97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (17 page)

In the tenement kitchen, the luxuriousness of goose fat elevated the most prosaic ingredients. In the following recipe, a dab of goose fat transforms onion and rye bread into a delicacy.

Lightly sauté one yellow onion, thinly sliced, in four tablespoons goose or chicken fat. Spread cooked onion on good rye bread. Season generously with crushed black pepper. For a more substantial snack, top with sliced hardboiled egg.
¹⁸

As modern methods of chicken breeding improved in the twentieth century, the goose lost its place of prominence on the Jewish table, replaced by its smaller, more economical cousin.

An East Side “chicken market,” 1939. By the 1920s, chicken had largely replaced geese in the Jewish immigrant’s diet.
Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

Chicken fat now took the place of goose fat as the Jew’s favorite cooking fat. The raison d’être for poultry fat of any kind, however, was essentially erased by the invention of scientifically engineered cooking fat derived from vegetables. The new hydrogenated fats came with many names; Flake White, Spry, Snowdrift, and Nyafat, a vegetable shortening pre-seasoned with onion, are just a few. The name best known today, however, is Crisco, a product created by Procter & Gamble, a Cincinnati-based soap manufacturer, in the years before World War I.

Tellingly, Crisco was originally developed as a cheaper alternative to the lard and beef tallow traditionally used in soaps and candles. Looking to expand its uses, Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco to American cooks in 1911, presenting it as a more economical and “more digestible” substitute for lard and butter. There was nothing Jewish about Procter & Gamble, but in time the company recognized the value of its product to Jewish cooks. Most important, Crisco was pareve, or neutral—a ritually permissible partner to either dairy or meat. The Jewish cook could bake with it, braise, or fry, pairing it with any ingredient she chose. No other fat in the Jewish pantry was as versatile, not even the beloved goose schmaltz.
Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Housewife
, a promotional cookbook published by Procter & Gamble in 1933, allowed the kosher cook to imagine the freedom awaiting her in the blue-and-white can. Clearly aimed at immigrants (the book was published with both Yiddish and English recipes), it represents the demise of poultry fat as a Jewish staple, bringing to a close a millennium of culinary tradition.

For a brief time in the 1870s, 97 Orchard was home to a mix of Irish, German, and Jewish families. For each of these groups, dinnertime likely included potatoes, herring, onion, cabbage (either pickled or fresh), lard or goose fat, and some form of dairy. These were the foods that sustained the nineteenth-century East Sider, regardless of national background. Despite this facade of a common cuisine, however, each immigrant group brought to the dinner table food-based assumptions that shaped their experience of eating. German East Siders held up their ancestral foods as cultural trophies, celebrating their German past in grand-scale and very public eating events. The Irish, by contrast, celebrated with drink and music and dance, but confined the serious work of feeding themselves to the privacy of their homes. As for the Jews, they came to the dinner table with a distinct and highly developed zest for eating, a sensibility so evolved and pronounced it deserves a term of its own: food-joy. Like the fondness for fat, Jewish food-joy was born of scarcity. (A firsthand knowledge of hunger was perhaps the single greatest common denominator among all East Side immigrants.) But it was more than that, too. Jewish food-joy was grounded in the elaborate system of culinary laws and rituals that transformed the everyday business of eating into a sacred act. As the rabbis explained, God had honored the Jews with a culinary mandate. Where Gentiles could eat as they pleased, Jews were given the dietary laws as an outward sign of their special relationship with God. In return, they obeyed the laws as a show of devotion, turning mealtime into a form of sacrament. For Jews who followed the letter of the law, blessings were required for every morsel that crossed their lips, continuing reminders of food’s divine provenance.

A core belief in the sacredness of food was the linchpin of Jewish food culture, always simmering in the Jewish eater’s thoughts. Fridays, in the Jewish kitchen, cooks like Mrs. Gumpertz saved their best ingredients and marshaled their skills for a meal of cosmic significance: Sabbath dinner, a celebration of nothing less than the miracle of creation. The midweek chanting now exploded into full-throated singing and the Jews feasted, even if that meant living on tea and potatoes for the rest of the week. Even for the poorest Jew, Sabbath dinner was a meal set aside for enjoying, quite literally, the sacred fruits of creation. Skimping was out of the question. At the Sabbath table, Jews recast the earthly pleasure of eating as a show of gratitude to the heavenly creator. Pleasure, in fact, was mandatory. After all, God’s first commandment to Adam and Eve was to savor the bounty of Eden.

On the Lower East Side, the pleasures of food became a common theme in immigrant writing. In the fictional world of Anzia Yezierska, a Russian-born writer who immigrated to New York around 1890, food was the proverbial ray of light in an otherwise bleak experience. The typical Yezierska heroine is the young East Side woman, oppressed by the ugliness of the ghetto, exploited by her sweatshop boss, but still bursting with life. Craving beauty, she finds it in food. The following exchange between the despondent Hannah Brieneh and her neighbor, Mrs. Pelz, is from
Hungry Hearts
, Yezierska’s first collection:

“I know what is with you the matter,” said Mrs. Pelz. “You didn’t eat yet today. When it is empty in the stomach, the whole world looks black. Come, only let me give you something good to taste in the mouth. That will freshen you up.” Mrs. Pelz went to the cupboard and brought out the saucepan of gefulte fish that she had cooked for dinner, and placed it in front of Hannah Brieneh. “Give a taste my fish,” she said, taking one slice on a spoon, and handing it to Hannah Brieneh with a piece of bread.

“Oy wei. How it meltz through all the bones,” she exclaimed, brightening as she ate. “May it be for good luck to all,” she exalted, waving aloft the last precious bite. Mrs. Pelz was so flattered that she even ladled up a spoonful of gravy.

“There is a bit of onion and carrot in it,” she said, as she handed it to her neighbor.

Hannah Brieneh sipped the gravy drop by drop, like a connoisseur sipping wine.

“Ahh. A taste of that gravy lifts me to heaven!”
¹⁹

Such is the magic of food-joy! If God created the fruits of the earth, a second act of creation took place in the kitchen, where homemakers performed their most valued task—cooking for the family. Appreciative Jewish eaters expressed their gratitude with extravagant praise, an echo to the food blessings, only these words were for mortal ears.

As tenement Jews moved up in the world, they became proficient in English; they changed their manner of dress and often their names, and adopted new habits. Men took up cigars; women coiffed their hair and scented their handkerchiefs. Jews who made the voyage to Upper Manhattan (anywhere above 14th Street) invented a hybrid culture that was reflected with particular clarity in the way they ate. One early chronicler of that culture is the largely forgotten writer Henry Harland, also known as Sidney Luska, Harland’s nom de plume in the early part of his career. Beginning in the 1880s, the Catholic-born Harland went undercover as a German Jew to write a series of romantic novels set mainly on the Lower East Side. The most successful was
Yoke of the Thorah
, about a young East Side Jew who marries—tragically, as it turns out—into an uptown family of shirtwaist magnates.

Sunday dinner in the Blums’ Lexington Avenue townhouse is a patchwork of seemingly incompatible foods and food traditions somehow pieced together in a way that makes sense to those at the table. The meal, which begins with the traditional blessing, fills the entire afternoon: ten courses and five kinds of wine, followed by an after-dinner liqueur and cigars for the men; in other words, the quintessential Gilded Age banquet. The banqueters, however, eat with the same earthy sense of relish as their downtown brothers and sisters:

During the soup, not a word was spoken. Everybody devoted himself religiously to his spoon. At last, however, leaning back in his chair, heaving a long-drawn sigh, and wiping the tears of enjoyment from his eyes, Mr. Blum exclaimed fervently, “Ach! Dot was splendid soup!” And his spouse wagged her jolly old head approvingly at him, from across the table, and gurgled:
“Du lieber Gott!”

This was the signal for a general loosening of tongues. A very loud and animated conversation at once broke forth from all directions. It was carried on, for the most part, in something like English; but every now and then it betrayed a tendency to lapse into German.

“Vail,”
announced Mr. Blum, with a pathetically reflective air, “when I look around this table and see all these smiling faces, and smell dot cooking and drink dot wine—my
Gott!—
dot reminds me of the day I landed at the Baittery forty-five years ago, with just exactly six dollars in my pocket. I didn’t much think then I’d be here today. Hey, Rebecca?”

“Ach, God is goot,” Mrs. Blum responded, lifting her hand and casting her eyes toward the ceiling.
²⁰

Rich as Midas, but still tears of enjoyment over a bowl of soup. The soup recipe below is from Aunt Babette:

W
HITE
B
EAN
S
OUP

To one quart of small dried beans add as much water as you wish to have soup. You may add any cold scraps of roast beef, mutton, poultry, veal or meat sauce that you may happen to have. Boil until the beans are very soft. You may test them in this way: Take up a few in a spoon and blow on them very hard, if the skin separates from the beans you may press them through a sieve, or take up the meat or scraps and vegetables and serve without straining. Add salt and pepper to taste. A great many prefer this soup unstrained. The water in which has been boiled a smoked tongue may be used for this soup. This may be thickened like split pea soup. Excellent.
²¹

Lentil soup was another hearty staple of the German-Jewish homemaker—thick like a stew and smoky-flavored from the addition of sausage. The recipe for lentil soup below comes to us from Kela Nussbaum, a Bavarian homemaker born to a long line of accomplished home cooks, who immigrated to the United States shortly after World War II. Many of Mrs. Nussbaum’s recipes, including this one, were kept in the family for centuries, preserved and passed down in handwritten form. Mrs. Nussbaum was the great-granddaughter of Rabbi Bamberger of Wurstberg, the illustrious nineteenth-century educator. In accordance with family tradition, lentil soup was known as “hiding soup” in the Nussbaums’ kitchen, a reference to the way the sausage tended to “hide” amid the lentils.

L
ENTIL
S
OUP

1 1-pound bag brown lentil

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

1 large onion, finely chopped

3 stalks celery, finely sliced

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 ringwurst (approximately 1 pound)

2 tablespoons flour

salt and pepper

Soak lentils in abundant cold water until they expand, about 2 hours. Drain and set aside. In a large soup pot, sauté the onion and celery until soft and onion turns pale gold. Add garlic and cook until fragrant. Add ringwurst, whole, drained lentils, and 7 cups of water. Bring to a gentle boil. Turn down heat and simmer until lentils are barely tender. In a cup, mix flour with a few tablespoons of cooking broth to form a roux. When free of lumps, return roux to the soup pot. Stir and continue cooking until lentils are fully tender but still hold their shape. Remove ringwurst, slice into discs, and return to the pot. Season with salt and pepper.
²²

Natalie Gumpertz resided on Orchard Street for a total of fifteen years, four years with her husband, and eleven years without him. But while she remained stationary, the world around her was in motion. German East Siders, most of them Protestant, were leaving the neighborhood, making room for the great influx of Russian Jews, which began in the early 1880s and continued for another twenty-five years. With this shift, the language of the street switched from German to Yiddish, followed by the shop signs. In 1886, John Schneider closed his basement saloon after nearly a quarter-century. Shortly thereafter, the space was taken over by two Jewish merchants, Israel Luftgarden, a butcher, and Wolf Rodensky, who operated a grocery. Both men lived in the building as well, part of its quickly growing Russian population.