. Other foods, however, were acquired in America, like bread and tea. But a greater change was the new abundance of meat. In Ireland, meat appeared on the dinner table several times a year, if that much. In America, mutton, beef, and veal became everyday fare, fried simply in a pan or cooked into stews for the evening meal. One woman in the study devised an ingenuous soup recipe based on salt pork, onion, and macaroni, an ingredient adopted from one of her Italian neighbors. An entire pot of it cost only 6 cents.

Another innovation: sugar. As the study shows, the Irish-American housewife went through several pounds a week, using it to sweeten the tea that she consumed more as a food than a beverage. Rich in caffeine, a cup of sweetened tea was an inexpensive way to stave off hunger between meals, while supplying the homemaker with the energy required to complete her daily tasks. Where Irishmen were notorious for their whiskey intake, Irishwomen were known for their tea habit—“tea inebriates” is how one doctor described them. The balance of the sugar went into the children’s cocoa or was used for baking pies, cakes, and puddings, a skill the homemaker may have learned in her servant days. Below is a recipe for a “cheap pudding” from the
Irish Times
:

C
HEAP
P
UDDING

Gather up all crusts and stale pieces of bread until you have sufficient for an ordinary-sized pudding; soak in water overnight, then pour off and add two tablespoonfuls of flour or rice, which goes to substitute for eggs; one ounce of raisins, the same of currants; one tablespoonful of cinnamon or whatever seasoning is preferred; add milk consistent, and mix well. Put in a buttered bowl to steam for two hours; or put it into a pudding dish to bake.
¹³

Bridget and Joseph, along with the great majority of immigrants coming to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, entered the country through Castle Garden in Lower Manhattan. Originally built as a fort, it was converted into an amusement hall in 1824 before its final transformation into the nation’s first immigrant landing depot in 1855. The octagonal main hall and the complex of buildings surrounding it were a full-ser vice operation, complete with a foreign money exchange, railway ticket office, hospital, quarantine, post office, showers, and restaurant. Here, immigrants got their first literal taste of America. It came in the form of sausage, pie, bread (both brown and white), beer, and cigars.

Each morning, the New York newspapers printed the names and ETAs of ships scheduled to arrive at the Garden that day. Scanning the daily announcements, immigrants living in and around the city could meet their relatives in the Castle Garden reception room. Like an audience in a theater, the crowd in the reception room watched the unspooling drama of one teary-eyed reunion after another. “It is certainly interesting to witness these meetings,” one observer notes:

Here is the name of a comely Irish girl called out, she enters blushing and is the next moment in the arms of her faithful sweetheart, who left her home in Ireland three years ago, and has now sent for her to make her his bride. There is kissing and crying and squeezing, and applause from the bystanders, who for the moment forget that they themselves will probably do the same sort of thing.
¹⁴

A scene very much like this (only the genders would have been reversed) may have taken place between Bridget and Joseph. Seventeen-year-old Bridget Meehan landed at New York’s Castle Garden in 1863. Two years later, Joseph Moore, a twenty-year-old Dubliner, made the same trip. By the end of the year, the two were married and parents of their first of eight children. Judging from the accelerated sequence of events, Joseph and Bridget had met in Ireland, and were likely engaged at the time of Bridget’s departure.

Like many newly landed Irish, they found lodging in Manhattan’s crowded sixth ward. Their first daughter, Mary Catherine, was born at 65 Mott Street in the Five Points, a section of the Lower East Side famous for its high crime rate, decrepit housing, and unsanitary living conditions. (Outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and other deadly infections were commonplace, and mortality rates were higher in the Five Points than most other city neighborhoods.) Over the next ten years, Bridget gave birth to seven more children: Jane, Agnes, Cecilia, Theresa, Veronica, Josephine, and Elizabeth. Only four survived childhood.

Jane Moore Hanrahan, circa 1900, daughter of Bridget and Joseph Moore.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum

Roger Joseph Hanrahan, a baggage clerk, and Jane Moore were married in New York in 1895.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum

After Mott Street, they lived at 150 Forsyth Street and remained there for a relatively extended stay, from 1866 to 1869. With three young daughters, they picked up again and moved into 97 Orchard Street in the heart of German
Kleindeutschland
.

Immigrants who arrived in the United States with no family to meet them spent their first days or weeks in a boardinghouse. To help new arrivals find a reputable establishment (many were not), an area had been set aside within Castle Garden, where licensed boardinghouse-keepers could solicit potential customers. Just beyond Castle Garden, immigrants met up with a much shadier class of boardinghouse representative. Known as “runners,” they were scam artists of the first order, regularly vilified in the local press. To rope in customers, runners employed a handful of standard ploys: they would snatch the immigrants’ baggage and offer to cart it—free of charge—anywhere in the city, delivering it to a local boardinghouse where it was immediately “put into storage.” With his baggage held hostage, the immigrant was forced to spend the night, paying any fee the owner demanded. Or they would abscond with one of the immigrants’ children, forcing the parents to follow. More insidious runners played on feelings of national kinship to establish a rapport with their marks and win their trust. Then they fleeced them.

In 1867, the Irish politician and newspaperman John Francis Maguire toured the United States to see how his countrymen were faring in their new home, and published his observations in a book called
The Irish in America
. To illustrate the depravity of boardinghouse runners, he included the following story, told to him by a great, broad-shouldered Irishman “over six feet in his stocking vamps.” On landing in New York, the strapping Irishman was

[p]ounced upon by two runners, one seizing the box of tools, and the other confiscating the clothes. The future American citizen assured his obliging friends that he was quite capable of carrying his own luggage; but no, they should relieve him—this stranger, and guest of the republic—of that trouble…He remembered that the two gentlemen wore very pronounced green neckties, and spoke with a richness of accent that denoted special if not conscientious cultivation; and on his arrival at the boardinghouse, he was cheered with the announcement that its proprietor was from “the ould counthry, and loved every sod of it, God bless!”
¹⁵

A two-night stay at the boardinghouse cost the Irishman a small fortune, more than he would have paid for a sumptuous dinner at the Astor Hotel.

Immigrant boardinghouses were scattered through Lower Manhattan, but were concentrated near the wharves. They were especially thick along Hudson, Washington, and Greenwich Streets, because of their proximity to Castle Garden. Here, one could find boardinghouses with owners of every nationality, each patronized by their respective countrymen. No group, however, was better represented than the Irish. Not just in New York, but throughout urban America, Irish entrepreneurs opened boardinghouses and hotels, a business they had no particular background in but which answered a pressing demand for immigrant housing and which they learned “on the job.”