CHAPTER FOUR
In the first decade of the twentieth century, immigrant traffic between Europe and the United States reached its peak, with 1,285,349 immigrants arriving in 1907 alone, a number that stunned Americans at the time and has never been equaled since. A typical day in those high-volume years could see over three thousand immigrants pass through Ellis Island, most ferried to the mainland within two to three hours. Roughly ten percent, however, were detained as captive guests of the immigration authorities. Among them were eight members of the Rogarshevsky family, two adults and six children. The Rogarshevskys immigrated to the United States from Telsh, Lithuania, a town famous in the nineteenth century as a center of Jewish learning. Abraham and Fannie Rogarshevsky, their five children, along with an orphaned infant niece, sailed from Hamburg, landing at Ellis Island on July 19, 1901. Here, they were briefly detained. The reason given in the official documents was very simply “no money.” The problem was most likely resolved by a relative who came to Ellis Island to vouch for the family, promising to support the Rogarshevskys until they found steady employment.
The Rogarshevskys were held for only a couple of days, but thousands of new arrivals found themselves stuck on Ellis Island for weeks and even months. The detainees fell into three basic groups. Women traveling alone were held on Ellis Island until a male relative came to fetch them, most often a husband or a brother. Another group contained the family members of immigrants held in the Ellis Island hospital. The final and most amorphous group was made up of immigrants who were “not clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to land.” Deportees were also held on Ellis Island pending their return to whatever country they had come from. The vast majority of deportees were rejected as “paupers.”
Detainees were housed in dormitories large enough to accommodate three thousand people. As the newspapers pointed out, that was more than the Waldorf-Astoria and Astor hotels combined. Unlike the Waldorf, however, the immigrant “hotel” on Ellis Island was a strictly no-frills operation. Guests slept on three-tiered bunks with wire mattresses, the bunks enclosed in pens that resembled oversized birdcages. Each morning, the pens were unlocked and disinfected to prevent the spread of typhus, cholera, and lice.
Along with shelter, Ellis Island provided new arrivals with nourishment: three meals a day served in a vast hall—the “world’s largest restaurant,” as one visitor described it. Diners sat at long bench-lined tables draped in sheets of white paper. In the interest of conserving space, the aisles between the tables were just wide enough for a grown man to squeeze through sideways. Even so, the immigrants ate in shifts, a thousand at a time, the first meal of the day served at half past five in the morning. Waiters in white jackets brought the immigrants their food. For many diners, it was the first time they had ever eaten food prepared and served by strangers.
Visitors to the mess hall were shocked by the immigrants’ disregard for table etiquette: They dove into their food like birds of prey and tossed the scraps—the bones and potato peels—onto the floor. When the dining room was expanded in 1908, easy clean-up was factored into the new design. The entire space was covered in white tile and enamel paint, with every sharp angle or edge softened into a curve to prevent dirt from settling into the corners and crevices. The dining-room floor was sloped toward half a dozen drains, so the room could be easily hosed. “It is doubtful,” one visitor concluded, “if the guests of any hotel in the country have their meals served under more satisfactory conditions of cleanliness, healthfulness, and good cheer.”1 As to the quality of the food, opinions were decidedly mixed.
The immigrants’ dining room at Ellis Island, date unknown.
National Archives
Like the baggage-handlers and money-changers, the Ellis Island food purveyors were private contractors granted the privilege of doing business on government property, hence their generic title: “privilege holders.” Of all the island’s concessions, feeding the immigrants was the most lucrative, and local caterers competed for the job in public auctions. The results were announced in the local papers, like the final score in a sporting event. Along with running the dining room, the food concessionaire operated a lunch stand, where immigrants paid cash for bread, sausage, tins of sardines, fruit, and other portable items. In the dining room, the immigrant ate for free, the food paid for by the steamship companies that brought them to America. In 1902, that came to 35 cents a day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, a small sum that added up quickly. During the high-volume years, feeding the immigrants detained on Ellis Island cost the steamship companies half a million dollars annually, but the money came out of the terrific profits they made on their steerage passengers, the golden goose of the shipping industry.
The immigrants’ first lesson in American food ways, however, took place before they had even landed. Once their ship had docked, the immigrants were loaded onto barges that ferried them to Ellis Island. It was here that each passenger was handed a cup of cider and a small round pie, the quintessential fast food of turn-of-the-century America. The two foods that most impressed the new immigrants were bananas (many tried to gnaw through the skin) and sandwiches. As they waited their turn in the Ellis Island registry line, sometimes a thousand people long, waiters snaked through the crowd, distributing coffee and ham or corned-beef sandwiches. The immigrants munched appreciatively, marveling over the sweetness of American white bread.
The regimen in the Ellis Island dining room was meager and repetitive, a step up from prison fare. For breakfast, there was bread and bowls of coffee with milk and sugar. At lunch, the immigrants were given soup, boiled beef, and potatoes. For supper, more bread, this time with the addition of stewed prunes. Unscrupulous caterers and crooked officials conspired to winnow the big-ticket items (the meat and the dairy) from the immigrants’ diet until all that was left was bread, coffee, and prunes. As a result, thousands of immigrants sustained themselves on an innovation of the Ellis Island kitchen: the prune sandwich.
In 1903, President Roosevelt launched an investigation into corruption on Ellis Island, which ended with a thorough overhaul of the reigning administration. One beneficiary of the regime change was the immigrant dining room. Menus tell the story best. The one below is from a later period, but captures the reformers’ culinary mandate:
SUNDAY, JULY 1, 1917 BILL OF FARE FOR THE IMMIGRANT DINING ROOM
BREAKFAST
Rice with Milk and sugar
served in soup plates
Stewed Prunes
Bread and butter
Coffee (tea on request)
Milk and crackers for children
DINNER
Beef Broth with Barley
Roast Beef
Lima Beans-Potatoes
Bread and Butter
Milk and crackers for children
SUPPER
Hamburger Steak, Onion Sauce
Bread and butter
Tea (Coffee or Milk)
Milk and crackers for children2
The immigrants also dined on pork and beans, beef hash, corned beef with cabbage and potatoes, Yankee pot roast, and boiled mutton with brown gravy. These were the sturdy foods of the American working person served in accordance with the nutritional wisdom of the day. Cooked cereals, cheap but nourishing, were routine at breakfast, while the midday meal, the most substantial of the day, was built around protein and starch. Milk, the all-American wonder food, was available at every meal for immigrant children, and was freely dispensed between meals as well. Vegetables were more or less limited to peas, beans, and cabbage.
Given the very limited diets the newcomers were accustomed to, the great quantities of food that materialized each day in the Ellis Island dining room was cause for euphoria. The fact that it was free of charge was literally beyond belief. To reassure the immigrants, signs were posted in the dining hall in English, German, Italian, French, and Yiddish: “No charge for food here.” Milk, bread and butter, coffee with sugar, all of it free and in endless supply. And the meat! A single day’s ration on Ellis Island was more than many immigrants consumed in a month. The bounty of Ellis Island hinted at the edible riches that waited on the mainland. At the same time, the island also fed tens of thousands of waiting deportees, people who would never reach the mainland but were granted a fleeting taste of American abundance. Deportees spent their days locked up in holding pens, but the food they received on the island was wholesome and plentiful. According to one island official, the thick slabs of buttered bread and hot stews were so much better than any food the deportees had ever known that they wept at the thought of leaving Ellis Island, even if staying meant a lifetime of confinement.
Each year, on the last Thursday of November, detainees celebrated American abundance at a Thanksgiving banquet that featured roast turkey, cranberry sauce, and sweet potatoes. Whether or not they grasped the meaning behind the meal, the immigrants were clearly swept up in the festive spirit of the day. In place of flowers, the women bedecked themselves with sprigs of celery plucked from the tables, while the children feasted on candy and oranges. After the dinner was served, the men puffed on cigars, a habit acquired just for the occasion. The meal itself lasted for several hours, the waiters instructed to keep filling the plates until every diner was fully sated. When it was over, the immigrants were serenaded by a hundred members of a German singing society. Their final number was the Star-Spangled Banner, a song the audience had never heard before, sung in a language it couldn’t comprehend. Nonetheless, the immigrants caught on quickly and rose to their feet, their heads bowed.
As to the food, it was also unfamiliar. The great majority of the guests had never seen a cranberry or an orange-fleshed potato, but the dish that perplexed them most was mince pie. A reporter from the New York Sun who visited Ellis Island in 1905 witnessed the immigrants’ first tentative bite of this holiday classic:
Mince pie was a novelty as to form if not to contents to everyone who sat down to his first Thanksgiving dinner. Half a pie was served to each, but it was some minutes before the diners could make up their minds as to what they were getting and as to whether they would risk it.
But then:
When once they buried their teeth in the spicy filling, it was easy to see that they would be willing converts to the great American practice of pie-eating.3
The implications were clear. In that moment of conversion, their taste buds adjusting to the fruity richness, a future American was born.
Images of Ellis Island as a floating cornucopia contrasted sharply with the “island of tears” portrayed in the immigrant press, among the institution’s most vocal critics. Foreign-language newspapers condemned Ellis Island for its overcrowding, its callous handling of new arrivals, and its overzealous implementation of immigrant law. When the complaints grew loud enough, government commissions were convened to investigate the charges. (Roosevelt’s 1903 investigation was in response to a series of condemnatory articles that ran in the German-language newspaper, the New York Staats-Zeitung.) While some claims were exaggerated, many charges leveled by foreign-born reporters were essentially true. Immigrants were denied entrance to the United States on petty technicalities; they were treated with gruff indifference by island employees and wedged into bug-infested dormitories. The deeper truth, however, is that the brutal efficiency of the Ellis Island machine somehow coexisted with genuine attempts at humane handling of the alien masses.
Detention on Ellis Island was a dreary, physically demanding, and anxiety-ridden experience. During that first busy decade, the immigrants’ dining room was among the island’s only bright spots. (Another was the roof garden complete with boxes of flowering geraniums, awnings for shade, benches for resting, and a children’s playground.) Over time, however, the men who ran Ellis Island looked to the immigrant depot as the first all-important point of contact between the United States government and its future citizens, developing a near-mystical belief in the power of that first encounter. Frederick Wallis, immigration commissioner from 1920 to 1921, summed up the new thinking this way: “You can make an immigrant an anarchist overnight at Ellis Island, but with the right kind of treatment you can also start him on the way to glorious citizenship. It is first impressions that matter most.”4 In his efforts to ensure the best possible impression, the commissioner introduced a series of reforms, imposing higher standards of cleanliness and courtesy. He established a baby nursery for young mothers, a playroom for children, and a recreation hall for adults. On weeknights, the immigrants attended lectures and motion-picture showings, while Sunday afternoons were set aside for live concerts. In the dining room, the new spirit of hospitality meant a more inclusive kitchen pantry, an attempt to satisfy the immigrants’ diverse culinary needs. One of the most important additions to the Ellis Island regimen was pasta—or “macaroni,” as it was listed on the menu. As the officials in charge of Ellis Island grew more attuned to the immigrants’ native food customs, the job of feeding them grew more complex. But while each group traveled with its own set of culinary biases and food taboos, no group arrived with more stringent and elaborate dietary restrictions than the Jews.
According to government records, 1,028,588 Jews immigrated to the United States between 1900 and 1910. Of that number, the great majority came from the “Pale of Jewish settlement,” a geographic designation created by Catherine the Great in 1791. Catherine established the Pale in an effort to corral and isolate the Jews living within the newly expanded Russian Empire. On a map, the territory corresponds to modern-day Ukraine, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Belarus. Russian Jews were well acquainted with anti-Semitism, but the Jewish mass migration that began in the 1880s was sparked by a wave of pogroms that heightened the Jews’ perennial status as outsiders. They began in 1881 in what is now Ukraine, as rioting mobs destroyed millions of rubles’ worth of Jewish property, killing dozens of Jews in the process. Small-scale pogroms continued for the next twenty years, erupting in full force in the city of Kishinev on Easter Day, 1903, when fifty Jews were killed during several days of uncontrolled violence. America promised Jews a safe harbor and political and religious freedom, along with unbounded economic opportunity.
Russian and Eastern European Jews lived primarily in small market towns known as shtetlach. Once a week, Gentile farmers from the surrounding countryside would converge on the shtetl to sell their goods and buy supplies from the Jewish shopkeepers, though shtetl Jews worked in many other occupations as well. The distinct folk culture that developed in the shtetlach found expression in language, music, and religion. Unlike their German brothers and sisters, shtetl Jews practiced an unambiguously traditional version of Judaism. Where men expressed their piety through study and prayer, women spoke through the language of food. The sacred responsibility of the shtetl homemaker was to keep a kosher home, celebrating the holidays with all the required ritual dishes. On the Sabbath, and other holy days, she distributed food to the poor. Landing on Ellis Island, these same Jews found a profusion of food, but, with a few exceptions, none of it was kosher.
Actually, the Jews’ culinary problems started at sea. Though the steamship companies were legally obliged to feed their passengers, only a fraction served kosher meals. Some fulfilled the requirement with a single food: herring. Others went through the trouble of installing kosher kitchens but hired cooks who were kashruth-illiterate, unfamiliar with the full sweep of Jewish dietary law. Jewish travelers who knew what to expect traveled with their own survival rations. One very common food was thick slices of zwieback-like bread that had been dried in the oven to keep it from spoiling. Travelers also preserved their bread by dipping it in vinegar and sugar then baking it. For protein, they packed dried fish and salami. The chief problem with home-packed food was that it often ran out before the ship reached America, leaving the immigrant with nothing but water and perhaps some tea for the last leg of the journey. Between the rampant seasickness and the germ-infested quarters, no one in steerage—Jew or Gentile—fared particularly well. The Jews, however, faced the added challenge of finding kosher nourishment, an often impossible task, and many arrived at Ellis Island stooped with exhaustion, colorless, and malnourished. Unfortunately for them, the relief of standing on solid ground was quickly followed by another realization: there was still nothing to eat.
The one place freshly landed Jews could find nourishment was at the Ellis Island lunch stand, which carried tinned sardines and kosher sausages. But the stand was only accessible to Jews who had already passed inspection. For Jews detained on the island, the food situation was grim. There was nothing kosher about the immigrants’ dining room, which left devout Jews with a choice: they could either go hungry and possibly starve, or break the food commandments and eat. (The Rogarshevsky family faced this precise dilemma in 1901, though only briefly.) The one time of year Jews were assured of a good kosher meal was at Passover, the springtime feast commemorating the Hebrew exodus. Under the headline “Passover at Ellis Island,” in 1904, the New York Times ran this short but evocative story on the immigrants’ seder:
The food counter at Ellis Island, 1901.
“Food counter in railroad ticket department at Ellis Island,” Terence Vincent Powderly Photographic Prints, The American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives, The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.
The Feast of the Passover was celebrated in due form last night at Ellis Island by 300 Jewish immigrants, detained there awaiting inspection. Commissioner Williams gave them permission to celebrate the rites of their church and the great dining hall was turned over to them, and there, dinner was served in keeping with the occasion.
The tables were covered with snowy linen and new dishes right from the storeroom. In the kitchen, the utensils were all new, and the dinner was cooked under the supervision of the immigrants themselves. The dinner was rather more sumptuous than is usually served to incomers—chicken soup, roast goose and apple sauce, mashed potatoes, ground horseradish, matzoth, black tea, and oranges.5
A gastronomic retelling of the Jews’ escape from slavery, the Passover meal held special significance for the immigrants. The parallels were perfectly clear: Russia was their Egypt, the czars were their pharaohs, while America was their modern-day Canaan. But Passover came just once a year.
Relief for the kosher food drought on Ellis Island arrived in 1911, when the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society finally convinced the authorities to give the depot its own kosher kitchen. HIAS, as it was known, was just one of the many immigrant aid societies with offices on Ellis Island, each one serving the needs of a particular ethnic or national group. Founded on the Lower East Side in 1902, HIAS was formed with a single mandate: to provide any Jew unlucky enough to die on Ellis Island with a proper Jewish burial. From that narrow focus, the mission quickly broadened to helping new arrivals gain a firm foothold in their adopted country. HIAS representatives wearing blue caps with the HIAS acronym embroidered in Yiddish met the incoming ferries and distributed pamphlets (also in Yiddish) on the inspection process. They helped steer immigrants through the island’s bureaucratic maze and advocated for immigrants condemned to return to “the country from whence they came.”
From their vantage point on Ellis Island, it was plain to the HIAS workers that the kosher-food shortage diminished the immigrant’s chance of passing inspection. The Ellis Island doctors sorted all new arrivals into classes, admitting most but barring anyone with tuberculosis, epilepsy, or any other “loathsome and dangerous disease.” In their decrepit post-voyage state, a high percentage of Jews fell into the catchall category “LOPD,” bureaucratic shorthand for “lack of physical development.” It was a vague diagnosis, and not especially loathsome, but serious enough to block the immigrant from entering the country. The reason was purely economic. According to the Ellis Island calculus, physical weakness diminished the individual’s earning power, a most serious consideration. Along with “pauper,” the single largest class of unwanted foreigners, the languishing Jews were officially rejected with another catchall label, LPC, or “likely to become a public charge,” when all they really needed was a few square meals and a good night’s rest.
In 1911, a New Yorker named Harry Fishel took this argument to Washington and presented it to President Taft. An immigrant himself, Fishel was a Donald Trump–like figure who made his fortune in the New York real estate market, purchasing and developing large tracts of land. Many of his holdings were on the Lower East Side, including one entire block of tenements on Jefferson Street. Fishel was also an Orthodox Jew who had channeled his wealth into yeshivas, hospitals, and assorted charities, including HIAS, where he served as treasurer for over half a century.
Harry Fishel’s crusade to feed the immigrants was doubly motivated. An act of compassion on behalf of the helpless foreigner, it was also an act of self-preservation. The way Fishel saw things, the kosher-food predicament on Ellis Island served as a roadblock to the kind of Jews America needed most, the rabbis and scholars who were so essential to the future survival of Orthodox Judaism in secular America. Here was a cause the mogul was ready to fight for. Face-to-face with the president, Fishel pleaded his case with the urgency of a condemned man. He returned to New York the following day with a firm pledge that the United States government would do what it could to fill the kosher gap.
The food served in the kosher dining room was instantly recognizable to the immigrant palate. There were kippered herring, noodle and potato kugels, barley soup, and dill pickles. American specialties also made regular appearances. The following menus from 1914 are the earliest on record:
MONDAY
BREAKFAST:
Boiled eggs (2)
Bread and butter
Coffee
DINNER:
Potato soup
Hungarian goulash
Vegetables
Bread
SUPPER:
Pickled herring
Fresh fruit
Bread and butter
Tea
TUESDAY
BREAKFAST:
Fresh fruit
American cheese
Bread and butter
Coffee
DINNER:
Vegetable soup
Pot roast
Potatoes
Bread
SUPPER:
Bologna
Dill pickles or sauerkraut
Stewed fruit
Bread and tea
WEDNESDAY
BREAKFAST:
Fruit
American sardines
Bread and butter
Coffee
DINNER:
Barley soup
Roast meat
Vegetables
Bread
SUPPER:
Beans (baked by Mrs. Paley)
Cakes
Bread and tea6
The size of the crowd in the dining room rose and fell depending on that day’s shipping schedule. The room might be empty for breakfast, but if a ship arrived that afternoon filled with Russians or Hungarians or Poles, the kosher kitchen went into high alert, capable of feeding six hundred mouths at a single sitting. One interesting footnote to the Ellis Island kitchen’s history is the leading role played by women. During World War I, a woman known to us only as Mrs. Paley (first initial “S”) was in charge, but in later years the job of head cook fell to another woman, whom we know much more about.
When Sadie Schultz came to work on Ellis Island in 1929, she was forty-six years old with a long culinary résumé. Born in Canada in 1882, Sadie Citron Schultz was the daughter of Polish immigrants who had returned to Europe when Sadie was still a young girl and then re-emigrated to the United States, settling on the Lower East Side. According to family legend, Sadie’s mother earned the family’s passage working as a cook for one of the steamship companies, which helps explain the zigs and zags in their route to America. The young Sadie Schultz entered the New York food economy at twelve years old with a waitressing job in an East Side restaurant. She worked steadily from that point on, with only two interruptions. The first was in 1906, the second in 1910, the years her children were born. As soon as the babies were old enough, she put them into the free nursery at the Educational Alliance on East Broadway and returned to the restaurant. At some point in her career, she traded in waitressing for a job behind the stove, and this is where she remained for the rest of her professional life.
Under Mrs. Schultz’s command, the kosher dining room functioned like a home kitchen writ large. Despite the institutional scale of her work, Mrs. Schultz worked without the benefit of written recipes. Recipes would, in fact, have been useless to her, as she could neither read nor write. The dishes she prepared for her immigrant clients were the same ones she made for her own family, the standard offerings of the Jewish home cook. Even more, Mrs. Schultz learned the regional food preferences of each national group and tailored her cooking to suit their tastes, the same way mothers adapt their cooking for a finicky child. So, for example, if she learned that Ellis Island was expecting a boatload of Hungarians, she prepared her stuffed cabbage with raisins and sugar, to satisfy the Hungarian sweet tooth. For Lithuanians, she omitted the sugar and added vinegar.
The following stuffed-cabbage recipe comes to us from Frieda Schwartz, born on the Lower East Side in 1918. Her special touch is the addition of grated apple to the filling.
STUFFED CABBAGE
1 lb beef
1 egg
3 cups canned tomatoes
½ tsp pepper
Beef bones
1 peeled and grated apple
3 tbsp rice
3 tbsp cold water
4 tbsp grated onion
3 tsp salt
1 cabbage
Pour boiling water over cabbage. Let stand 15 minutes. Separate the leaves. Remove the thick stem from the outside of each leaf. Prepare the sauce in a heavy saucepan by combining tomatoes, salt, pepper, and bones. Cook 30 minutes, covered. Mix beef, rice, onion, egg, apple, and water. Place a heaping tablespoon of the mixture in a cabbage leaf. Roll leaf around mixture and add to sauce. Season with lemon juice and brown sugar. Cook 2 hours.7
Fannie Rogarshevsky and her son Philip, circa 1917.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
Fannie Rogarshevsky gave birth to two more children in America, bringing the total to six: two girls and four boys. For a time, the Rogarshevskys lived at 132 Orchard Street, moving down the block to number 97 sometime around 1908. The building was also home to Fannie’s parents, Annie and Joseph Beyer, who had adopted their orphaned granddaughter. According to the 1910 census, the sixty-four-year-old Mr. Beyer earned his living as a street peddler. During the 1920s, another set of relatives, the Bergmans, lived directly across the courtyard from the Rogarshevskys, the two buildings connected by a clothesline. Mrs. Rogar shevsky occasionally used the clothesline as a delivery system, sending the Bergmans pots of cholent, a Sabbath stew.
At the time of the 1910 census, all six of the Rogarshevsky children were still living at home. Ida, age eighteen, was employed as a “joiner” in a garment factory; Bessie, age sixteen, was a sewing-machine operator; and Morris, age fifteen, worked as a shipping clerk. Sam and Henry, ages twelve and seven, were in school, and three-year-old Philip was at home with his mother. The four Rogarshevsky boys slept in the parlor room on a jury-rigged bed, their heads resting on the sofa, their feet supported by four kitchen chairs. The two girls shared a folding cot, while their parents slept in the “dark room,” on the other side of the kitchen. The Rogarshevsky boys spent their free time haunting the front stoop and getting into street fights. (One of them, Sam, trained in a local boxing gym with the hopes of going professional, a career many East Side boys dreamed about and some achieved.)
On the 1901 ship’s manifest, Abraham Rogarshevsky described himself as a “merchant.” In New York, however, he worked as a presser in a garment factory, a job held exclusively by men. Mr. Rogarshevsky was paid “by the piece,” his salary dependent on the number of garments completed per week, a common point of contention between factory workers and managers. By 1917, Mr. Rogarshevsky had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, which was then known as the “tailor’s disease,” and died the following year. After her husband’s death, Fannie supported her family by taking in boarders, a common recourse of East Side widows. At the same time, she became the building’s janitor, a job that offered no wage but allowed her to live there rent-free. Between her two jobs, the income of her older children, and the kindness of her neighbors, the single mother of six cobbled together a decent existence. Among her allies were the East Side peddlers, so indispensable to neighborhood homemakers, who provided a wide array of edible goods at the lowest prices in the city.
For Eastern European Jews, the city’s pushcart markets were a reminder of home. The shtetlach that the immigrants had left behind had one key feature in common: an outdoor food market where, once a week, Jewish homemakers shopped for their supplies. Some of what they needed could be found in stores, but they relied on the market for their produce, their poultry, fish, milk, cheese, and butter, as well as household goods like candles, pots, and pans. When they arrived in New York, they found themselves perfectly at home in the tumult of the East Side pushcart markets that had been created by their immigrant predecessors.
To uptown visitors, the East Side pushcart markets were garbagestrewn streets aswirl with foreigners, women in tattered wigs, baskets over one arm, haggling at top volume over third-rate merchandise. In other words, retail mayhem. The more Bohemian of the uptown visitors swooned over the romance of the pushcarts. They came to the markets as sightseers (never as customers) to drink in the Old World atmosphere and observe the local customs. Whenever the city threatened to close down the markets, which it did at regular intervals, they mourned the impending loss, mostly on aesthetic grounds. The pushcart markets on Hester, Orchard, and Essex streets were among the most picturesque spots in New York, and the city would be a much grayer place without them. The point that seemed to elude them was the usefulness of the markets to the people they served. For the tenement housewife, the pushcarts were America’s antidote to hunger. They provided her with a wide assortment of familiar foods at the lowest possible prices, and allowed her to buy them in the quantities she desired. Where else in New York could she buy half a parsnip or a handful of barley, not a single ounce more than she needed? The minuscule purchases possible at the pushcarts surprised uptown New Yorkers, who wondered why anyone would buy a single egg, but to the tenement housewife, it was eminently practical. She had no pantry to store her provisions and no ice box to keep foods from spoiling. More compelling still, small purchases were the only kind she could afford.
Tenement housewives like Fannie Rogarshevsky shuttled between the pushcart and the kitchen at least twice a day. In the mornings, before the children were awake, they bought their breakfast supplies, some hard rolls and maybe a cup of pot cheese. In the afternoon, they returned to the market for their dinner ingredients. To the uptown city-dweller, the idea of shopping meal-by-meal was hopelessly inefficient. The tenement housewife saw things differently, treating the pushcarts as an extension of her own kitchen. For Mrs. Rogarshevsky, who lived directly above the Orchard Street market, this was almost literally the case, and the same was true for thousands of other East Side women.
The pushcart market was a boon to East Siders on both sides of the equation, shopper and peddler alike. A line of work familiar to the Eastern European Jew, peddling was the fallback occupation of new immigrants. It required little capital, no special work skills, and scant knowledge of English. All immigrants needed were a basket and a few dollars to invest. Many started with dry goods—suspenders, collar buttons, sewing pins, and the like—which they peddled door to door. The pushcart, a larger retail venue, demanded more capital and a deeper knowledge of the workings of the city. Pushcart peddlers rented their carts for 10 cents a day from one of the many East Side garages or pushcart stables. They began work each morning around four a.m., wheeling the carts to a wholesale produce market on Catherine Slip along the East River, which catered specifically to the pushcart trade. By five a.m., carts loaded, they were on the street and ready for business. At some point in the afternoon, the peddlers’ wives took over the cart so the men could rest up for the next day’s early start. (Actually, a fair percentage of peddlers were women, and only some were partners with their husbands.) The chief attraction of peddling for the Eastern European Jews was the independent nature of the work. The sweatshop worker had precise hours to keep, quotas to meet, and supervisors to appease. The peddler, by contrast, was his own boss. As one East Sider put it, “the peddler was a man who had seen the sweatshops and thought they were for someone else.” There was dignity in peddling, but, even more to the point, the peddler was free to set his own hours and keep the Sabbath. To observant Jews, this was a crucial advantage over the sweatshops, which followed the Gentile business week and stayed open Monday through Saturday.
Beginning in the 1890s, the pushcart market became a regular destination for New York journalists, who were lured by its literary possibilities. They came in search of good copy and found it in characters like the Polish fishmonger with her barrels of two-penny herrings, or the horseradish peddler, bent over his mechanical grinder, literally reduced to tears by the rising fumes. A more quantitative rendering of the pushcart market was provided by New York mayor George B. McClellan, who presided over City Hall from 1904 to 1909. Pressured by public concern over the quickly growing number of pushcarts, Mayor McClellan appointed a commission to investigate what some New Yorkers referred to as “the pushcart evil.” Their complaints were many. The pushcarts, they said, were a threat to public health. They generated garbage and interfered with proper street-cleaning. They sold contaminated food—moldy bread, worm-ridden cheese, rotten produce—to New York’s most vulnerable citizens. Even more pressing, the pushcarts interfered with the free flow of traffic in a rapidly expanding metropolis, a matter of great concern to city officials.
To establish a common body of facts, Mayor McClellan ordered a systematic “pushcart census,” and on May 11, 1905, a small army of police officers fanned out over the Lower East Side, each one armed with a stack of questionnaires. To some measure, the census confirmed what everybody already knew. The one neighborhood with more pushcarts than any other was unequivocally the Jewish ghetto. Of the four thousand pushcarts counted in Manhattan, two thousand five hundred were on the Lower East Side, with the highest concentration on Hester, Orchard, and Essex streets. The census also brought surprises. The pushcart peddlers earned a better living than anyone suspected, and stayed in their jobs longer than anticipated. Peddling was not just a stepping-stone job, as most people believed, but a destination. Another surprise was the high quality of the goods. Contrary to expectation, more than 90 percent of the fruits, vegetables, eggs, butter, cheese, and bread sold from the pushcarts was declared fresh and wholesome, of better quality than the same items found in a store. The public world of the market offers a rare glimpse into the private realm of the kitchen. Thanks to the mayor’s census, we know precisely what foods were available to the tenement housewife and which she relied on most.
Health workers who studied the immigrants’ eating habits in the early part of the twentieth century bemoaned the shortage of vegetables on the Jewish dinner table. The ghetto market, however, abounded with vegetable peddlers. Of course, there were potatoes, but there were also beets, cabbage, carrots, eggplant, parsnip, parsley, rhubarb, onions, peppers, peas, beans, cucumbers, radishes, and a food listed as “salad greens.” One reason the health workers may have overlooked Jewish vegetable consumption is that so much of it came in the form of soup.
There’s an old Yiddish proverb that goes: “Poor people cook with a lot of water.” The truth of the proverb was borne out on a daily basis in the immigrant soup pot. In the winter months, Jewish cooks like Mrs. Rogarshevsky prepared tangy, magenta-colored borschts; cabbage soup; chicken soup with carrots, celery, and parsnip; potato soup enriched with milk; and, most economical of all, bean soup, a dish found throughout the tenement district regardless of the cook’s religion or country of origin. Lima beans, fava beans, white beans, lentils, chickpeas, and dried peas both yellow and green were cheap, nutritious, and easy to cook. Jewish cooks liked to combine their beans with onion, carrot, celery, and barley, producing soups that were deeply flavored and slightly chewy. They called the soup krupnik, a dish traditionally served to impoverished yeshiva students. In its simplest form, krupnik was indeed a spartan dish, nothing more than lima beans, a handful of barley, and maybe a chunk of potato. Adding a marrow bone was one way to make it more substantial. For meatless krupniks, the cook might add a splash of milk or maybe some dried mushrooms, an ingredient that mimicked the savoriness of meat.
In the mid-1930s, the Daily Forward, the East Side’s leading Yiddish newspaper, began a regular cooking feature edited by Regina Frishwasser. The recipes that appeared in the column were sent in by readers—home cooks with limited time and limited budgets as well. In the 1940s, Frishwasser collected the recipes into Jewish American Cook Book. The purpose of the book, she writes in her preface, “is not to bring glamour to a menu, but rather to bring our foods in the easiest way possible to those who want them.” Here is her recipe for a krupnik that used dried mushrooms, barley, lima beans, and yellow split peas.
KRUPNIK
Bring 2 quarts water to a boil, and add 1 cup yellow split peas, ½ cup minute barley, ½ cup lima beans, and 1 teaspoon salt. Simmer 1 hour and add 1 ounce broken dried mushrooms, 1 minced onion, 1 diced carrot, and 1 diced parsley [root]. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Fry 1 minced onion in 2 tablespoons butter until golden brown, then add to the soup.8
Come summer, Jewish cooks turned to chilled soups, like meatless borscht served with sour cream and boiled egg, just one of the many mouth-puckering foods consumed by the immigrants, a taste preference they had acquired on the other side of the ocean. Back in Europe, the traditional souring agent in borscht was home-fermented beet juice otherwise known as rossel. Once in America, cooks turned to a store-bought product called sour salt (tartaric acid) to give their borscht the required zing. Like lemonade, it was the sourness of borscht that made it so refreshing. Schav was another cold and sour soup that the Jews consumed as a summer tonic. Murky green in color, it was made from boiled and chopped sorrel leaves, a plant loaded with vitamin C. The appearance of sorrel on the East Side pushcarts signaled that spring had come to the ghetto. Tenement housewives prepared their first batch of schav sometime in mid-May, and served it “the old Ghetto way,” with sour cream, bits of chopped egg, cucumber, and scallion, so it was part soup and part salad. Schav was also popular in the East Side cafés, where customers sipped it from a glass like iced tea.
In warm weather, as pushcarts filled with summer vegetables, the Jews became avid salad-eaters, though not the leafy green kind favored by the Italians that we are most familiar with today. Instead, they chopped cucumber, radish, scallion, and pepper into bite-size chunks and sprinkled them with a little salt and pepper. In a more luxurious version, the raw vegetables were crowned with a scoop of cottage cheese or sour cream, a dish once referred to as “farmer’s chop suey.” This classic Jewish creation was reportedly the food that Harry Houdini (a Hungarian-born Jew) requested on his deathbed.
When the first pushcart survey was taken in 1905, fruit peddlers held sway over the market, occupying more curb space than vendors of any other food. On the far side of the ocean, Jewish fruit consumption was more or less limited to whatever grew locally, including apples, peaches, cherries, berries, and, above all, plums, which grew on the outskirts of the shtetls and which Jewish cooks made into a thick, dark preserve called pavel, a kind of plum butter. Plums were also dried along with apples and used in cooking. Jewish cooks added prunes to festive dishes like tzimmes (sweet glazed carrots) and cholent, or used it as a filling for hamantaschen, the triangle-shaped Purim cookie. When crushed and left to ferment, plums were the foundation for slivovitz, a kind of Eastern European firewater. At the pushcart market, immigrant Jews discovered an Eden of melons, citrus, stone fruits, and tropical wonderments like pineapple, banana, and even coconut, which the vendor sold, pre-cracked, the white oily shards floating in jars of cloudy water. In fact, many kinds of fruits—melons, pineapple, even oranges—were sold presliced and hawked as street food, a practice that city officials frowned on. (According to the New York sanitary police, the consumption of bad fruit purchased from street peddlers was a leading cause of death among East Side children.) Where other vendors packed up by dinnertime, the fruit vendors remained on the street long after the sun went down, their carts illuminated by flaming torches. Fathers coming home from work would stop by the fruit peddler for penny apples to give to the kids. On summer nights, when tenement-dwellers poured into the streets for a breath of fresh air, strolling East Siders paused at the fruit carts for a cool slice of watermelon. Fruit was the great affordable luxury of the tenement Jews.
Family members often took turns at the pushcart. Children peddled in the afternoon when school let out.
CSS Photography Archives, Courtesy of Community Service Society of New York and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
In the early 1920s, a Boston dietician named Bertha Wood conducted a multiethnic study of immigrant eating habits, eventually published as a book, Foods of the Foreign-Born in Relation to Health. As the title suggests, the book was written for health-care professionals—visiting nurses, settlement workers, and dispensary doctors—who served the immigrant community. Though well versed in current medical practice, they knew very little about the immigrants’ foodways, a tremendous handicap in treating the immigrant patient. For each group in her study, Wood identified the leading food deficiencies and most harmful tendencies. She was also ready, however, to point out where the immigrant cook was superior to her native-born counterpart.
At less than a hundred pages, Foods of the Foreign-Born is a curious little book. Ms. Wood approaches her immigrant subjects with a degree of culinary open-mindedness unusual for the 1920s, a particularly anxious period in American political history. At the same time, she is firmly moored in the food wisdom of her day, with a deep faith in the value of bland, unadorned cooking like creamed soups and boiled vegetables. Her 1920s perspective helps explain Wood’s two most persistent concerns with the immigrant kitchen: too much seasoning and too little milk. Ms. Wood declared the Jews guilty of both preparing highly seasoned foods (one reason the Jews were so nervous) and depriving their children of sufficient milk, “nature’s most perfect food.”
Red Cross workers distributing milk, “nature’s most perfect food,” to newly landed immigrants.
Library of Congress
Among the foods that Ms. Wood objected to most was a much-loved Jewish staple: the pickle. “Perhaps no other people,” Wood observed, “have so many ‘sours’ as the Jews. In the Jewish sections of our large cities,” she continued,
There are storekeepers whose only goods are pickles. They have cabbages pickled whole, shredded, or chopped and rolled in leaves; peppers pickled; also string beans; cucumbers, sour, half sour, and salted; beets; and many kinds of meat and fish. This excessive use of pickled foods destroys the taste for milder flavors, causes irritation, and renders assimilation more difficult.9
More alarming still was the pickle habit among Jewish school kids, who spent their lunch money on pickles and nothing else, their appetites ruined for more appropriate foods like milk and crackers. The taste of the standard Jewish pickle was so aggressive—briny, garlicky, sour—and so foreign to the native palate that Americans like Ms. Wood wondered how anyone, children especially, could eat them by choice. Instead, they saw pickle-eating as a kind of compulsion. The undernourished child was drawn to pickles the same way an adult was drawn to alcohol. More than a food, the pickle was a kind of drug for tenement children, who were still too young for whiskey.
At the pushcart market, the pickle stand was a rendezvous for shoppers. Here, standing among the barrels, hungry East Siders could buy a single pickle and eat it on the spot, then continue with their errands. Pickles were also sold in bulk, dished from the barrel with a sieve and packed into jars supplied by the shopper. Uptown visitors to the market were shocked by the size of Jewish pickles, some “large enough to kill a baby.” These overgrown sours were cut into thick rounds that sold for a penny a piece and placed between bread to make a pickle sandwich, a typical East Side lunch.
The following recipe is adapted from Jennie Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking:
DILL PICKLES
30 Kirby cucumbers of roughly the same size
½ cup kosher salt
2 quarts water
2 tablespoons white vinegar
4 cloves garlic
1 dried red pepper
¼ teaspoon mustard seed
2 coin-sized slices fresh horseradish
1 teaspoon mixed pickling spice
20 sprigs of dill
Wash and dry cucumbers and arrange them in a large jar or two smaller jars, alternating a layer of cucumbers with a layer of dill. Combine salt and water and bring to boil. Turn off heat. Add vinegar and spices and pour liquid over cucumbers. They should be immersed. If necessary, add more saltwater. Cover and keep in a cool place for 1 week. If you like green pickles, Mrs. Grossinger recommends you try one after 5 days.10
Though pushcarts formed the backbone of the immigrant food economy, East Siders also patronized neighborhood shops: butchers, groceries, delicatessens, and dairy stores. This last group, a type of business that no longer exists, included Breakstone & Levine, sellers of milk, butter, and cheese, formerly located on Cherry Street, and forerunner to the modern-day Breakstone brand. But inside the tenements, hidden from the casual observer, immigrants trafficked in a shadow food economy in which neighbors took responsibility for feeding each other. Transactions within the tenement were most often cashless. Neighbors exchanged gifts of food as part of an improvised bartering system in which the poor gave to the truly destitute, or, in many cases, to families struck by tragedy: a death, sickness, a lost job. In return for her edible gifts, the tenement homemaker received the same consideration whenever her luck was down—and no one in the tenements was immune from a run of bad luck. Mrs. Rogarshevsky, a widow with six kids, was certainly eligible, and edible charity must have streamed into the apartment during and after her husband’s long illness, when she adjusted to her new role as breadwinner.
The continuous give-and-take that carried food from one apartment to another was a strategy for survival among tenement-dwellers sustained by the tenement itself. In buildings where apartment doors were hardly ever locked or even closed, where stairways were used as vertical playgrounds, rooftops functioned as communal bedrooms, and front stoops were open-air living rooms, the business of daily life was an essentially shared experience. Tenement walls, thin to begin with, were riddled with windows, windows between rooms, between apartments, and windows that opened onto the hallway. As a result, sounds easily leaked out of one living space and into another. Or, if they were loud enough, ricocheted through the central stairwell. During summer, when East Siders hungered for fresh air, and windows to the outside world were open wide, voices were broadcast through the building via the airshaft. In the brownstones and apartment houses above 14th Street, New Yorkers lived more discreetly, sealed off from the larger world in their own domestic sanctuary. In the tenements, the people who lived above and below you were often blood relatives, but even if they weren’t, you were fully briefed on their domestic status down to the most intimate details, and vice versa.
Fannie Rogarshevsky (back row, second from right) and three of her children posing in front of 97 Orchard, circa 1920. (The two children in the front row are unidentified.)
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
The communal nature of tenement-living was unavoidable and frequently unbearable. (Tenement-dwellers craved two things that many took for granted: privacy and quiet.) At the same time, it encouraged neighbors to look after each other in ways unheard of in other forms of urban housing. Visitors to the tenements, settlement workers, sociologists, and social reformers, were struck by the generosity of the poorest New Yorkers, recounting their many acts of kindness in memoirs and studies. In fact, their writing became so cluttered with examples of tenement compassion that Lillian Wald, founder of the Henry Street Settlement, was moved to write, “it has become almost trite to speak of the kindness of the poor to the poor,” by way of introducing her own extended list.
The acts of kindness took many and varied forms. Between 1902 and 1904, a sociology student named Elsa Herzfeld carried out a study of family life in the tenements, which outlined some of them:
The readiness to share seems to me to be one of the chief traits in the relation of neighbor to neighbor. The aid given is of a simple kind. It satisfies an immediate need. Above all it is spontaneous…. When a mother has to go out for the day, she “leaves” the children with her neighbor or asks her to go in “and have a look at them.” The neighbor comes in when the children are sick, she offers her blankets, makes some soup, suggests her own physician, or brings cakes and goodies to the sick child. She visits a neighbor patient in the hospital and brings her ice cream and candy or flowers. If a mother dies suddenly, a neighbor takes the children to her own room. If a child is neglected, she takes her “for months and asks no board.” The young girl on the same floor is given a place in the home “to keep her from fallin’ into low company.” If your husband gets “drunk,” a neighbor opens her door to you. If you get separated or dispossessed, “she has always room for one more.”11
As a rule, East Siders avoided taking handouts from the established charities because of the stigma it carried. Even the trip to the charity office, oftentimes located in alien neighborhoods, was a much-dreaded exercise in humiliation. In a coming-of-age memoir set on the Lower East Side, Bella Spewack, who later went on to a successful career as a Broadway playwright, describes her mother, pregnant at the time and with two kids already at home, abandoned by her husband, trying to convince the charity officer that she was worthy of $14 in rent money. “To get help from that place…you must cry and tear your hair and eat the dirt on the floor,” Spewack writes. But seeking help from a neighbor was another story entirely. In the tenements, there was no need to explain or plead your case. Passengers on the same proverbial boat, the people around you grasped your situation with perfect clarity and gave what they could, with no probing questions or edifying lectures.
Sharing food with neighbors was standard practice among immigrants of every nationality, and in some cases, between nationalities. So, for example, an Italian housewife fed minestrone to the Irish kids who lived on the second floor, while Russians brought honey cake to the old Slovak lady across the airshaft. Widespread though it was, food-sharing loomed especially large among Jewish immigrants, who arrived in the tenements with their own long history of culinary charity. Fridays just before sundown, in the towns and cities they had come from, a woman who could afford the extra expense prepared a little more food than her own family needed and distributed it to less well-off neighbors. The sight of women carrying loaves of challah through the streets, or covered pots of stewed fish was a regular Friday-night occurrence. A second option was to invite a poor stranger to join the family Sabbath table, an old widower or beggar, or maybe a peddler who was miles from his own home. Public feasts were held for the poor in honor of weddings and brisses, the circumcision ceremony held on the infant’s eighth day of life. Food-sharing, in short, was a built-in feature of the Jewish kitchen.
Fannie Cohen was an immigrant homemaker from Poland, who arrived in New York in 1912, a married woman with two young kids. Her husband was already here, having immigrated a full eight years earlier, and was working on the East Side as a carpenter. The family lived at 154 Ridge Street on the Lower East Side, in a tenement much like 97 Orchard, where Mrs. Cohen gave birth five more times, though one of the children died at fourteen months from contaminated milk. Mrs. Cohen had received a classic Jewish culinary education. Friday nights, she made gefilte fish (her standard formula combined whitefish, carp, and onion), which she chopped in a large wooden bowl and simmered along with the fish bones, wrapping them first in cheesecloth to prevent the kids from choking on one. She also made roasted carp, the whole fish rubbed with peanut oil, chopped garlic, and paprika, then baked until the skin was varnished-looking and slightly crisp. On Shavuot, the holiday in late spring that celebrates God’s gift of the Ten Commandments, she made yellow pike, the fish sliced crosswise into meaty steaks then simmered with lemon, bay leaves, pepper, and a pinch of sugar. The main culinary attraction on the Purim table was goose and, for dessert, hamantaschen. On Passover she made brisket, fruit compote, and chremsel, dainty pancakes made from matzoh meal that were eaten with jam or dipped in sugar.
Whatever the holiday, it was Mrs. Cohen’s habit to prepare more food than her own family could ever consume. Friday mornings at three a.m., she mixed up a batch of dough for the Sabbath challah, using twenty pounds of flour, forty eggs, and five cups of oil. The only vessel large enough to hold it was a freestanding baby’s bathtub. Once mixed and kneaded, the dough was left to rise in its metal tub, covered by a wool blanket, until mid-morning, when it was sectioned off into loaves and left to rise again. By afternoon, Mrs. Cohen had twenty braided loaves cooling by the window. Some she gave to the neighbors, and some to the local rabbi, who always received the two largest loaves, each one the size of a placemat. Two loaves she kept for the family, but the rest she packed up and delivered to the newly landed immigrants at Battery Park, ferried there directly from Ellis Island. Knowing that some of them were stranded for the night—a tragedy on the Sabbath, when every Jew should be celebrating—she also came with soup, conveyed across town in metal canisters with screw-on tops.
In America, the newly arrived immigrant became the main recipient of the Jew’s edible charity, while the tenement became the new shtetl. On Shavuot, Mrs. Cohen made hundreds of blintzes—some blueberry, some cheese, some potato—and sent them through the building, delivered by one of her kids. For Passover, she sent around tins of flourless sponge cake. But sometimes, there was no holiday at all and Mrs. Cohen still fed the building, handing a plate of stuffed cabbage or a square of kugel to one of the children with the instruction, “Bring up Mrs. Drimmer some food” or “Take this to Mrs. Sipelski,” depending on which of the neighbors was sick or jobless or otherwise in need. These food deliveries always involved a round trip, since the child was later sent back to retrieve the now-empty dish. And sometimes the charity extended beyond the tenement to the larger neighborhood, like on Passover, when Mrs. Cohen invited strays, down-and-out characters whom her husband had rounded up on the way back from the synagogue, to eat from her own Seder table.
Here is Mrs. Cohen’s challah recipe, scaled down to yield two good-size loaves:
CHALLAH
2 ½ lbs or 7 ½ cups bread flour
2 ounces fresh yeast or 4 teaspoons instant yeast
1 ½ cups warm water
½ cup peanut oil or other vegetable oil
4 eggs, room temperature
½ cup sugar
3 tablespoons salt
Dissolve yeast in warm water and let stand until mixture looks foamy, 5 to 10 minutes. Combine with remaining ingredients, stirring to form a dough. Knead dough for 10 minutes, then place in a lightly greased bowl. Cover with a damp cloth and let rise until doubled in volume, 1 to 2 hours. Punch down dough, knead ten times and divide in two. Separate each half into thirds. Roll each section into a rope about 18 inches long. Braid ropes, pinching the ends and turning them under. Place on a lightly greased baking tray and cover with a damp cloth. Let rise until doubled in size. Preheat oven to 375ºF. Before baking, brush challah with one egg yolk mixed with 1 teaspoon water. Bake for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until brown.12
Though food items of one kind or another dominated the pushcart trade, the market also provided East Siders with a sweeping array of nonedible goods. Pots, pans, dishes, scissors, soap, clothing, hats, and eyeglasses are just a minute sampling. In short, any useful item from mattresses to sewing thimbles was available at the pushcart market. But East Side vendors also trafficked in more fanciful goods, including the decorative objects known in Yiddish as tchotchkes, figurines, wax fruit, and mass-produced wall prints. The subject matter of pushcart artwork was often inspirational, the immigrant drawn to portraits of heroic figures from the worlds of literature and politics. There were postcard-size prints of William Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, Sholem Aleichem (the Yiddish Mark Twain), and President Lincoln, the great hero of the ghetto. Another revered figure was Christopher Columbus and, in later years, Franklin Roosevelt. Fannie Rogarshevsky kept a plaster bust of Columbus on the parlor mantel.
The market also supplied East Siders with intellectual stimulation in the form of books. Browsing the pushcarts for reading material was, to put it mildly, a hit-or-miss venture. The carts carried a grab bag of mostly secondhand volumes, many of them reference books. On the same cart, the shopper might come across a history of railway statutes, a yearbook from the Department of Agriculture, a collection of Hebrew prayer books, and an assortment of dictionaries. More discerning readers skipped the carts and shopped from the profusion of book stands scattered through the neighborhood. The stands were semipermanent structures, urban lean-tos supported by the tenements on one side, with counters and shelves improvised from discarded doors, window shutters, and stray planks of wood. Unlike the pushcarts, the book stands dealt mostly in new merchandise, books that were published by immigrants for immigrants, often produced in small local print shops.
Sometime in 1901, the same year the Rogarshevskys landed in New York, a skinny paperbound volume made its first appearance on the East Side book stands. The Text Book for Cooking and Baking by Hinde Amchanitzki was America’s first Yiddish-language cookbook, a photograph of the author, her wig neatly parted, gracing its cover. Very little is known about the author’s own immigration history, though in her foreword she shares details from her culinary past. Amchanitzki’s career as a professional cook started in Europe and continued in America. Her recipes, she writes, are based on forty-five years of experience working in both private homes and restaurants, including an extended stint in a New York establishment that catered to “the finest people.” Amchanitzki’s intended readers were women much like Mrs. Rogarshevsky—seasoned homemakers trained in one culinary tradition, now ready, in their own cautious way, to take on another. Accordingly, the recipe index skips between the Old and New World kitchens, with stuffed spleen, chopped chicken liver, and sponge cake alternating with breakfast pancakes, tomato soup, and banana pie. A third group of dishes, however, falls somewhere between the two kitchens, an amalgam of New World ingredients and Old World techniques. Included in this category is Amchanitzki’s recipe for cranberry strudel:
CRANBERRY STRUDEL
Take a quart of good cranberries, a half pound of sugar, and a bit of water. Cook until thick and put aside to cool. Take a glass of fat, a glass of sugar, 2 eggs, and stir together. Add a glass of water and mix well. Take two glasses of flour, two and a half teaspoons baking powder, mix them together, and stir into batter. Take a sheet and grease it well. Pour in half the batter and spread it evenly over the entire sheet with a spoon. Spread the cranberries evenly over the dough and pour the remaining dough over the cranberries, covering them completely. Sprinkle sugar on top and bake thoroughly. When done, let cool and cut into pieces. This is a very good strudel.13
Early twentieth-century cookbooks brought news from the American kitchen to immigrants with limited access to the food habits of mainstream America. One place where contact was possible was the settlement house. The idea behind the settlement house, a British invention of the 1850s, was to bring together the educated and laboring classes for the benefit of both parties. It was always assumed, however, that the educated person had more to give, the laborer more to gain. America’s first settlement house, the Neighborhood Guild (later known as the University Settlement), opened in 1887 on Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side, followed by Hull House in Chicago two years later. By 1910, the number of settlement houses in the United States had reached four hundred.
The settlement house aspired to elevate the working person to “a higher plane of feeling and citizenship.” Most offered classes in literature, music, theater, and dancing, with kindergartens for the youngest children, clubs and gymnasiums for the older ones, and reading rooms for the adults. Some offered vocational training—more for women than men—providing instruction in millinery, sewing, and nursing. In immigrant-dense neighborhoods, where settlement houses assumed the job of Americanizing the foreign-born, there were also English-language classes, classes in civics, and American history. At the Educational Alliance, for example, immigrants could enroll in a lecture course that covered federal and state history, geography, government, and American customs and manners. Students who completed the course received copies of both the Constitution and Declaration of Independence printed in English and Yiddish.
Similar efforts to Americanize the immigrant took place in settlement cooking classes. The class curriculum was shaped by a relatively new approach to housework, known as domestic science, a movement that gained ground with American homemakers in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The women who led the domestic science charge set out to ennoble the homemaker’s daily grind of cooking and cleaning by grounding it in scientific theory and method. They envisioned the home as a kind of domestic laboratory in which women applied their knowledge of chemistry, sanitation, dietetics, physiology, and economics to the everyday work of cooking and cleaning. To help spread their gospel, they established cooking schools in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, and domestic science programs in colleges and universities, including the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Columbia University in Manhattan. The Russian-American writer Anzia Yezierska was granted a scholarship to study at the Columbia School of Household Arts, but private cooking programs were generally beyond the means of working-class women. The domestic-science movement reached the working class through charitable institutions like churches, YMCAs, and settlement houses, where classes were offered for free or at prices scaled to the working person’s budget.
The classes focused on the simplest and plainest American foods, beginning with a lesson on how to make toast and brew coffee in a freshly scoured coffee pot. Students learned how to properly boil oatmeal, rice, and potatoes, how to make pea soup, mutton stew, creamed codfish, biscuits, and gingerbread. Settlement houses that catered to Jews adapted the standard lesson plan so it conformed to Jewish dietary law, but only because they had no choice. The people who ran the settlement houses were Reform Jews, many from German families, who had immigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, oyster-eaters. In their desire to Americanize the immigrant, they would have preferred to dispense with kosher laws—and some, in fact, tried—but their students wouldn’t allow it. As one settlement worker explained it, “There are some kosher laws that have to be followed, else the teaching would go no further than the classroom and would never show practical results.”
A cooking class for immigrant girls at the Educational Alliance. The girls here are learning how to make corn muffins.
From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
Of the eight thousand East Siders that passed through the doors of the Educational Alliance each day, the vast majority came to take advantage of the free legal aid, use the public baths, or let their children loose on the rooftop garden. The cooking classes were only a modest success. The reason was simple: the Jewish homemaker already knew how to cook.
In 1916, the New York Board of Health issued a recipe booklet of cheap and nutritious foods intended for the East Side homemaker. Distributed by neighborhood settlement houses, How to Feed the Family was something of a flop among its intended audience. A reporter curious about the East Sider’s reaction found out why. (The interview is transcribed in dialect, a common practice in period newspapers when dealing with working-class subjects.) The Board of Health, one woman explained,
ain’t got no right to say what I should cook and how. Y’understand? Already when I was little I knew how oatmeal it should be cooked. You do it with a double boiler. I ain’t got no use for peoples what teaches me how to cook things that a long time before I done better as what they did.
Her neighbor concurred. “The East Side is the East,” she told the reporter. “I make like my Grossmutter Selig and my mother Gefullte fish and stuffed helzel [poultry neck]. What I care for the Board of Health?”14 But if the Board of Health failed to impress them, immigrant cooks felt the pressure to Americanize from other sources. The most persuasive were the cook’s own children.
No single institution exerted more influence on the culinary lives of immigrant children than the American public school. Here, beginning in 1888, immigrant daughters were taught the fundamentals of American cookery in a then-experimental course based on the principles of domestic science. Declared a success by city educators, the experiment in “manual training” (the classes also gave instruction in sewing, housekeeping, and nursing) became a permanent fixture of the New York public schools. Over the next decades, it expanded and evolved along with the changing profile of the city. For poor students, classes in manual training opened up employment opportunities, but middle-class girls could benefit too. The classes taught them discipline, neatness, and organization, the qualities that would help them manage their own future households.
The program’s original audience was native-born American girls, but the focus shifted as immigrants continued to descend on New York. To reach their foreign-born students, educators hit upon a novel teaching strategy. They replaced the conventional classroom with “model flats,” simulated tenement apartments that mimicked the students’ own tenement homes. In their stage-set kitchens, the girls learned how to maintain the highest sanitary standards, every dish and utensil neatly stowed in its rightful place. They were taught the importance of established mealtimes, the family sitting down together at a properly set table, the food “served” rather than “grabbed.” Finally, they were tutored in the science of cooking with lessons on food chemistry, kitchen mechanics, and human physiology.
Model flats were the brainchild of Mabel Kittredge, a domestic scientist who worked with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement. The first model flat opened in 1902 in a tenement building in the heart of the Jewish ghetto. Before long, they were scattered through the tenement district, some housed in actual tenements, others in school buildings, including P.S. 7 on Hester Street. Miss Kittredge developed a housekeeping curriculum based on the model flats, which she compiled into a textbook. Today, Practical Homemaking provides a detailed picture of the public school cooking class circa 1914, when the book was published. The recipes in Practical Homemaking, hand-selected for the tenement population, were centered around three core ingredients: milk, cereals, and potatoes. Miss Kittredge saw little use for vegetables, with the exception of beans, the only form of plant life rich in “nutritive value.” She was equally unimpressed by fruit, which, after all, was composed mostly of water. The immigrants’ first cooking lesson was devoted to nature’s most perfect food, milk, from which the girls were taught to make cocoa. Future lessons were devoted to white sauce, boiled cereals like oatmeal and Wheatena, boiled potatoes, and cooked apples. Promoting the foods that Kittredge felt were best suited to the East Sider, the lessons were also designed to wean immigrants away from their less desirable culinary habits. For Jews, that meant forsaking their over-spiced pickles and delicatessen meats, while Italians were asked to cut back on their beloved macaroni and olive oil. Returning to their real-life tenement flats, the girls shared what they had learned, teaching their mothers how to poach eggs, or cook vegetables in boiling water rather than goose schmaltz. Teachers also made home visits to reinforce the lessons and monitor their students’ progress. As one contemporary described it, the girls served as missionaries to their foreign-born parents, a role that the public schools exploited for all it was worth.
Dieticians from local schools and settlement houses paid visits to the tenements. The dietician pictured is teaching immigrant women how to cook hot cereal in a double boiler.
CSS Photography Archives, Courtesy of Community Service Society of New York and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
A second powerful influence on the food habits of immigrant children was the school lunchroom. Up until the twentieth century, most city kids returned from school each day for a home-cooked meal. That began to change as more and more women found work outside the home, leaving their kids to fend for themselves. With no one to feed them, the kids were given two or three pennies to buy lunch from a local pushcart or delicatessen. In 1908, a group of private citizens, alarmed by this new development, founded the New York School Lunch Committee, a charity that provided three-penny lunches to undernourished children. In place of pickles and candy—the typical pushcart meal—the committee provided hot soups and stews for two cents a serving, and one-penny treats like rice pudding or baked sweet potato. The school lunch committee lasted through World War I, but in 1920, responsibility for feeding the city’s children shifted to the Board of Education. As it happens, the shift coincided with a groundswell of anti-immigrant thinking in the United States, which culminated in the Johnson Reed Act, a far-reaching immigrant quota system passed by Congress in 1924. Calls to Americanize the foreign-born reverberated through government offices and monopolized the editorial pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. With so much attention on the immigrant threat, the Board of Education looked to the school lunchroom to Americanize the immigrant palate. Below is a typical school lunch menu circa 1920:
MONDAY: Cocoa, buttered roll, stewed corn, stewed prunes
TUESDAY: Cream of pea soup, peanut and cottage cheese sandwich, Brown Betty with lemon sauce, fruit tapioca
WEDNESDAY: Vegetable soup, baked beans, vanilla cornstarch with chocolate sauce
THURSDAY: Lima bean and tomato soup, buttered roll, cream tapioca, rice pudding
FRIDAY: Cocoa, salmon sandwiches, sliced fruit, oatmeal cookies15
To extend the lunchroom’s influence, mothers were invited to eat with their kids. During the meal, domestic-science teachers would point out the benefits of the particular dishes served, urging them to prepare similar foods in their own homes. Across America, educators seized on the lunchroom’s educational possibilities, establishing similar programs of their own. A domestic-science teacher named Emma Smedley summed up the new awareness most succinctly. “No branch of the school activities,” she wrote, “offers greater opportunity of fitting in with the Americanization plan than the school lunch.”16 The process was gradual, but in the school lunchroom, kids of diverse backgrounds found a culinary common ground, one tentative bite at a time.
In 1884, a new entry made its debut in Trow’s New York Business Directory, ancestor to the modern-day Yellow Pages. Sandwiched between “Deeds (Acknowledgement of)” and “Dental Equipment” now appeared “Delicatessens.” These specialized groceries had existed in New York for at least thirty years, most of them clustered along First and Second Avenues. Even so, 1884 was a kind of birthday for this immigrant food shop, the year it captured the attention of the Trow’s editors, asserting its place in the city’s food economy.
If the New York Tribune is correct, the city’s first “delicatessen handler,” or deli man, for short, was an immigrant named Paul Gabel, who landed in New York in 1848, the year of revolution in Europe and the start of the great German migration. (Gabel made a good living in America. By 1870, he had moved his store and his family to stately Brooklyn Heights, his fortune now worth $20,000, a substantial amount by the standards of the day.) Shops like Mr. Gabel’s carried a limited stock of sausages, cheeses, and sweets, but as the century progressed, delicatessens added “made dishes” to their lineup of provisions—foods that were cooked and ready to eat, prepared by the owner’s wife in a small kitchen behind the store. Hungry city-dwellers visiting their local delicatessen could choose among the following: meat pies, smoked beef shoulder, smoked tongue, smoked fowls, roast fowls, smoked, pickled, and salted herring, fresh ham, baked beans, potato salad, beet salad, cabbage, parsnip, and celery salads, in addition to all the usual wursts, breads, and cheeses. Though still in the hands of German New Yorkers, the delicatessens’ clientele had now widened to include the city’s growing population of Irish immigrants, along with native-born Americans. By the 1890s, delicatessens were “as common as bricks in a building” the great majority, however, could be found on the Lower East Side. Rich New Yorkers, with their live-in servants and private cooks, had little real need for the delicatessen. But among the tenements, delicatessens assumed the role of a poor person’s catering shop. Bachelors, shopgirls, boarders and lodgers, working mothers, people with little time for the kitchen, some with no kitchens at all, relied on the delicatessens to cook for them. Their ser vices were particularly indispensable during the hot summer months, when firing up the kitchen stove turned the tenement apartment into a sweatbox.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the “delicatessen habit” moved up the economic ladder and caught on among the middle class. With this development, a new tradition was born: the Sunday delicatessen supper, a meal composed of cooked foods, hot and ready to serve. Not only in New York, but across urban America, the delicatessen was now so thoroughly entrenched that it sparked an anti-delicatessen backlash. Domestic scientists, among other concerned Americans, blamed the delicatessen for an array of social maladies. A few links of sausage, a loaf of white bread, and a bottle of ketchup, the standard delicatessen meal, drives the workingman straight to the nearest saloon, these women argued. Along with intemperance—a source of growing apprehension in pre–World War I America—delicatessens were thought responsible for the nation’s climbing divorce rate. “If fewer women depended on the delicatessen store,” one expert argued, “there would be fewer broken homes.”17 Disgruntled husbands could be made manageable if their wives would only take the trouble to cook for them.
The history of the Jewish delicatessen follows a separate but roughly parallel track. The country’s first Jewish delicatessens opened for business on the Lower East Side early in the 1850s. Established by German Jews, they specialized in smoked, brined, and spiced meats, much like their Gentile counterparts. They also carried myriad forms of herring, pumpernickel, and the standard assortment of German salads. The two stores even looked alike. The delicatessen’s main staging area was a white marble counter, where the meats were displayed and sliced for the customer. The salads were arrayed in a row of stoneware crocks. What set the Jewish delicatessen apart was the total absence of any product derived from pigs. In its place, German Jews turned to geese. The following description is taken from an 1897 story that ran in the New York Tribune:
There are delicatessen shops in New York where roast fowl and sliced ham are unknown, where pigs’ feet would not be tolerated, and where an order of venison would be given in vain. The Kosher delicatessen places of the crowded East Side, although in name like those in Sixth-ave., carry a stock of goods unlike those of any other place. There, in season, may be bought the various dainties made from goose meat. Among these are Gansekleines, Gansegruben, and fattened goose liver.Gansekleines is the name given to the small pieces of the dressed goose, like wings, feet, and neck, and Gansegruben are the pieces of the brown crackling from which the fat has been extracted. In some of these places they also prepare what is known as Gesetztes Essen. This consists of a mixture of barley and dried peas, which is prepared on Friday for consumption on Saturday when the pious Jews do no cooking.18
Without a doubt, the Sabbath stew glistened with goose schmaltz.
Beyond these goose-based dainties, Jewish delicatessens sold kosher wursts and frankfurters, corned beef and corned tongue. In the early days, the cured meats were shipped over from Germany, but as the Jewish community settled in, it became more self-sufficient. During the 1870s, kosher sausage factories sprang up on the Lower East Side to supply the quickly multiplying number of Jewish delicatessens in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and smaller cities as well. In 1872, a German butcher named Isaac Gellis produced some of America’s first domestic kosher frankfurters in his sausage factory at 37 Essex Street. As the company was passed down from father to son to grandson, it grew into an empire, with delicatessen restaurants selling nothing but the Gellis brand scattered through Manhattan. One of them, Fine & Schapiro, can still be found on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Moses Zimmerman, also from Germany, was another early sausage-maker. His factory on East Houston Street opened in 1877, producing bolognas, frankfurters, wienerwursts, corned beef, and corned tongue, along with kosher cooking fat.
In the 1880s, as migration patterns shifted and large numbers of Eastern European Jews sailed for America, they discovered the delicatessen in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The great majority had never seen one before. Older immigrants looked on the delicatessen with suspicion (it was “too spicy” and “too fancy”), while their children were intoxicated by its distinct perfume, a blend of boiled beef, garlic, pepper, and vinegar. Mondays through Fridays, they rushed from school to the local deli for a lunch of pickles and halvah. On Saturdays, the delicatessen was closed for the Sabbath, but it opened again Saturday evenings at sundown. This was a moment that ghetto kids looked forward to with crazed anticipation, famously captured by Alfred Kazin in his food-rich memoir, A Walker in the City. Saturdays at twilight, Kazin writes, neighborhood kids haunted the local delicatessen, waiting for it to reopen. As soon as it did, the kids raced in, “panting for the hot dogs sizzling on the gas plate just inside the window. The look of that blackened empty gas plate had driven us wild all through the wearisome Sabbath day. And now, as the electric sign blazed up again, lighting up the words Jewish National Delicatessen, it was as if we had entered our rightful heritage.”19
The irony here is that the delicatessen was not, in fact, a pillar of Jewish food culture, at least not for the Russians, or the Poles, or the Litvaks, but the Jews declared it one all the same. If their mothers disapproved—and most mothers did—for Jewish kids, the delicatessen was like a second home, part lunchroom, part urban clubhouse, and at night, an after-hours meeting place for ghetto sweethearts. With their limited pocket money, East Side kids were confined to the cheapest items on the delicatessen menu: a frankfurter with yellow mustard or a salami sandwich. The big-ticket item was a plate of sliced deli meat served with a tub of pickles. The most aristocratic option of all was the “mixed plate”: a combination of pastrami, corned beef, and tongue.
Inch by inch, their kids leading the way, the new Jewish immigrants developed a taste for the cured meats of their German brothers and sisters. Those with an entrepreneurial bent looked to the delicatessen as a business opportunity and opened stores of their own. Samuel Chotzinoff, a Russian immigrant and future concert pianist, remembers exactly what that entailed. The Chotzinoff family arrived in New York in the late 1890s when Samuel was around eight years old. A few years later, when his mother decided to open a delicatessen, she paid a visit to one of the local sausage manufacturers. In keeping with East Side custom, the Mandelbaum Sausage factory offered her a kind of delicatessen start-up package. It included fixtures for the store (paid for on an installment plan) and three months of credit toward supplies. The sausage people even taught her how to cut meat into the thinnest possible slices, the delicatessen’s key to financial success. A seltzer company lent Mrs. Chotzinoff a soda-water fountain for making syrup drinks. The store kitchen was a backroom with a three-burner stove, where she cooked her own corned beef in a tin clothes boiler. The entire operation cost her only $150 upfront, money that she borrowed from a well-off landsman.
Looking beyond the delicatessen, the Jewish East Side was home to a staggering variety of eating places. Neighborhood restaurants catered to every nameable niche and subniche of the local population—geographic, economic, professional, and even political—attracting a highly specialized clientele of like-minded diners. Every national group had its corresponding restaurant. The more modest establishments were located in tenement apartments temporarily converted into public eating spaces. Blurring the line between home and business, the private restaurant offered diners a truly Old World eating experience: a home-cooked meal prepared in the style of a particular region or city back in Europe. A visitor to the East Side in 1919, who discovered these private restaurants, explains how they worked:
A great many of the emigrants from Russia and Rumania, even after years of alienation, have an intense craving for the dishes of their native province. They cannot assimilate the American cuisine, even though they accept its citizenship. It is, therefore, the practice of the inhabitants of particular province to convert her front parlor (usually located on the ground floor of a tenement) into a miniature dining room, where she caters to a limited number of her home-town folk. Her shingle announces the name of her province, such as “Pinsker,” “Dwinsker,” “Minsker,” “Saraslover,” “Bialystoker,” etc., as the case may be. Here the aliens meet their friends from the Old Country and lose their homesickness in the midst of familiar faces and dialects and in the odors from the kitchen, which evoke for them images for their home and surroundings.20
Parlor restaurants answered the needs of the working person, but the ghetto also provided for the local population of well-off merchants, factory owners, lawyers, doctors, and real estate barons. By the turn of the century, a half dozen glittering eating-places had opened on the Lower East Side, which catered to the downtown aristocracy. Most of them were in the hands of Romanian Jews, the self-proclaimed bon vivants of the ghetto.
The Romanian quarter of the Lower East Side began at Grand Street and continued north until Houston Street. It was bounded on the west by the Bowery, the border between the Jewish ghetto and Little Italy, and by Clinton Street to the east, the thoroughfare that separated the Romanians from the Poles. The streets within this square quarter-mile were unusually dense with pastry shops, cafés, delicatessens, and restaurants, the most opulent eateries south of 14th Street. Dining rooms were decorated in the sinuous Art Nouveau style, a raised platform at one end for the house orchestra, the tables arrayed along a well-polished dance floor. Sunday nights, when ghetto restaurants were at their busiest, the dance floors were crowded with ample-bodied Jewish women, the grand dames of the Lower East Side, decked out in their finest gowns and sparkliest diamonds.
The deluxe surroundings belied the earthy, garlic-laced cuisine typical of the Romanian rathskeller. The following account of Perlman’s Rumanian Rathskellar at 158 East Houston Street comes from a 1930 restaurant guide:
The food for the most part is invariably unspellable and wholly delicious. Sweetbreads such as you never encountered before; smoked goose pastrami, aromatic salami, chicken livers, chopped fine and sprinkled with chopped onions; Wiener schnitzel; pickled tomatoes and pickled peppers; sweet-and-sour tongue; and huge black radishes. Because it’s so good, you eat and eat until your head swims, drinking seltzer to help it along.21
The Romanian restaurants were also known for their “broilings,” or grilled strip steaks, and for their carnitzi, sausages that were so pungent they seemed one part ground meat to one part garlic.
Romanians shared East Houston Street with Hungarians, and together the two groups transformed a generous chunk of the Lower East Side into New York’s leading café district. Where Russian Jews were devoted tea drinkers, the Hungarians had acquired a love for coffee, a habit learned from the Ottoman Turks. (Along with Austria, Hungary was part of the vast territory claimed by the Ottomans between 1544 and 1699.) Settling in the United States in the late nineteenth century, the Hungarians brought their coffee habit with them, establishing scores of coffee houses in immigrant enclaves. Visitors to the East Side counted at least one café on nearly every block of the Hungarian quarter, while some streets had four or five. Coffee on the East Side was served in the European style, with a small pot of cream and a tumbler of water, a symbolic gesture of hospitality. That was for patrons who asked for their coffee schwartzen. Coffee with milk was served in a glass. Whichever style, Hungarian coffee was often consumed with pastry, maybe a slice of strudel, apple or poppy seed, or a plate of kiperln, the crescent-shaped cookies that we know as rugelach.
After dark, well-heeled New Yorkers descended on the cafés for a night of “slumming,” a term coined in the nineteenth century. For the uptown city-dweller, slumming on the Lower East Side was both an opportunity for cultural enrichment, like a visit to the museum, and a form of ribald entertainment. The adventure began as the uptowner crossed 14th Street and entered the foreign quarter, seeking immigrant cafés with olive-skinned waitresses, gypsy violinists, and fiery (to the uptown palate) Hungarian cooking. A favorite destination was Little Hungary, a haunt of Theodore Roosevelt during his term as New York police commissioner. Below, a 1903 guide to the East Side cafés deciphers the menu at Little Hungary for the bewildered uptown diner. First among the entrées is, of course “Szekelye Gulyas,” a sharp-seasoned ragout of veal and pork, with sauerkraut. Then there are such things as:
Lammporkolt mit Eiergeste—a goulash of lamb
Peishel mit Nockerln—a goulash of lung
Wiener Backhendle—fried chicken, breaded
Kas-Fleckerl—vermicelli with grated cheese
Zigeuner-Auflauf—vermicelli with prune jelly
Palacsinken—a sort of French pancake
Kaiserschmarren—a German pancake cut into small pieces while baking, and mixed with seeded raisins
Strumpfbandle—noodles with cinnamon and sugar Among the most noted pastries are Apfel-Strudel, Mohn, and
Nuss-Kipferl22
It didn’t seem to matter to the uptown patrons that the café crowd was made up of fellow slummers. High on slivovitz, they tumbled into their waiting carriages and bounced homeward, their taste buds still reeling from the onslaught of garlic and paprika.
The Russian quarter of the Lower East Side hosted its own café network, only here the action unfolded around steaming glasses of amber-colored tea. In his drinking habits, the Russian Jew was the inverse of the Irishman. The Irishman drank his tea at home, but socialized over whiskey in the East Side saloons. The Jew, by contrast, consumed his alcohol around the family table while tea was his drink of public fellowship. Café tea was brewed in samovars and served in glass tumblers with a thick slice of lemon and a lump of sugar that the drinker clamped between his front teeth. The hot liquid was then sucked through the sugar with a loud, slurping sound. In the process of drinking, a few tablespoonfuls always splashed over the edge of the tumbler into the saucer beneath. When the glass was empty, the drinker raised the saucer to his lips and drained that as well.
In Little Hungary, music was part and parcel of the café atmosphere. In the Russian quarter, music was replaced by the sound of talk—feverish, theatrical, and at times contentious. The food and drink were secondary. For this reason, the cafés came to be known as kibitzarnia, from the Yiddish verb kibetzn. Roughly translated, to kibitz is to banter, in a sometimes mocking or intrusive way. The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, who was born in Russia in 1859 and lived for a short time on the Lower East Side, explains that to kibitz “is to engage in repartee of a special sort, to needle someone, tickle him in the ribs, pull his leg, gnaw at his vitals, sprinkle salt on his wounds, give him the kiss of death, and all with a sweet smile, with a flash of rapier-like wit, with whimsy and humor…” In the kibitzarnia, he continues, the customer orders a cup of tea and a bite to eat, in prelude to the real action. Now the kibitzing starts:
The barbed compliments fly between the tables. Racy stories and witticisms are passed around, each calculated to step on someone’s toes where the shoe pinches most…The kibitzarnia, dear reader, is a sort of free Gehenna [hell] where people rake each other over the coals, a steam bath where they beat each other with bundles of twigs until the blood spurts. Here opinions are formed, reputations are made and destroyed, careers decided.23
During the day, the café doubled as a conventional working person’s restaurant serving traditional Russian fare: bean soup, borscht, kasha varnishkes, and herring in all its forms. At Leavitt’s Café on Division Street, stomping ground of the East Side literary set, patrons could order a plate of chopped chicken liver for a nickel, or meatballs with farfel for 15 cents. After the dinner hour, the café assumed its nighttime role as the local debate club/lecture hall/classroom/salon, where the talking continued unabated until two or three in the morning. In the East Side hierarchy of daily necessities, good conversation trumped a good night’s sleep.
A café existed for patrons of every political conviction. All of the “-ists” were represented: Socialists, Marxists, Zionists, Bundists, anarchists, and even the lonely capitalist, odd man out among Russian Jews, could find a sympathetic audience in one café or another. And not just men, but women too, were at home in the politically charged café environment. To the uptown observer, the sight of these “unwomanly women,” sitting in mixed company and denouncing this or that government, came as a shock. To the café regulars, hungry for revolution on any front—political, artistic, or social—it exemplified the new world to come. Revolution, however, was for the young…. The older generation had their own establishments, where the talk centered on spiritual matters, and men in derbies (the café patron never removed his hat) disputed esoteric points of Talmud over a glass of tea and a slice of strudel. This is where we may have found the pious Mr. Rogarshevsky, president of his synagogue, embroiled in religious debate with his fellow congregants. The café also served the ordinary working people—the factory hands, shopkeepers, and peddlers who were more concerned with earning a living than with Nietzsche or Marx. This last group, repairing to the café at the close of the workday, sucked down glass after glass of hot tea—ten, twelve, fifteen glasses in succession—to soothe their throats, raw from a day of shouting.
Another expression of culinary specialization could be found in the East Side knish parlors, restaurants dispensing that one item and not much else. Starchy and filling, the knish, or knysz, was Russian peasant food, a rolled pastry traditionally filled with kasha. Because it was portable, it could be carried into the fields for a calorie-dense midday meal. Adopted by the Jews, the knish was transplanted to America, where it became the quintessential East Side street snack. Hot knishes were initially sold from carts that resembled tin bedroom dressers but were actually coal-burning ovens on wheels. The knishes were stored in the warming drawers. Like other East Side street foods—the bagel included—the knish eventually moved inside to a proper shop, the knishery.
The Jews made two basic types of knishes, milchich and fleishich, dairy and meat. The dairy knish was filled with pot cheese, the meat knish with liver. Knishes filled with kasha, potato, and sauerkraut could go either way, their status determined by the type of shortening used in the dough, butter or schmaltz. Deep into the 1920s, East Side knish-makers still followed the traditional strudel-like blueprint, stretching their dough, slathering it with one or another filling, then rolling it up like a carpet. After baking, the baton-shaped pastry was cut into sections. But this represented only one possible configuration. When uptowners discovered the knish sometime around World War I, they were baffled by it. A visitor to the East Side in 1919, on a tour of local eating spots, responded to the knish with typical befuddlement:
Another institution which is part of the multifarious life of the lower East Side is the “knishe” restaurant. The “knishe” is a singular composition. One may look in all the cook books and culinary annals of all times for the recipe of a “knishe,” but his efforts will be futile. Its sole habitat is the East Side.24
And so began the mythological association between this Slavic pastry and New York City, birthplace of the knish in the American culinary imagination.
Everything about the knish was so well-suited to the mode of life on the Lower East Side that it seemed to have sprung from the asphalt. Its portability was one of its major assets. Another was its price. What other food could deliver so much satisfaction for only three cents? At midday, it was a cheap and filling lunch for the sweatshop worker. At night, theatergoers devoured a quick knish at intermission or stopped by the local knishery for an after-show snack. In fact, an important connection developed between knishes and theater that helped establish a place for the knish in the local ecosystem. The home of the Yiddish theater in the early twentieth century was Second Avenue, the playhouses concentrated between 14th and Houston streets. That same strip came to be known as “knish alley” in recognition of the many knish joints that had sprung up within a few blocks’ radius. Knish parlors followed theaters the same way that pilot fish follow sharks. Wherever a theater opened, a knishery followed. In 1910, a Romanian immigrant named Joseph Berger opened a knish restaurant at 137 East Houston Street, directly next door to the Houston Hippodrome, a Yiddish vaudeville house that also showed moving pictures. The restaurant was named for Berger’s cousin and former partner, Yonah Schimmel, the knish vendor who had started the business two decades earlier with a pushcart on Coney Island. Berger’s son, Arthur, took over from his father in 1924, and continued selling knishes for the next fifty years. Eventually, the business was sold to outside investors. The Hippodrome building is still a movie theater, now a five-screen multiplex. When the shows let out, hungry theatergoers walk the same thirty feet to Yonah Schimmel’s, functioning time capsule and last of the East Side knisheries.
One measure of wealth among East Side Jews was how much meat a person could afford. Because they came from a meat-scarce society, its sudden availability in America represented the unlimited bounty of their adopted home, and Jews aspired to eat as much of it as possible. This fixation on meat helps explain the exalted place of the delicatessen in the life of the ghetto. But shortly after the turn of the century, a new type of eating place appeared on the East Side, which served no meat at all: the dairy restaurant. Here, with the exception of fish, the kitchen was strictly vegetarian, concentrating on foods made from grain, vegetables, milk, and eggs. On the face of it, the dairy restaurant was a natural outgrowth of the Jewish dietary law that forbids the mixing of meat and milk. On closer inspection, however, its appearance in New York around 1900 was a product of culinary forces that extended beyond the ghetto.
First, the East Side dairy restaurant was part of a growing interest in vegetarian dining that had recently taken hold of New York. The city’s first vegetarian restaurant opened in 1895 and more followed, providing patrons with a meatless menu of salads, nut-butter sandwiches, omelets, vegetable cutlets, and dairy dishes like berries and cream. American vegetarians came to their dietary views by way of religion. One early proponent was the Reverend Sylvester Graham (advocate for whole-grain bread) who helped found the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. Another was John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist and culinary inventor responsible for the creation of corn flakes. At his sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg also experimented with faux meat compounds made primarily from gluten and nuts, which became a staple of the East Side dairy menu.
The appearance of the first Jewish dairy restaurants coincided with a culinary crisis on the Lower East Side, which centered on the high cost of kosher meat. In the spring of 1902, a sudden jump in the price of kosher beef uncorked the pent-up outrage of East Side housewives. The women organized a neighborhood-wide boycott for the morning of May 15, with picketers stationed in front of every neighborhood butcher shop. Patrons who crossed the picket line had their purchases seized and doused with kerosene. At eleven a.m., a group of women and boys marched down Orchard Street and smashed the windows of every butcher en route, including the basement shop at number 97. Police who tried to stop the women became the target of their anger. The demonstrators pounced on the officers and wrestled them to the ground or pelted them with garbage. That night, five hundred women assembled at an East Side meeting hall. As the surrounding streets filled with angry supporters, tensions escalated between the crowd and the police. The inevitable fight broke out, and within the hour the neighborhood was engulfed in violence. The rioting subsided by the following afternoon, but the meat troubles continued for another decade, sparking boycotts and protests, though nothing on the scale of 1902.
The East Side’s first dairy restaurants, born in the midst of the kosher-meat crisis, were shoestring operations, the menu limited to a handful of traditional dishes like blintzes, kasha, and herring. By the 1940s, however, this working person’s lunchroom had evolved into a more ambitious enterprise. The most ambitious of all was Ratner’s, which had originally opened in 1905 in a cramped storefront on Pitt Street. In 1918, the restaurant moved to its new home on Delancey Street, right next door to the Loew’s Delancey, then a neighborhood vaudeville theater. In 1928, the Loew’s Delancey became the Loew’s Commodore, one of the new and fantastically ornate movie palaces that had begun to appear in the city. That same year, Ratner’s received its own renovation at a cost of $150,000, transforming the old-time lunchroom into the “East Side’s premier dining place.” In its more elegant guise, its menu blossomed, and by 1940 covered a vast gastronomic territory ranging from the traditional herring salad to asparagus on toast to caviar sandwiches, among the most expensive items on the menu. But the most creative dishes to emerge from the dairy restaurant were their counterfeit meats. In place of actual beef or chicken or lamb, the dairy restaurants served meat substitutes that craftily mimicked the original. There was vegetarian stuffed turkey neck, chicken giblet fricassee, or chopped liver, all traditional Jewish foods. Diners with more assimilated taste could have vegetarian lamb chops or meatless veal cutlet. All of these foods were grouped under a section of the menu labeled “Roasts.” Under the same heading was a selection of the faux meat products manufactured by Kellogg at his Michigan plant. The most popular was Protose steak, which the dairy restaurants served with fried onions or mushroom gravy. Here’s a classic recipe for vegetarian chopped liver, with the “livery” taste surprisingly coming from the canned peas:
LILLIAN CHANALES’S VEGETARIAN CHOPPED LIVER
3 medium-sized onions, chopped
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large can sweet peas, drained
1 ½ cups chopped walnuts
2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
Sauté the onions in the oil until they are soft and golden. Mash peas with the back of a fork. Combine onion and peas with remaining ingredients and chop by hand until you have the desired consistency. If you like, you can use a food processor, but be careful not to over-process. Season with salt and a generous dose of freshly ground black pepper.25
The East Side’s vast network of food purveyors satisfied the diverse culinary needs of the local population with a thoroughness that was unmatched in most other neighborhoods. People like the Rogarshevskys had no reason to cross 14th Street to buy their horseradish or kosher meat or to find a congenial café or a restaurant that met their religious standards. As East Siders began to disperse, the food merchants followed. Kosher butcher shops opened in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and along upper Broadway, in addition to Jewish bakeries and delicatessens. Dairy restaurants began to appear in midtown to feed the Jewish garment workers, and more opened on the Upper West Side. But still, former East Siders returned to the old neighborhood to shop from the downtown merchants and patronize the restaurants. Immigrants who had moved to Brooklyn or the Bronx or Upper Manhattan made Sunday trips to the Lower East Side to flex their bargaining muscles at the pushcart market and buy a smoked whitefish at Russ & Daughters, the appetizing store on Houston Street. Before the holidays, they converged on the East Side to buy their matzoh, kosher wine, and dried fruit. When the shopping was done, they went for lunch at Ratner’s or Rappaport’s, another of the East Side’s dairy restaurants.
Accounts of these food-inspired trips to the Lower East Side appear regularly in immigrant memoirs and immigrant fiction as well. A Fannie Hurst story called “In Memoriam” follows the tribulations of Mrs. Meyerberg, a lonely Fifth Avenue matron who returns—by chauffeured limousine—to her former tenement kitchen. Flooded with memories, Mrs. Meyerberg is moved by a sudden impulse to assume her place behind the tenement stove, and she does, but the experience proves too much for her. In typical Fannie Hurst fashion, the matron literally dies of joy. Anzia Yezierska’s East Side heroine, Hannah Brieneh, makes a similar voyage. Now an old woman, residing in relative splendor on Riverside Drive, Hannah Brieneh is bereft, a living soul trapped in a mausoleum. The answer to her existential crisis is a trip to the pushcart market. “In a fit of rebellion,” she rides downtown, buys a new marketing basket, and heads for the fish stand. The downtown foray is like a splash of cold water for the withering Hannah Brieneh, who returns in triumph, filling the lifeless apartment with the homey smells of garlic and herring.
The subway ride from the tenements to uptown New York proved more disruptive to immigrant food ways than the initial journey to America. Comfortably middle-class, the uptown Jew could eat like royalty, meat three times a day, unlimited quantities of soft white bread, pastry and tea to fill the gap between lunch and dinner. But uptown living came with unexpected constraints. Uptown Jews were plagued by a new and irksome self-consciousness that complicated mealtimes. Americanized children badgered their immigrant parents to give up the foods they had always relished. If the uptown Jew had a craving for brisket and sauerkraut, the aromas of these dishes cooking on the stove wafted through the apartment building and neighbors complained. The once-beloved organ meats became tokens of poverty, and uptown homemakers had to sneak them into the kitchen like contraband on the servant’s day off. What a pleasure, then, to escape to an East Side restaurant for a plate of chopped herring and a basket of onion rolls.