CHAPTER THREE
Our visit with Mrs. Gumpertz begins on a Friday, late morning, over a steaming pot of fish, a carp. The fish lays snugly in an oblong vessel, like a newborn in a watery cradle. From our current vantage point, it looks intact. In reality, however, the fish has been surgically disassembled and reassembled. It is the kind of culinary operation worthy of the trained professional, yet the responsible party is standing in front of us, an ordinary home cook. The process begins with a slit down the backbone. Mrs. Gumpertz opens the fish the same way one opens a book. Carefully, she scrapes the flesh from the skin, chopping it fine so it forms a paste, what the French call a forcemeat. Reduced to a mere envelope, head at one end, tail at the other, it is now the perfect receptacle for stuffing. Mrs. Gumpertz fills the skin with the paste and sews it shut. She lays the reconstructed carp on a bed of fish bones and onion—sliced but unpeeled—then puts it up to simmer. Just now, she is standing over the open pot, wondering if it needs more time. She prods it with a spoon; the fish is ready. She lifts the pot from the stove, moves it to a chair in the parlor, and leaves it there to cool by an open window. Moments before sundown, start of the Jewish Sabbath, she slices her carp crosswise into ovals and lays them on a plate. The cooking broth, rich in gelatin from the fish bones, has turned to jelly. The onion skin has tinted it gold. Mrs. Gumpertz spoons that up too, dabbing it over the fish in glistening puddles. To a hungry Jew at the end of the workweek, could any sight be more beautiful?
Jewish immigrants landing at Castle Garden, 1880.
Provided courtesy of HarpWeek., LLC
Twenty-two-year-old Natalie Reinsberg emigrated to New York from Ortelsburg, Prussia, in 1858. Her betrothed, Julius Gumpertz, another German Jew, had arrived a year earlier. Their wedding date is unknown, but their first child, Rosa Gumpertz, was born in New York in 1867. A second daughter, Natalea, known to the family as Nannie, was born in 1869, then Olga in 1871. The couple also had a son named Isaac, born in 1873, but he did not survive childhood. The family moved to 97 Orchard Street in 1870, when most of the building’s residents were German-born Catholics or Protestants, and remained on Orchard Street for the next fifteen years, as the neighborhood around them gradually shifted from Gentile to Jewish.
For Jews like the Gumpertzes, the Friday evening meal was reserved for fish, a tradition carried over from Europe. On the Lower East Side, the Sabbath fish tradition brought a stream of basket-wielding shoppers to the intersection of Hester and Norfolk streets, center of the Jewish fish trade in the 1890s. By this time, Hester Street was a full-blown pushcart market open every day except Saturday. The real action, however, began Thursday afternoon and peaked Friday morning, when Jewish women did their Sabbath marketing. This was prime time for the East Side pushcart vendor. Nineteenth-century New Yorkers who ventured downtown from the better neighborhoods above Fourteenth Street were flabbergasted by the scene awaiting them on market day: “There is hardly a foot of Hester Street that is not covered with people during the day. The whole place seems to be in a state of perpetual motion and the occasional visitor is apt to have a feeling of giddiness.”1 At the corner of Norfolk Street, the shoppers reached maximum density, a solid throng of housewives sorting through wagons of perch, whitefish, and carp for the freshest, clearest-eyed specimens. But now we’re jumping ahead, beyond the scope of our present story…. Back in the 1870s, when the Gumpertz family moved to Orchard Street, East Side women bought their provisions from the public market on Essex Street or, perhaps, from one of the roving peddlers—some with baskets, others with wagons or carts—who patrolled the streets of Manhattan.
An illustration from Harper’s Weekly depicting the Hester Street pushcart market, 1884.
Provided courtesy of HarpWeek., LLC
The Friday evening fish recipe was determined by where exactly the immigrant was born. If she came from Bavaria, for example, the housewife stewed the fish in vinegar, sugar, a splash of dark beer, and a handful of raisins, the sauce thickened by a sprinkling of crumbled ginger snaps. This was the famous sweet-and-sour dish known on Gentile menus as carp, Jewish-style. Another possibility was carp in aspic. Here, the whole fish was cut into steaks, simmered with onion and bay leaf, then allowed to cool with its cooking broth. The choicest portion was the head, appropriately reserved for the head of the household. Or perhaps, if she had an expanded food budget, the German cook might prepare an aromatic stewed fish, the sauce enriched with egg yolk. Such recipes were memorialized in The Fair Cook Book, a collection of German-Jewish recipes published in 1888 by the women of Congregation Emanuel in Denver, Colorado. The Fair Cook Book is the first known Jewish charity cookbook published in America (the queen of the genre, The Settlement Cook Book, has sold over two million copies to date). The following recipe, contributed by Mrs. L. E. Shoenberg, a nineteenth-century Denver homemaker, combines the sweetness of ginger and mace, the creaminess of egg yolk and the piquancy of lemon:
STEWED FISH
Cut a three-pound fish in thick slices and put on to boil, with one large onion sliced; salt, ginger, and mace to taste; cold water enough to cover fish, let boil about twenty minutes; take the yolks of three eggs, beat light, juice of two lemons, chopped parsley, beat well together. When fish is done pour off nearly all the water, return to fire and pour over your eggs and lemon, moving fish briskly back and forth for five minutes so that the egg does not coagulate.2
But if the cook was a native of Posen in eastern Prussia, the Friday night fish might resemble Mrs. Gumpertz’s carp. It is the dish we know today, though in an altered form, as gefilte fish. The name “gefilte fish” comes from the German word gefülte, meaning stuffed or filled, since the original version was exactly that, a whole stuffed fish. Writing on the provenance of gefilte fish in the 1940s, the Jewish cooking authority Leah Leonard posed several possibilities:
Gefilte Fish may have originated in Germany or Holland sometime after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Or it may have been invented in Russia or Poland. Or, perhaps, it was only the culinary ingenuity of a housefrau-on-a-budget in need of a food stretcher. One thing is certain, Gefilte Fish is Jewish.3
Across Central and Eastern Europe, one could find some version of gefilte fish wherever Jews had settled, prepared, like clockwork, Friday mornings, and served that evening with grated horseradish. Aside from matzoh or challah, few Jewish foods were as ubiquitous. Here was a food of towering stature in the Jewish imagination. Over the centuries, a body of mystical thinking had grown up around gefilte fish, explaining its perfection as a Sabbath delicacy. Because of its intricacy, the dish was also a perfect measure of the Jewish housewife’s culinary skill. No other food in the Jewish kitchen required as much time or finesse. Along with the Sabbath candlesticks, the oblong gefilte fish pot, a vessel dedicated to that one food, was among a handful of objects that the Jewish housewife carried with her to America.
Despite its Jewish resume, gefilte fish did not originate with the Jews. Rather, it was a culinary convert, a food taken from the Gentile kitchen and adapted by the Jewish cook sometime in the distant past. In this respect, it reflects a larger pattern true of many foods typically consumed by Jews, among the world’s most avid culinary borrowers. Where most cuisines are anchored to a place, Jewish cooking transcends geography. Spatially unmoored, it is the product of a landless people continuously acquiring new foods and adapting them as they move from place to place, settling for a time, then moving again.
Coming from Prussia, Mrs. Gumpertz was an Ashkenazi, a very elastic label that takes in the Jews of northern France, Germany, Austria, Romania, Poland, all of the Baltic countries, and Russia. Its original meaning, however, was more narrowly defined. Sometime in the tenth century, large Jewish families from southern France and Italy began to migrate north, forming settlements along the Rhine River. These were the original Ashkenazim, a term derived from the medieval Hebrew word for Germany. The early Rhineland communities were made up largely of rabbis and merchants. Both figures, it turns out, played major roles in shaping Ashkenazi food traditions. In the great centers of Jewish learning that sprang up in the Rhine Valley, rabbinic scholars directed their intellectual energies toward food-based issues, including the finer points of kashruth, Jewish dietary law. As interpreters of kashruth (which is ever-evolving), they decided which foods were fit for Jewish consumption, how they should be cooked, who was allowed to cook them, and when they should be eaten. Jewish traders, meanwhile, acted as culinary conduits, shuttling foods and food traditions from one side of the globe to the other. As the preeminent travelers of their day, they introduced medieval Europe to the exotic foods of the East: nuts, spices, marzipan, and, most important of all, sugar. On a smaller geographic scale, they carried foods from town to town and country to country, spreading localized food traditions within Europe and creating regional cuisines.
The flow of Jews from southern Europe (most were from Italy, where Jews had been living since the days of the Roman Empire) continued through the twelfth century. By this time, a distinct Jewish culture had evolved in the Rhineland and taken root, but only temporarily. The ever-shifting political environment kept the Jews moving. The period of the Crusades, which began at the end of the eleventh century and lasted for another two hundred years, was a particularly difficult period for the Ashkenazim. On their way to the holy land, crusading soldiers, in a fit of religious zeal, would stop to torture Jews, in some cases wiping out entire towns.
Jewish hatred stirred up by the Crusades set the tone for the next several centuries. State-sponsored expulsions, massacres, and anti-Jewish riots pushed the Jews farther east and north into Poland, Lithuania, and beyond. At the same time, more subtle forms of persecution prevented Jews from staying too long in any one place. Within German-speaking Europe, locally enforced laws restricting the Jews’ right to own property, to work in certain occupations, to live where they chose, and even when they could marry left the Jews both rootless and poor. Many worked as itinerant peddlers, traveling by foot and selling assorted dry goods, pots and pans, needles, thread, and fabric. The truly destitute lived as wandering beggars. For the most part, the Jewish migrations flowed eastward, but if the political situation in Poland or Russia became too inhospitable, Jews circled back into Germany.
The history of Ashkenazi cooking tells the story of a people in motion. Since they came from Italy, it shouldn’t surprise us that many early dishes show a strong Italian influence. The most obvious is pasta, or noodles, which the Jews called vermslich, or grimslich, words derived from the Italian “vermicelli.” In one medieval noodle dish, a favorite among twelfth-century rabbis, the dough was cut into strips, baked, and drizzled with honey, an early ancestor of noodle kugel. Boiled noodles arrived in Germany roughly three centuries later, another food carried north, this time by traders, many of whom were Jews. In his book Eat and Be Satisfied, John Cooper describes a dish called pastide, an enormous meat pie of Italian origin, typically filled with organ meats. Too large to finish in a single sitting, the pie was baked in its own edible storage container: a thick whole-grain crust that was chipped away at each successive meal. Like noodles, pastide was generally eaten on Friday evenings, a Sabbath tradition that lasted through the eighteenth century.4
While the Ashkenazi cook retained elements of her Italian past, she also adopted local food habits, creating a new hybrid cuisine. Like her Gentile neighbors, she relied on dried peas and beans, porridge made from millet and rye, black bread, cabbage, turnips, dried and pickled fish, and, eventually, potatoes, a nineteenth-century addition to the Jewish diet. A shared dependence on local resources created broad similarities between the two kitchens, Jewish and Gentile. More interesting, however, is the cross-over of specific dishes, a process helped along by the Jewish merchant, a crucial point of contact between the two cultures. Among the dishes that made that journey are two Jewish staples. Before the Jews adopted it, the braided bread we know as challah was the special Sunday loaf of German Gentiles. German Jews adopted the braided bread, which was originally made from sour dough, and renamed it berches, a term derived from the Hebrew word for “blessing.” On the Sabbath table, the berches symbolized the offerings of bread once made to the Kohanim, the priests who served in the ancient temple. When a piece of bread was torn from the loaf and dipped in salt, it referred back to the sacrifices of salted meat at the temple altar.
Even the poorest Jews celebrated the Sabbath with challah, the traditional braided loaf. Here, an immigrant prepares for the Sabbath in a Ludlow Street coal cellar, 1900.
Library of Congress: 209 “Ludlow St. Hebrew making ready for the Sabbath Eve in his coal cellar—2 loaves on his table, c. 1890,” Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection
Challah offers just one example of how borrowed foods could be reborn, their former lives erased from memory. Gefilte fish followed a similar path. The idea of a reassembled fish comes straight from the imagination of the medieval court cook, a master of visual trickery. Descriptions of medieval banquets are brimming with all manner of reassembled animals, from deer to peacock, brought to the table in their original skins. Following in that same tradition, gefilte fish was a creation of the court cook intended for the aristocratic diner. Here, for example, is a recipe from a sixteenth-century cookbook by the German court cook, Marx Rumpolt:
STUFFED PIKE
Scale the fish and remove the skin from head to tail; cut the meat off from the bone and chop it fine with a bit of onion; add a bit of pepper, ginger, and saffron, also fresh, un-melted butter and black raisins, egg yolk, and a bit of salt. Fill the pike with this mixture, replace the skin, sprinkle on some salt, place it in a pan and roast it. Make a sweet or sour broth under it and serve either warm or cold.5
Recipes very similar to Rumpolt’s can be found in German-Jewish cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century. As it traveled from one culture to another, gefilte fish, much like challah, was invested with a new iconography. But where challah looked to the Biblical past, gefilte fish became a symbol of the messianic banquet awaiting the Jews in paradise where, according to the Torah, the righteous shall dine on the flesh of the Leviathan. On the Sabbath table, gefilte fish was the Leviathan, that giant sea creature, a taste of paradise on earth.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, East Side Jews like Mrs. Gumpertz continued the gefilte fish tradition, preparing it in the old style, much like Rumpolt had four centuries earlier. A few decades later, a folksier version of gefilte fish seems to have taken its place. Prepared by cooks from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, the chopped fish mixture was simply rolled into balls, simmered, then served cold with horseradish, the all-purpose Jewish condiment. With Jews from disparate countries all gathered in one neighborhood, subtle regional variations suddenly took on significance. Polish Jews, for example, seasoned their gefilte fish with sugar, where Lithuanians favored pepper. East Side Jews saw the sugar/pepper divide as a token of larger cultural differences between the Galiciana (Polish Jews) and the Litvaks (Lithuanians and Latvians), using it in conversation as a kind of code. So, if an East Sider wanted to know what part of the world a fellow Jew came from, he could ask, half-jokingly, “How do you like your gefilte fish, with sugar or without?”
Here’s a classic version of gefilte fish from the International Jewish Cook book, a dish of surprising delicacy to anyone who has tasted the mass-produced version found in the kosher aisle of your local supermarket:
GEFILLTE FISCH
Prepare trout, pickerel, or pike in the following manner: After the fish has been scaled and thoroughly cleaned, remove all the meat that adheres to the skin, being careful not to injure the skin; take out all the meat from head to tail, cut open along the backbone, removing it also; but do not disfigure the head and tail; chop the meat in a chopping bowl, then heat about a quarter of a pound of butter in a spider, add two tablespoons chopped parsley, and some soaked white bread; remove from the fire and add an onion grated, salt, pepper, pounded almonds, the yolks of two eggs, also a very little nutmeg grated. Mix all thoroughly and fill the skin until it looks natural. Boil in salt water, containing a piece of butter, celery root, parsley, and an onion; when done, remove from the fire and lay on a platter. The fish should be cooked for one and one-quarter hours, or until done. Thicken the sauce with yolks of two eggs, adding a few slices of lemons. This fish may be baked but must be rolled in flour and dotted with bits of butter.6
By the mid-nineteenth century, a distinct form of Jewish life had evolved in East Prussia, the region where Natalie Gumpertz spent her first twenty-odd years. The Jews here were thinly scattered in small towns and villages, representing only a tiny fraction of the local population. Out of two million East Prussians, fourteen thousand were Jews. Dispersed as they were, East Prussian Jews lacked the critical mass to sustain the kinds of Jewish institutions found farther east in the larger, more-bustling Polish shtetlach. The town of Ortelsburg, East Prussia, where Natalie was born, was a sleepy market town, its Jewish population never much larger than that of a single East Side tenement. Too small and too poor to support a Jewish school, in the 1840s, the Ortelsburg Jews pooled their resources to build a synagogue, but never hired a permanent rabbi. No rabbi, no school. And yet, this remote outpost of European Judaism was of sufficient size to accommodate two Jewish-run taverns.
Among rural Jews, the local tavern was the preeminent social spot, especially for men, who came to play cards (a popular Jewish pastime), read the newspaper, and drink. Over a mug of beer or glass of schnapps, Jewish businessmen, from shopkeepers to horse dealers, cemented partnerships, found new customers, and made new contacts, not only with fellow Jews but with Christians too, who were likewise tavern customers. In many cases the taverns were attached to roadside inns that catered to Jewish merchants and traders. The inn provided them with a bed to sleep in and a stable for their horses, while the tavern kitchen, usually run by the tavern keeper’s wife, provided them with sustenance. On Saturday afternoons, whole families would stop by the tavern for a late lunch, paying for it when the Sabbath was over. At the start of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of German Jews lived in the countryside, but in the cities, too, Jews found their way into the hotel and restaurant business, one facet of their larger role in the food economy. Set apart from the wider culture by their distinct food requirements, the Ashkenazim relied on a vast network of butchers, bakers, vintners, distillers, traders, and merchants. The tavern-keeper belonged to this culinary workforce, supplying Jews with kosher food and drink in a public setting. Remember, too, that Christian-owned establishments were free to turn Jews away and often did. Jewish taverns and cafés, hotels, restaurants, and even Jewish spas, were the answer to widespread discrimination.
In the mid-nineteenth century, German Jews brought their experience in the hospitality business to America. At Lustig’s Restaurant in New York, nineteenth-century Jewish businessmen dined on German specialties like sweet-and-sour tongue, stuffed goose neck, and almond cake, all prepared to the highest kosher standards. Nicknamed the Jewish Delmonico’s, the Mercer Street restaurant stood in the heart of the old dry-goods district. Restaurant patrons were observant Jews from around the city, mainly wealthy merchants, who congregated at Lustig’s for the refined kosher cooking, but also for the traditional ambience.
In the Lustig’s dining room, with its bare wood floor and simple furnishings, customers performed the food-based rituals inseparable from the traditional Jewish dining experience. Like a visiting anthropologist, a New York reporter wrote up his observations of the lunchtime scene:
As each customer came in, he would take off his overcoat, hang it up, and then go to the washstand and wash his hands, looking very devout in the meantime and moving his lips in rapid muttering. He was repeating in Hebrew this prayer: “Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy command, and has ordered us to wash hands.” Having thus performed his first duty, he took his seat and ordered his dinner.
The close of the meal was marked by the same kind of singsong praying that had opened it. In between, diners performed other curious acts, like dipping their bread into salt and praying over that as well. Also odd was how none of the customers removed their hats, a clear breach of dining etiquette. All in all, the experience was so foreign that the reporter exited Lustig’s feeling disoriented, like “a traveler returned from strange lands to his native heath.”7
When he left his office and boarded the uptown streetcar, the typical Lustig’s customer returned to a traditional Jewish life. Beginning in the fall with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he celebrated the full calendar of holidays, and every week observed the Sabbath. Friday evenings he went to synagogue, and Saturdays too, returning home at midday for lunch and a nap. The rest of the afternoon he devoted to Torah. While the man of the house prayed and studied, responsibility for guarding the purity of the home fell to his wife. A task that revolved around food, the work was relentless. Training began in childhood, when she was old enough to stand on a chair in her mother’s kitchen and help pluck the chicken or grate the potatoes. Over the years, she absorbed an immense store of food knowledge, allowing her to one day take control of her own kitchen. This happened the day she was married.
The traditional Jewish homemaker inherited her mother’s recipes along with her expert command of the Jewish food laws. Each day of her married life, as she shopped for groceries, or cooked, or even cleaned, she called on her knowledge of kashruth, ensuring every morsel of food served to the family was ritually pure. In other words, kosher. Such cooks could be found among New York’s German Jews, some on the Lower East Side, walking distance from Ansche Chesed on Norfolk Street, the Orthodox congregation founded by German immigrants in 1828. In the same urban population, however, were Jewish cooks with a radically new outlook on the dietary laws: women serving oyster stew, baked ham, and creamed chicken casserole, a full menu of forbidden foods.
The readiness to break away from tradition, more pronounced among Germans than any other Jewish group, had its roots in a wider cultural movement that began in Germany in the late eighteenth century, the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. For centuries, German Jews had lived as outsiders on the distant fringes of the wider Christian society. Their communities were self-governing and inward-looking, sealed off from the culture around them. But not entirely. Inspired by the European Enlightenment, eighteenth-century Jews began to question their own separateness. Men like Moses Mendelsohn, the eighteenth-century German scholar and philosopher, argued for the value of a secular education for Jewish school kids, a revolutionary suggestion at a time when education meant one thing only: the study of Torah. Mendelsohn’s ideas took hold, so by the middle of the nineteenth century Jewish children were learning to read and write in German, their passport to the larger world of secular thought. German Jews discovered Goethe and Schiller, along with German translations of the European classics. Even in the countryside, far from the intellectual ferment of the big cities, Jewish families spent the evenings reading aloud from Voltaire and Shakespeare.
The new openness in education encouraged other forms of change, particularly in the cities. Here, “modern-thinking” Jews developed a more relaxed approach to religious observance. On the Sabbath, shopkeepers kept their stores open. Men shaved their beards; women abandoned their traditional bonnets, trading them in for wigs, or went bareheaded. In their synagogues, modern-thinking Jews rejected traditional forms of worship, installing organs and choirs, the rabbi standing before his congregants in a long black frock and delivering sermons, very much like his Christian counterparts.
In the German-Jewish kitchen, a quiet revolution was likewise in progress. For the first time, home cooks felt they could choose among the food laws, holding on to some, dropping others. Of course, the willingness to improvise fell along a sliding scale, with each cook determining her own culinary threshold. Some abandoned the time-consuming practice of salting and soaking their meat, the traditional method for drawing out blood, a substance banned from the Jewish table. Others gave up on kosher meat entirely and started shopping from the gentile butcher. In private recipe collections, we see Jewish cooks experimenting with pork and other forbidden foods. Outside the home, Jews began patronizing Christian-owned establishments, while Jewish-owned eateries, like the palatial Restaurant Kempinski in Berlin, served oysters, crayfish, and lobsters.
Changing food attitudes were carried to America, setting the stage for a remarkable document. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a Cincinnati homemaker named Bertha Kramer began a collection of her best recipes, compiling them into a manuscript. Her idea was to pass the collection on to her daughter. This was nothing unusual. Handwritten recipe books were common presents for new brides, some handed down for several generations with each cook adding her own favorite dishes. Such collections generally ended up in attics or cellars or trash heaps or, in some cases, archives. Kramer’s collection, however, was unveiled to the reading public, published in 1889 under the pseudonym “Aunt Babette.” A Star of David emblazoned on the title page, “Aunt Babette’s” Cook Book was intended for young Jewish homemakers, but only the most “modern-thinking,” or, as we would describe them, assimilated.
Title page for “Aunt Babette’s” Cook Book.
Author’s collection
The recipes in Aunt Babette’s systematically, brazenly, play havoc with the food commandments, including the prohibitions against pork, shell-fish, wild game, blood, and mixing meat and dairy. Shrimp and lobster salads, oysters on the half-shell, chopped ham mixed with cream, broiled squirrel, venison, and rabbit pie—all ritually forbidden foods—find their way into Aunt Babette’s, but so do recipes for matzoh pudding, Purim doughnuts, and gefilte fish, resulting in an eclectic feast of old and new, foreign and domestic, all in one volume. The freewheeling approach continues beyond the recipes into the “valuable hints” section. Here, at the back of the book, the reader will find a home remedy for a sore throat that involves swathing the patient’s neck in raw strips of bacon.8
Babette’s position on kashruth is very much in tune with the mindset of her time and place. In separating the pure (kosher) from the impure (treyf), she defers to contemporary standards of good hygiene over ancient law, divine or otherwise. She sums it up this way: “Nothing is trefa that is healthy and clean,” dispensing with five thousand years of culinary tradition in a few well-chosen words. Living in Cincinnati, Mrs. Kramer belonged to the largest community of Reformed Judaism in nineteenth-century America. Her publisher, the Cincinnati-based Bloch Printing and Publishing Company, was the unofficial voice of the Reform movement, with strong connections to the movement’s leadership. The company president, Edward Bloch, was the brother-in-law of Chief Rabbi Isaac Wise, father of Reformed Judaism and founder of Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College. Mrs. Kramer was likely acquainted with both of them, moving in the same social circles, a member of the same clubs and charities. Given the local culture it is fitting that America’s first “treyf cookbook” was a product of the “Queen City.”
In New York, the first wave of German-Jewish immigrants, most from Bavaria, latched on to the city’s older and well-established community of Sephardic Jews. In the 1830s, they joined the Sephardic congregation, Shearith Israel, founded in the seventeenth century, when New York was still New Amsterdam, and married into Sephardic families, blending into the city’s Jewish aristocracy to the best of their ability. Tensions developed, however, as the number of Germans continued to swell. The decisive break came in the mid-nineteenth century, as the first generation of modern-thinking Germans landed in New York, forming their own settlement in the old tenth ward of the Lower East Side, then part of Kleindeutschland. Here, in a converted church on Chrystie Street, they established New York’s first Reform synagogue, Temple Emanuel. With their assimilated habits and enlightenment ideals, the new immigrants were philosophically out of step with New York’s Jewish elite. The Sephardim (along with their Bavarian brothers and sisters) were Orthodox, with a strong sense of their own exalted history, but the newly arrived German Jews had reasons to feel superior too. They were cultured, educated, some with university degrees, and solidly middle-class.
In the realm of food, they took full advantage of enlightenment principles to share in the gastronomic culture of their adopted country. The following account shows the free reinterpretation of ancient custom as it played itself out in the Jewish dining room. The meal described below took place in New York shortly after the Civil War:
A friend of mine, not long since was invited to dine with a wealthy Jew whose name is well known among the most eminent businessmen of the city. The table was elegantly spread, and among the dishes was a fine ham and some oysters, both forbidden by the law of Moses. A little surprised to see these prohibited dishes on the table and anxious to now hear how a Jew would explain the introduction of such forbidden food, in consistency with his allegiance to the Mosaic law, my friend called the attention of the Jew to their presence. “Well,” said the host, “I belong to that portion of the people of Israel who are changing the customs of our fathers to conform to the times and country in which we live. We make a distinction between what is moral in the law, and, of course, binding, and what is sanitary. The pork of Palestine was diseased and unwholesome. It was not fit to be eaten, and therefore was prohibited. But Moses never tasted a slice of Cincinnati ham. Had he done so, he would have commanded it to be eaten. The oysters of Palestine were coppery and poisonous. Had the great law-giver enjoyed a fry or stew of Saddlerocks or Chesapeake Bay oysters, he would have made an exception in their favor.”9
When this dinner was held, circa 1869, the presence of ham or shellfish on a Jewish table required explaining. By the end of the century, the same menu was unremarkable, standard fare among the city’s Reformed Jews. Or, rather, it was almost standard. Still, even the most assimilated Jew felt a certain unshakable reticence with regard to pork. Shellfish, however, was another story entirely. Here was a food thoroughly embraced by assimilated eaters, in their homes and in public, too. Most surprising, perhaps, shellfish were commonly served at Jewish-sponsored events, like the infamous “trefa banquet” held in Cincinnati in 1883, to celebrate the first ordination of rabbis from the Hebrew Union College. On the menu that evening were Little Neck clams on the half-shell, soft-shell crabs l’Amérique, and finally, “Salade of Shrimp.”
In private kitchens, the Jewish home-cook experimented freely with the whole array of crustacea. The Famous Cook Book, another synagogue-based charity cookbook, this one from Seattle and published in 1908, gives five separate recipes for clam chowder, each one contributed by a different member of the congregation. Clearly, the dish was a regional favorite growing out of the local clam trade. A few pages further on are recipes using Dungeness crab, another creature indigenous to Pacific waters. The Famous Cook Book is just one example of a much broader trend. In fact, few Jewish charity cookbooks do not include at least a handful of shellfish dishes.
The assimilated cook made full use of the shellfish available to her, depending on the local markets. By the century’s end, however, one marine animal was available just about everywhere. It was the oyster, the Jews’ favorite forbidden food. This appreciation was a reflection of the larger American culinary culture. Throughout the nineteenth century, oysters were consumed with equal gusto by society swells and poor working stiffs, men and women, East Coasters and West Coasters. Perhaps no other food held such universal appeal. By the 1870s, New York alone was home to 850 oyster eateries, some grandly decorated in true Gilded Age style, others no more than a stall at the market. And thanks to the newly constructed railroad, the oyster craze penetrated to the middle of the country as well. For the assimilated Jew, it was impossible to resist the tug of the oyster—more so, it seems, than other treyf foods. Rabbi Wise, whom we have already met, personally refrained from everything treyf with the exception of oysters, which he claimed were technically kosher, their shells equivalent to the scales of a fish, protecting the bivalve from “poisonous gases in the water.” In a similar spirit, one Kansas City rabbi argued that oysters were not, in fact, shellfish at all, but rather a form of underwater plant. These were the kinds of legal defenses put forth by clergymen, but down in the culinary trenches, Jewish eaters followed their own logic. More persuasive than any technical loophole was the oyster itself, plump, briny, undeniably delicious. American Jews were incredulous that any food so patently good could be forbidden.
True to her time, Aunt Babette was enamored of the oyster, providing instructions for an all-oyster supper: “In giving an oyster supper always serve raw oysters first, then stewed, fried and so on. Serve nice, white crisp celery, olives, lemons, good catsup, cold slaw and pickles and do not forget to have two or three kinds of crackers on the table.” Jewish cooks in New York were equally enthralled. In 1909, the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, a prominent New York charity, published a cookbook. With recipes contributed by society members, The Auxiliary Cook Book provides a direct and focused picture of Jewish food ways at a particular moment in time. Among the half dozen oyster recipes included in this slender volume are fricassee of oysters cooked in brown butter, oyster stew, and oyster cocktail. These were the kind of standard American oyster dishes adopted by the assimilated homemaker. But the Jewish cook could be more creative as well, fusing Old and New World culinary traditions in highly unorthodox ways. Perhaps the best example of this is the “oyster noodle kugel,” a recipe found in the Council Cook Book published by the Council of Jewish Women in 1909: “Into a pudding dish put layers of broad boiled noodles, alternating with layers of oysters dipped in cracker crumbs, with plenty of butter and salt to taste; pour over the whole pint of pastry cream and the juice of the oysters; bake until brown—about twenty minutes.”10
Like most East Siders, when Natalie Gumpertz departed this world, she left very little behind in the way of documentation. No diary, no book of household accounts, no correspondence, and no family recipes—the kind of detailed and personal records left by middle-class women. The poor, meanwhile, left behind a different class of evidence: census and draft records, marriage licenses, birth and death certificates—the kinds of documents that fill our municipal archives, the city’s official memory. According to her death certificate, Natalie Reinsberg Gumpertz was born in Ortelsburg, East Prussia, an out-of-the-way market town with a small community of Jewish merchants and tradesmen. As a girl in Ortelsburg, Natalie would have received a state-sponsored education, in German, but may have spoken Yiddish as well. The region surrounding Ortelsburg was known as the poorest in Prussia, its Jewish population largely impoverished. Natalie’s father, however, was a person of at least some means, contributing money to build the town’s first synagogue.
Natalie Gumpertz, circa 1890. Mrs. Gumpertz lived on Orchard Street from 1870 to 1886.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
Small-town Jews like the Reinsbergs lived on a cultural frontier between Germany’s larger, more modernized Jewish communities and the traditional shtetl Jews of Poland and Lithuania. They spoke German and embraced German culture with the same pride of ownership as their Christian neighbors. In their daily lives, they moved with relative freedom among their non-Jewish countrymen, doing business, even socializing with Christians, a pattern rarely found among the Jews of small-town Bavaria. Their version of Judaism, however, was closer to the religion of their Eastern brothers and sisters. They followed Polish religious custom, prayed in an Orthodox synagogue, and led Orthodox lives. Tucked away in the Prussian lake region, they lived beyond the reach of Reform thinking, a movement centered in the cities.
The Reinsbergs also lived on a culinary frontier. Located on the edge of German-speaking Europe, East Prussia felt the culinary influences of Central and Eastern Europe in near equal measure, blending German specialties like wursts and kuchens with typically Slavic foods like borscht and pirogi. Add to this complex scenario the fact that most Prussian Jews were Polish transplants. Reversing the normal eastward flow of Jewish migrants, they carried Polish cooking traditions back into Germany, foods like gefilte fish and cholent, or Sabbath stew. Following the usual Jewish pattern, they held on to familiar foods while adopting local staples. For Prussian Jews, that included dairy products like schmant (sour cream) and glumse (farmer’s cheese), two key foods in the local diet, an abundance of freshwater fish, and Prussian firewater, a combination of grain alcohol and honey. In short, East Prussian Jews were culturally assimilated but traditional in their religious practice. In their kitchens, Prussian cooks followed the food laws as best they could—not always easy in remote towns where the closest source of kosher meat could be miles away.
In the New World, Jewish culinary custom came up against a new set of realities. Living on Orchard Street, Natalie Gumpertz faced a highly precarious financial future. Between 1870 and 1874, her husband, Julius, bounced from one job to another, working as a clerk and then a salesman before returning to his old standby as a shoemaker. Unhinged by the strain of supporting his family, he eventually buckled completely. On October 7, 1874, Julius left the Orchard Street apartment for work and never returned, thus joining the ranks of the East Side’s many “missing husbands.” (The phenomenon was so common that the Daily Forward, the city’s leading Yiddish newspaper, ran a regular photo feature called the “Gallery of Missing Husbands.”) Natalie tried to find her missing spouse, but he was never located, leaving the young mother to fend for herself.
Abandonment was a special class of hardship reserved for East Side women. All immigrants, however, faced the challenge of plain economic survival. In America, land of the mighty dollar, businesses ran six days a week, pausing on Sundays so workers might catch their breath. Back in Europe, traditional Jews abstained from toil on the Sabbath. In America, the economic pressures to work on Saturday were hard to resist, and many Jews relented. Similar concessions were made in the realm of food. For some, that meant eating kosher at home but sharing in the wider culinary culture when out in public. Others stayed loyal to traditional foods but consumed them in ways unimaginable to the strictly devout. Vivid examples of how this compromise worked appear in the fiction of Fannie Hurst, a German-Jewish writer with a tremendous following in the 1920s. The only daughter of two assimilated Bavarian Jews, Fannie Hurst was born on her grandmother’s Ohio farm in 1885 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1909, she moved to New York to launch her career, and by the 1930s had produced hundreds of short stories and a string of novels, some of which were made into movies (the best known is the twice-filmed Imitation of Life).
The characters Hurst was most drawn to were poor urban women—shopgirls, streetwalkers, maids, and tenement housewives, many of them Jewish immigrants. Often, Hurst’s stories begin in the tenements, following her characters as they break into the middle class. For the typical Hurst heroine, it’s a bittersweet victory, the material rewards of her new middle-class life offset by the demands of assimilation. The fictional Turkletaub family of West 120th Street have made precisely that journey. In the following scene, they have just sat down to an abundant midday meal:
At one o’clock there was dinner, that immemorial Sunday meal of roast chicken with its supplicating legs up off the platter; dressing to be gouged out, sweet potatoes in amber icing; a master stroke of Mrs. Turkletaub’s called “matzos klose,” balls of unleavened bread, sizzling, even as she served them, in a hot butter bath and light-brown onions; a stuffed goose neck, bursting of flavor, cheese pie twice the depth of the fork that cut in; coffee in large cups.
Just a few hours later, Mrs. Turkletaub is back in the kitchen, preparing Sunday night supper, the second feast of the day:
A platter of ruddy sliced tongue; one of noonday remnants of cold chicken, ovals of liverwurst; a mound of potato salad crisscrossed with strips of pimento; a china basket of stuffed dates, all kissed with sugar; half of an enormously thick cheese cake; two uncovered apple pies; a stack of delicious curlicues, known as “schneken,” pickles with a fern of dill across them.11
Though still bound to some of the old traditions, the Turkletaubs are willing to defy the religious injunction of mixing meat and dairy. Even more, the family has abandoned the traditional Friday night meal and moved it to Sunday, celebrating the Christian day of rest, but doing it with Jewish food! (Incidentally, the Turkletaubs were not alone. As far back as 1859, a contingent of German-Jewish New Yorkers, many of them bankers, experimented with rescheduling the Sabbath—their attempt to reconcile Judaism with the American workweek.)
The Jewish Sunday dinner is one example of the push-pull relationship that soon developed between immigrants like the Turkletaubs, Jews from traditional backgrounds, and their ancestral foods. Sabbath dishes like chicken soup, brisket, or challah became Sunday dinners in America, suddenly free of the old religious restraints. Holiday foods reserved for special times of the year were drained of their symbolism, and eaten on a whim, whatever the season. In Europe, potato pancakes were a winter-time delicacy inextricably connected with the celebration of Hanukkah. In New York, they were sold year-round by East Side street vendors. Blintzes in Europe were a symbolic food of spring, traditionally eaten on Shavuot. On this side of the Atlantic, they were standard fare in the scores of East Side dairy cafés.
Newly flush with American dollars, middle-class Jews like the Turkletaubs turned their dining-room tables into edible landscapes. Three kinds of meats, dumplings and salads, cakes and pie, followed by coffee, then raisins and nuts (a favorite Jewish snack), all in a single meal. Largesse on such a grand scale was impossible back in the Old Country. At mealtime, they unloaded their well-stocked pantries, as if to say: “Look what we have! Incredible, no?”
Downtown in the tenements, where the typical pantry was nine-tenths empty, German Jews relied on a long culinary tradition of “making do.” Mainstays of the tenement cook were starchy, cheap, and filling. She was, for example, an expert noodle maker, her kitchen equipped with a “noodle board” for rolling and cutting dough. If her husband was handy, the noodle board was attached to the wall by a hinge, so it folded up neatly when not in use. To slash the cost of homemade noodles, a bargain food to begin with, she bought broken eggs, a common commodity among East Side vendors. Ever prepared, the East Sider carried an old tin cup or a beer mug in her shopping basket. When she came to the egg stand, she cracked the already-shattered eggs into the cup, sniffed them, and eyed them. If they met with her approval, she carried them home, fully cracked, at the vendor’s discounted price. All she needed now was a few cups of flour to create a meal.
Shoppers inspecting the merchandise on Hester Street, 1898.
“Street Vendors, 1898,” Museum of the City of New York, The Byron Collection
Chicken noodle soup was a luxury food by downtown standards, and commonly reserved for Fridays or holidays. A midweek meal among German Jews might be pea soup with spaetzle, pebble-shaped nuggets of dough grated straight into the soup pot. Another option was noodles stewed with fried onion and perhaps a piece of crumbled liver or “soup meat.” There were also noodles and fruit—dried pears, apricots, or prunes—stewed together over a slow flame. The end result was a stove-top version of noodle kugel, sweet and satisfying.
Where Bavarian cooks looked to noodles as their starch of choice, Jews from Prussia, Posen, and all points east relied on potatoes. No people on earth could equal the Irish in potato consumption, but the Jews of Eastern Europe came close, remarkable when you consider the potatoes’ relatively late arrival on the Jewish food scene. Actually, widespread potato cultivation came surprisingly late to Europe in general. For a solid two hundred years after its European debut in the sixteenth century, the potato remained an obscure sample of New World flora. It was studied by botanists and grown as an ornament, but rarely eaten. The one place it made any headway as a food was the court kitchen, served now and then as a novelty item to aristocratic dinners. Commoners were less favorably impressed. Most Europeans feared the potato as a carrier of disease or scorned it as a food of heathens. Those who tried it, found it plain unappetizing, better suited to livestock than people. The potato showed its virtues mainly when other crops failed. It could withstand long stretches of cold temperatures better than most grains, and matured more quickly. (It takes two to three months for potatoes to mature, versus ten months for wheat.) During times of political turbulence, the edible part of the potato plant stayed buried in the earth, safe from marauders and their torches.
By the start of the eighteenth century, extensive potato farming was found throughout the Low Countries and in parts of France and western Germany. By the middle of the century, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, had grasped the potatoes’ usefulness as an insurance crop—a backup food when other foods were scarce—and in 1744 commanded wide-scale potato planting. The order took roughly thirty years to implement, but in the end Frederick prevailed through a mix of force, coaxing, and education. (The king distributed free seed potatoes, along with an instructional handbook, to farmers.) By the end of his reign, his dream was realized: Prussia was rich in potatoes. Frederick’s campaign introduced potatoes to the Prussian Jews, numbering over a hundred thousand and a very receptive audience. Even more, he brought the potato to the edge of Eastern Europe and its vast Jewish community. It was just a matter of decades before it spread across Poland and eventually Russia.
Jews embraced the potato for many of the same reasons as the Irish. It was a high-yielding, fast-growing plant, even in poor soil, while the potato itself was dense in both calories and nutrients. Like the Irish, the Jews cooked their potatoes whole, either boiled or roasted, and peeled them at the table. And, like the Irish, Jews “kitchened” their potatoes with some form of dairy food, perhaps a glass of buttermilk, or maybe a few bites of protein, usually herring. When the herring ran out, they dipped their potato into the pickling brine. But sometimes there was nothing—no fish, no brine—and the work of seasoning the potatoes was left to the eater’s imagination. The following domestic scene comes from the Yiddish story “When Does Mame Eat?” by Avrom Reisen. It highlights nicely the power of suggestion as a culinary tool:
In the morning, when Leybele got up, he saw Mame standing by the oven, sticking one pot in and sliding the other out—she was so handy! And she had forks of all kinds—a big one for a big pot, a small one with a small pot, and the middle-sized tines to go with the middle-sized pot. Then, when she removed one pot, she checked its contents, blew away the foam, and put it back in the oven.
What did she cook in those pots? One of them, a day’s worth, was dedicated to hot water, nothing else. “A house,” said Mame, “has to have hot water.” The second pot was surely filled with potatoes, called “fish potatoes” when cut up. But there wasn’t any fish…They didn’t eat fish during the week. “Fish,” said Mame, “is very expensive.” And fish potatoes, even without fish, were tasty too. In any case, Mame was a skilled housewife, that he knew for sure.12
Boiled potatoes with imaginary fish. This was Jewish potato cookery at its most austere. Alongside it, however, Jewish cooks developed a full repertoire of more elaborate potato-based dishes: puddings, dumplings, breads, soups, even baked goods.
Potato kugel, a Sabbath mainstay of Polish Jews, was made from grated raw potatoes and onions, goose fat, eggs, and bread crumbs, all mixed together and baked overnight until golden with crisp, brown edges. Golkes, another Polish specialty, were chewy potato dumplings. They were made from grated raw potatoes that had been wrung dry in a towel, then mixed with flour and eggs, rolled into balls, and boiled. Golkes were typically eaten in soup or maybe in a bowl of hot milk. (Potatoes and milk, or some form of dairy food, were a very common pairing in the Jewish kitchen, just as in Ireland.) A Lithuanian food called bondes was made from grated potatoes mixed with rye or buckwheat flour to form a rough dough. After a good kneading, the dough was placed on cabbage leaves and baked. Lithuanian mothers gave bondes to their children to bring to school, but a gourmet treat was bondes hot from the oven with sour cream. Another Lithuanian creation, known as “mock fish” (relative of “fish potatoes”), was made from sliced potatoes cooked with onion and goose fat. In the summer, when the cows were producing, “mock fish” was converted into a dairy dish, the potatoes and onions cooked with butter and sour cream. Potatoes, onion, and fat—the Jewish cook explored every conceivable permutation of these three core ingredients, the more fat the fancier the dish. The most extravagant of all was latkes, potato pancakes fried in sizzling pools of precious goose fat.
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
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:
WHITE BEAN SOUP
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.
LENTIL SOUP
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.
Living among the new Russians, Mrs. Gumpertz was out of her element. In 1884, she inherited the fantastic sum of $600 from her husband’s family in Germany and used the money to finance her move to Yorkville, a predominantly German neighborhood on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. She remained in Yorkville, living with her daughters until her death in 1894. She was fifty-eight years old.