CHAPTER FIVE
“Whoever forsakes the old way for the new knows what he is losing but not what he will find.”
—SICILIAN PROVERB
At the start of the twentieth century, 97 Orchard Street stood on the most densely populated square block of urban America, with 2,223 people, most of them Russian Jews, packed into roughly two acres. One hundred and eleven of them resided in the twenty apartments at 97 Orchard, the oldest building on the block.
By the 1930s, the same East Side neighborhood was a shadow of its former self. Many of the older tenements had been abandoned by their owners, who could no longer afford to pay the property taxes, and were now vacant shells. Others had been demolished or consumed by fire and never rebuilt. As a result, a neighborhood once defined by its extreme architectural density was now littered with empty lots. The tenements that survived the 1920s were languishing too, the victims of changing demographics. Immigration had slowed dramatically by the middle of the decade; old-time East Siders, those who had settled in the neighborhood before the war, had dispersed to the outer boroughs. The number of people living at 97 Orchard, for example, had shrunk from one hundred and eleven to roughly twenty-five, leaving one-third of the building’s apartments completely empty. The East Side tenant shortage meant that neighborhood landlords—even the most conscientious—could no longer afford to maintain their properties, and many buildings fell into disrepair.
Built during the Civil War, years before New York had formulated a body of housing laws, 97 Orchard embodied a laissez-faire approach toward lodging for the working class. As the building passed from one owner to the next, it was gradually modernized. In 1905, 97 Orchard was equipped with indoor plumbing. A system of cast-iron pipes now branched into every apartment and connected to the kitchen sink, supplying tenants with cold running water. The same system allowed for indoor water closets. A second major overhaul came in the early 1920s, when the building was wired for electricity. Despite these efforts, 97 Orchard remained an architectural relic. As late as 1935, the four apartments on each floor were served by two communal toilets. None had bathtubs or any form of heat apart from the kitchen stove. Only one room in three had proper windows.
In the years following World War I, 97 Orchard was home to a mix of Irish, Romanians, Russians, Lithuanians, and Italians. Included in this last group were the Baldizzis, a family of Sicilian immigrants that had come to New York to share in the unlimited possibilities of the American economy. Their plans, however, were derailed by the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting disappearance of millions of jobs.
For most of the nineteenth century, as Germans and then Irish streamed into the United States, the Italian population stayed at microscopic levels. The 1860 census counted only twelve thousand Italian-born immigrants in the entire country, a demographic speck. The great majority of these early settlers were Northern Italians from Genoa, the surrounding province of Liguria, and from Piedmont just to the north. The numbers began to climb in the boom decades after the Civil War as America turned to the work of rebuilding. The rush of postwar construction activity created more jobs than the country could fill with its own citizens. So, America turned to her neighbors overseas. With the encouragement of the United States government, work-hungry Italians—among other immigrant groups—stepped in to alleviate a desperate labor shortage. During the 1880s, fifty-five thousand Italians arrived in the United States, and just over three hundred thousand in the decade following. By the end of the century, more Italians were landing at Ellis Island than any other immigrant group, and the trend continued into the 1900s. The immigrants who belonged to this second wave were overwhelmingly from the southern provinces of Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily.
Two features of the Italian migration distinguished it from other groups. First was the lopsided ratio of men to women from Italy. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, that ratio was four to one, with men leading the way. Though the numbers balanced out some over time, they never reached an even fifty-fifty. Lone Italian men came to the United States to work in railroad construction, to build dams, dig canals, lay sewer systems, and pave the nation’s roads, “pick and shovel” jobs. The Italian laborer was typically a man in the prime of his working life. Many had wives and children back in Italy, to whom they planned to return once they had saved enough of their American wages to go back home and purchase a farm or maybe start a business. The average length of the Italian’s sojourn in America was seven years. Some Italians became long-distance commuters. They worked in America during the busy summer season and returned home for the slow winter months, when construction was put on hold.
The success of this international labor pool hinged on a figure known as the padrone, an immigrant himself who wore many hats. Part employment agent, part interpreter, part boardinghouse keeper, and part personal banker, the padrone supplied the new immigrant with much-needed ser vices while robbing him of half his wages, and sometimes more. The padrone’s headquarters were in America but his work began in Italy, scouring the countryside for prospective clients—dissatisfied field workers, in good health, who were willing to travel. This work was often delegated to an Italian-based partner, who worked on commission. The padrone also formed relationships with American employers who kept him apprised of their labor needs, so when an immigrant landed, the padrone knew where to send him. In the cities, he kept boardinghouses where his clients were compelled to lodge, charging extortionist rates for a patch of floor to sleep on. Italians who were sent afield to lay railroad tracks or dig reservoirs in the American hinterland were beholden to the padrone for all their basic needs. Other men who worked on these grand-scale building projects—Slavs, Hungarians, and even the occasional American—lived in camps established by their employer. They slept in the company bunkhouse and ate together in the company mess hall. The one group missing from this international community was the Italians, who followed their padrones to all-Italian camps complete with bunkhouses, a commissary for buying supplies, and a kitchen where the men ate. These boardinghouses in the wilderness, catering to a captive and hungry clientele, were another money-maker for the padrone. At the same time, they answered one very important requirement for the laborer: to eat like an Italian.
Where other groups consumed whatever stews, breads, and puddings they were given, the Italian demanded foods from the homeland. Over the course of one month, the typical laborer consumed:
Bread 34.1 lbs
Macaroni 19.3 lbs
Rice .24 lbs
Meat (sausage, corned beef, & codfish) 2.31 lbs
Sardines 2–5 boxes
Beans, peas and lentils 2.06 lbs
Fatback (lard substitute) 5.13 lbs
Tomatoes 2.13 cans
Sugar 2.8 pounds
Coffee .43 lbs1
The men purchased their supplies at the commissary or shanty store, a grocery run by the padrone, where everything on the shelves was triple its normal price. The men took turns behind the camp stove, a group of three or four preparing meals for the entire crew. Some camps ran their own bakeries, using commissary flour. Out west, a similar arrangement could be found among Chinese railroad workers. In their separate camps, faced with the unappetizing prospect of the company mess hall, the Chinese workers assumed the job of feeding themselves, the only possible way to procure food that they considered edible. For both groups of men, Chinese and Italian, cooking became a New World survival skill.
Many of the foods that issued from the communal pot would be familiar today. Various forms of lentil soup, macaroni and tomatoes, beans and macaroni, beans and salt pork, and beans with sausage. Next to the familiar were more uncommon preparations. One ingenious food was a kind of homemade bouillon cube, prepared by Italian workers in Newark, New Jersey, circa 1900. Using a beer vat as their mixing vessel, the men first pounded a large quantity of tomatoes. Next,
they poured some cornmeal and flour into the vat and stirred until the stuff became a dough. The next step was to throw this on what bakers would call a molding trough and knead it, adding enough flour to make it a stiff pulp. The less said about the state of their hands the better, but that is a trivial matter. The mixture was molded into little pats about the same size of fishcake. These were placed on boards and taken to various roofs to dry.2
Come winter, when fresh tomatoes were no longer available, the cakes were dissolved in boiling water, each cake producing enough soup for six men.
A second defining feature of the Italian migration was poverty. After 1865, the great majority of Italian immigrants were poor southern fieldworkers. They arrived at Ellis Island, illiterate and unskilled, with, in 1901, an average life-savings of $8.79. Despite their farming background, most Italians settled in the large industrial cities. Here they found work as street cleaners, pavers, and ditch-and tunnel-diggers—the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs. Immigration officials bluntly referred to the Southern Italian as America’s “worst immigrants,” a judgment echoed in the daily papers. “Lazy,” “ignorant,” and “clannish” were just a few of the adjectives most commonly linked with Italians by the popular press. “Violent” was another oft-mentioned Italian characteristic. American newspapers kept a running tally of crimes committed by the Black Hand, an early name for Italian organized crime, paying special attention to any case that involved explosives. (Bombs were a fairly common means of extortion among gangsters of the period.) America’s fascination with Italian gangsters helped reinforce the argument that Italians were violent by nature. Following this circular logic, Americans were convinced that “no foreigners with whom we have to deal, stab and murder on so slight provocation,” a judgment offered by the New York Times.3
Among the lowest of this low-grade stock were the men and women who rejected honest work in favor of more shiftless occupations. One character was the Italian organ-grinder, a roving street performer with a hand organ suspended from a strap around his neck. The hand organ worked like an oversized music box, with a rotating cylinder inside it that turned by means of a crank. The more prosperous worked with an assistant, a trained monkey in a red vest and matching fez. The animal perched on his master’s shoulder while the music played and collected pennies at the end of the number. The organ grinder’s main patrons were the city’s children.
Another dubious line of work was rag-picking, an urban occupation dominated by foreigners, beginning with the Germans in the 1850s. The Irish also turned to rag-picking, but in smaller numbers. By the 1880s, the industry had been passed down to the Italians, the country’s newest immigrants. America’s first career recyclers, rag-pickers made their livelihood by sifting through the city’s garbage for reusable resources. The tools of the rag-picker’s trade were a long pole with a hook at one end and a large sack slung across her chest. Her workday began before the city was fully awake, when the streets were still quiet. She made her rounds, moving from one trash barrel to the next, examining its contents with the help of her pole, and plucking from it whatever she found of value. Her most fruitful hunting grounds were the cities’ wealthier neighborhoods, where the garbage was rife with discarded treasure—old shoes and boots, battered cooking pans, glass bottles, and the rags themselves, cream of the trash barrel. Once home, she emptied her sack onto the floor to survey the day’s gleanings. Each type of article was sorted into its own box, one for paper, one for leather goods, one for metal, one for glass, and so on. The bones were put into a large kettle and boiled clean. The rags were rinsed and hung up to dry.
The next stop for the sorted garbage was the junk dealer, a refuse middleman who paid the rag-picker a set sum by weight for each material, then turned around and sold it, at a profit, to assorted manufacturers. Old shoes and boots were retooled to look like new or shredded to a pulp, an ingredient used in the manufacture of waterproof tarps. Paper was sold to local publishers, who turned it into newsprint for the morning papers. Bottles were reused or melted. Bones from the family dinner table were turned into umbrella handles, snuff boxes, buttons, and toothbrushes. Rags, which fetched more per pound than any other item, went to make the era’s finest writing paper.
Middle-class America declared the rag-picker too lazy for “real work,” or accused her of ulterior motives. All of that innocent rummaging was, they believed, a cover for her real purpose—casing the best homes in the city for future burglaries. The organ grinder was likewise seen as a threat to public welfare, a nuisance at best, but at worst a common street thug, his stiletto tucked in his boot. Bootblacks, chestnut vendors, and fruit peddlers all belonged to the same itinerant class and all were suspect.
Non-Italians found proof of these immigrants’ lowly character in the foods they ate: stale bread, macaroni with oil, and, if they were lucky, a handful of common garden weeds. No other immigrant diet was as meager. For his nourishment, the Italian fruit peddler relied on the bruised and moldy fruit that was too far gone to sell, even by East Side standards. Organ grinders, because of their aversion to work, subsisted on a diet “so scanty that had they not been accustomed to the severest deprivation from infancy, their system would refuse to be nourished by food that an Irish navvy would shrink from with abhorrence.”4 Their spare diet acted as an impediment that kept the immigrant from rising in the world. A typical lunch for the Italian laborer, a piece of bread and cup of water, was no meal for a working man. American employers, who could choose from an international pool of workers, came to regard the Italian as second-rate. “They are active, but not hardy or strong as the average man”—a rung below the Hungarian or the Slav. The main reason: “they eat too little.”5
But no diet was more reviled than the rag-picker’s—a hodgepodge of bread crusts, vegetable trimmings, bones, and meat scraps plucked from middle-class trash bins. One particularly desperate class of rag-pickers scavenged only for food, eating some of what they gathered and selling the rest for profit. Italian women from Mulberry, Baxter, and Crosby streets, the food scavengers targeted the city’s markets, grocers, fruit stands, butchers, and fishmongers. An 1883 newspaper story from the New York Times describes how they operated:
Partially decayed potatoes, onions, carrots, apples, oranges, bananas, and pineapples are the principal finds in the mess of garbage that is overhauled. The greatest prize to the garbage-searching old hag is a mess of the outside leaves of cabbage that are torn off before the odorous vegetable is displayed for sale on the stands. The rescued stuff—cabbage leaves, onions, bananas, oranges, &c.—is dumped into a filthy bit of sacking, and the whole carted, as soon as a day’s labor is concluded, to the miserable quarters which the old hag is forced to call home. Here a sorting process is gone through with. If the husband or son is sufficiently endowed with this world’s goods to be the proprietor of a fruit-stand, everything that may possibly be sold for no matter how small a sum is transferred to him. The remainder is subdivided. The cabbage leaves which are fresh are sold for use in the cheap restaurants to be served with corned beef. Such as will not serve for that purpose is stripped of decayed portions and used as the body of the poor Italian’s favorite dish—cabbage soup. In the composition of this dish, often for days at a time the only food save stale bread, which a family has to dine upon, are mixed the portions of the potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables which are not absolutely rotten. The tomatoes are used in making a gravy for the macaroni, this delicacy being secured in exchange for decayed fruits and vegetables at the groceries or restaurants of the Italian quarter. This process of exchange is carried on quite extensively as the store-keepers prefer it, and find an addition to their meager profits in the system of barter.6
Despite the revulsion of middle-class America, the rag-picker’s harvest provided her and her family with a windfall of edible wealth. American queasiness over “rescued food” was a luxury that the struggling immigrant could easily overlook. The heaps of discarded food, some of it perfectly good, which materialized each day in city trash bins, must have left the rag-picker gaping in wonderment. On the one hand, the rag-picker’s lack of skills, education, and English left her consigned to the outer fringes of American society. Still, she was able to make a living off America’s leftovers. American abundance was so staggering that the garbage that accumulated daily in cities like New York could support a shadow system of food distribution operated largely by immigrants. The rag-picker was a key player in this shadow economy, redistributing her daily harvest to peddlers, restaurants, and neighborhood groceries. In her own kitchen, the rag-picker’s culinary gleanings formed the basis of a limited but nourishing diet. (Sanitary inspectors were often surprised by the rag-picker’s good health.) Even more surprising, the rag-picker cook was determined to both nourish and delight, bartering for macaroni—a luxury food in the immigrant diet—while turning her rescued fruit into jellies and marmalade.
Expressions of anti-Italian bias continued until the start of World War I, when the nation shifted focus to fighting the Germans. German-Americans, once regarded as model immigrants, were now considered a threat to national security. Suspected of loyalty to the Fatherland, they were declared “enemy aliens” by President Woodrow Wilson and subject to a string of government restrictions. Thousands were arrested or interned. In the anxious years after the war, animosity directed at the Germans spread to other foreigners, placing immigrants and immigration at the center of a national debate. Though many of the old fears persisted, the new nativists turned to the faux science of race studies, a potent blend of anthropology, biology, and eugenics. American prosperity, they argued, rested on the superior mental traits of the Anglo-Saxon, attributes that were passed down from parent to offspring in much the same way as eye color. Alarmed by the recent influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans, the nativists claimed that decades of unchecked immigration had compromised the greatness of America, and the danger would continue as long as the gates stayed open. If they did, the outcome was assured: race suicide. By this reckoning, the settlement workers and schoolteachers who had worked so hard to Americanize the foreign-born were hopelessly misguided. American greatness could not be taught. It was literally in “the blood.”
Among the leading voices of the new nativists was a New Yorker named Madison Grant, a lawyer and amateur zoologist who helped found the Bronx Zoo. Alongside his interest in wildlife, Grant developed a taste for politics, chiefly in the field of immigration policy. He encountered like-minded thinkers in such organizations as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Defense Society, a group originally founded to protect America from German aggression. Once the armistice was signed, the group shifted focus to a new enemy, the immigrant. Grant published his manifesto, The Passing of a Great Race, in 1916. The book never sold very well, but the ideas laid down by Grant filtered into Washington. Here, they became the quasi-scientific basis for a series of anti-immigration laws culminating in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, the most stringent immigrant quota system in United States history. After 1924, the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year became one hundred and fifty thousand, a minuscule number compared to earlier times. What’s more, Johnson-Reed was specific about who those immigrants could be. America was now prepared to admit two percent of each foreign population living in the United States as of 1890, a year strategically chosen to make room for Western Europeans while shutting out less desirable types—Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Jews.
More than other groups, Italians arrived in this country with the firm knowledge that they were unwanted. In the workplace, Italians were paid less than other ethnicities, or denied jobs entirely. Landlords with a no-Italians policy denied them housing. The fact that few spoke English offered little protection against ethnic slurs, sources of the deepest humiliation for the transplanted Italian. The immigrant soon discovered that words like dago and ginny were accepted features of American speech, and not only in the streets and the schoolyards. “The Rights of the Dago” and “Big Dago Riot at Castle Gate” were the kinds of headlines Americans could expect to find in their morning paper. The quota laws effectively made anti-Italian discrimination the official policy of the United States government.
In the hostile environment first encountered by Italians, food took on new meanings and new powers. The many forms of discrimination leveled at Italians encouraged immigrants to seal themselves off, culturally speaking, from the rest of America. This circling of the wagons, a response typical of many persecuted people, was interpreted by Americans as Italian “clannishness,” an unwelcome trait in any immigrant but especially so for an already suspect group—poor, uneducated, and Catholic. The metaphorical walls built up by Italian-Americans served a double purpose. On the one hand, they protected the immigrant from outside menace, both real and invented. On the other, they carved out a space where Italians could carry on with their native traditions in relative peace, away from American disapproval. As it happens, the traditions they seemed most devoted to were those connected with food. Certainly, culinary continuity was important to other foreign groups, but Italian-Americans were bonded to their gastronomic heritage with an intensity unknown to Russians, Germans, or Irish, and went to great lengths to protect it. The Jews had their religion; the Germans had their poets, their composers, and their beer; and the Irish had their politics. The Italians arrived with a strong musical tradition; they also had their faith. But food was their cultural touchstone, their way of defying the critics, of tolerating the slurs and all of the other injustices. It was their way of being Italian.
Harsh critics of Italian eating habits, Americans tried through various means to reform the immigrant cook. The Italians were unmoved. Despite the cooking classes and public school lectures, and despite the persistent advice of visiting nurses and settlement workers, the immigrants’ belief in the superiority of their native foods was unwavering. Respect for the skills of the Italian cook, the goodness that she could extract from her raw materials, was one thing, but the immigrants were equally devoted to the materials themselves. For them, good Italian cooking was made from foods that grew from the Italian soil, and they used imported ingredients whenever possible. Olives and olive oil, anchovies, jarred peppers, dried mushrooms, artichokes cured in salt, canned tomatoes and tomato paste, vinegar, oregano, garlic, a variety of cured meats and cheeses, and, above all, pasta, were some of the products found in the Italian groceries that served America’s many Little Italys. Here, Italian homemakers, working women of limited means, could stock their pantries with native foods, despite the daunting cost of imported goods. The financial sacrifice was proof of the Italian’s dedication. A 1903 newspaper story describing the Italian grocery for readers who had never seen one took note of the Italians’ food priorities:
No people are more devoted to their native foods than the Italians, and Italian groceries filled with imported edibles flourish in all the different colonies of the city. The price of the imported good is a drain on the purses of the patrons and they wearily try to get the same satisfaction out of American-made substitutes, which have the same names and the same appearance, but never, never, the same taste.7
To the immigrant palate, Italian-style hams made in America were cured too quickly; American-made caciocavallo, the cheese beloved by Sicilians, was lacking in butterfat and quickly spoiled; American garlic was tasteless; and American vinegar was the wrong color. But the saddest disappointment was American pasta, much of it produced on Elizabeth Street in Sicilian-owned pasta factories. Made from standard white flour—not semolina—it was pale and, once cooked, it went soft. Domestic pasta was half the price of imported, but Italians were loath to buy it and literally saved their pennies for the genuine article.
Back home in Italy, peasant families had managed to survive another kind of hostile environment. Oppressive landowners, unfairly high taxes, and periodic crop failures meant a precarious life for the contadini, the field workers of southern Italy. Even in good times, when the peasant had enough to eat, starvation remained a looming possibility, always one crop failure away. If nothing else was guaranteed to the peasant—and nothing was—the unshakable bond of family was his bedrock. The family patriarch was an unchallenged authority who demanded absolute obedience from his wife and children, his helpers in the fields. The needs of the family came before those of the individual, and loyalty among family was unwavering. In America, as Italians adapted to a new way of life, the old values of family solidarity were put to the test. For the first time, children left their parents’ side to attend school. Here they were exposed to a world of people and ideas apart from their family. Italian girls, no longer under the constant surveillance of their elders, were now free—though not entirely—to make their own friends, and eventually to find their own husbands. As Italian women left their homes to work in American factories, they too developed lives separate from the family, discovering a level of independence they had never known in the Old Country.
Despite all these changes, the old values lived on in the nightly ritual of the evening meal, a tangible expression of family solidarity, loyalty, and love. To borrow a phrase from Blood of My Blood, Richard Gambino’s wonderful book about Brooklyn Sicilians, the evening meal was “a communion of the family.” Sicilians, and southern Italians in general, arrived in America with a deep reverence for the preciousness of food. They knew full well the human labor required to coax it from the earth, and how, on occasion, the earth would refuse them. In America, though now removed from the soil, the Italian still labored for his food, working for relatively low wages in the nation’s most strenuous jobs. The family meal was an occasion to share the fruits of that labor, and for the Italian, attendance was mandatory. On weekdays, Italian kids often returned home for lunch as well, though they could eat for free in the school cafeteria.
As Italians found their way into the American economy, the family supper took on another layer of meaning. Edible proof of the immigrant’s success, the evening meal was a nightly celebration of the triumph over hunger. The price of that victory was not lost on the immigrants, especially the older ones, who still remembered the fourteen-hour work-days. The bounty before him was the Italian’s belated reward for building America’s subways, her skyscrapers and bridges—in other words, for bringing America into the twentieth century.
Each night, the family dinner table became a stage for all the tempting foods that the immigrant had once dreamed about but couldn’t afford. At the center of that dream, there was meat. For early immigrants, meat was used as a seasoning, an ingredient added to soup or sauce to give it body and richness. By the 1920s, a midweek dinner in a working-class Italian kitchen included soup, then pasta, followed by meat and a salad. At the end of the week, Italian families sat down to a banquet of stunning extravagance. Sunday supper began in the early afternoon with an antipasto of cheese, salami, ham, and anchovies. Appetites now fully awake, the family moved through multiple courses, leading them to the heart of the feast. If the family were Sicilian, that might include a ragu made from marrow bones, chicken, pork sausage, and meatballs, stewed veal and peppers, and braciole, a thin filet of pounded beef or pork wrapped around a stuffing of cheese, bread crumbs, parsley, pine nuts, and raisins.
The Italian writer Jerre Mangione, who grew up in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s, remembers the parade of courses: first, there was soup; then pasta, perhaps ziti in sugo; followed by two kinds of chicken, one boiled, and one roasted; roasted veal; roasted lamb; and brusciuluna—“a combination of Roman cheese, salami, and moon-shaped slivers of hardboiled egg encased in rolls of beef.” When the meat was cleared, there was fennel and celery to cleanse the palate, followed by homemade pastries, nuts, fruit, and vermouth. These Sunday suppers, prepared by the author’s father, were more extravagant than the family could realistically afford, and the senior Mangione often had to borrow money to pay for them.8 Moderation had no place at the Sunday table. The gathered crowd, encouraged by their fellow diners, went back for multiple helpings with not a jot of self-consciousness. Quite the contrary, any guest who refused another helping was given a mild rebuke.
The meatballs, ragus, and roasts that were (and remain) a centerpiece of the Italian-American kitchen had never figured in the peasant diet. Rather, they belonged to the kitchens of Italian landowners, merchants, and clergy, who, on important feast days like Easter and Christmas, distributed meat to the poor.9 In America, immigrant cooks reinterpreted these feast-day foods and, in another expression of American bounty, made them a regular part of the Sunday table. The American larder was so immense that it could literally feed the working class on a diet once reserved for Italian nobility.
One effect of the quota laws of the 1920s was to create a shadow wave of uncounted immigrants, men and women from Russia, Poland, Italy, and other restricted nations, who evaded the authorities and entered the country illegally. The Baldizzis belonged to that wave. Adolfo Baldizzi was born in Palermo in 1896 and was orphaned as a young boy. His professional training as a cabinetmaker began at age five, but the outbreak of World War I put his career temporarily on hold. A wartime portrait of Adolfo shows a young soldier with thick black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Rosaria Baldizzi (her family name was Mutolo) was born in 1906, also in Palermo, to a family of trades people and civil servants. The Baldizzis were married in 1922, the same year Rosaria turned sixteen. A year later, the couple decided to emigrate. To evade the 1921 immigrant quota laws, Adolfo came to America as a stowaway aboard a French vessel. As the ship pulled into New York Harbor, he climbed from his hiding place, jumped over the railing, and swam to shore. Rosaria made the same trip in 1924, with a doctored passport.
Adolfo Baldizzi in his soldier’s uniform, circa 1914.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
Wedding portrait of sixteen-year-old Rosaria Mutolo Baldizzi, two years before she emigrated.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
For Rosaria Mutolo Baldizzi, the move to America was a step down in life. Born to a middle-class family, Rosaria spent her childhood in a good-size house with a stone courtyard where her mother grew geraniums and raised chickens, selling the eggs to neighbors. Rosaria’s father was confined to a wheelchair by the time she was a young girl, but in his youth had owned or worked in a bakery. Her two older brothers were both policemen; her sister was a dressmaker. On Sunday afternoons, still in their church clothes, the family took leisurely strolls, stopping at a local café for coffee and granita. Rosaria’s marriage to a cabinetmaker at age sixteen was considered a good match. In her 1921 wedding portrait, she is posed at the foot of an ornate staircase, dressed in a tailored skirt and matching jacket, both trimmed in a wide panel of hand-woven lace. A flapper-style cloche hat, jauntily cocked, with a long, trailing sash, completes the ensemble.
Rosaria’s move to New York in 1924 meant the end of a reasonably privileged and protected life. Her first glimpse of Elizabeth Street, center of Sicilian New York, was a sobering experience for the young immigrant. To her consternation, the shoppers who overflowed the sidewalk onto the cobblestoned street were oblivious to the garbage under their feet, a carpet of moldering cabbage leaves and orange rinds. Every window ledge and door lintel was veiled in soot, like a dusting of black snow. But most disturbing of all were the Elizabeth Street stables. The young Mrs. Baldizzi was shocked to find that New Yorkers, presumably civilized people, lived side by side with horses.
The couple’s first home was a single room in a two-room apartment. To supplement her husband’s earnings, Rosaria took in laundry, a common source of income for immigrant women. Whenever the couple fell behind in rent, they simply packed up and moved. The two Baldizzi children, Josephine and John, were born on Elizabeth Street, but in 1928, when John was still in his swaddling clothes, the family left Little Italy for 97 Orchard Street, a leap across cultures that brought the Baldizzis into the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side. Living on Orchard Street, they encountered the challenges typical of an immigrant family. These were eclipsed, however, by the calamitous events of 1929 and their aftermath. The “land of opportunity” they had expected to find evaporated before their eyes, leaving Mr. Baldizzi with a wife, two toddlers, and little hope of finding work.
The Baldizzis remained on Orchard Street through the grimmest years of the Depression. For most of that time, Adolfo was unemployed, though he still earned a few dollars a week as a neighborhood handy-man. New clothes or toys for the children were out of the question. When the soles on Josephine’s shoes sprouted holes, they were fortified with a cardboard insert. The family food budget was concentrated on a few indispensible staples: bread, pasta, beans, lentils, and olive oil. Once a week, the family received free groceries from Home Relief, the assistance program created by Franklin Roosevelt in 1931 when he was still governor of New York. For many foreign-born Americans, Home Relief introduced the immigrant to foods like oatmeal, butter, American cheese, and, for the children, cod liver oil. It also furnished them with milk, potatoes, vegetables, flour, eggs, meat, and fish. For the Baldizzi parents, the weekly trip to the neighborhood food bank (it was actually the children’s school) was a public walk of shame. The food, however, was necessary, and they accepted it gratefully.
Breakfast for the Baldizzi children was hot cereal, courtesy of Home Relief, or day-old bread that Mrs. Baldizzi tore into pieces and soaked in hot milk, with a little butter and sugar. The resulting dish, a kind of breakfast pudding, was a favorite of the children. Josephine Baldizzi, who was always thought too skinny by her parents, was given raw eggs to help fatten her up. The eggs were eaten two ways. Mrs. Baldizzi would poke a hole in one end of the egg, instructing her daughter to suck out the nutritious insides. She also prepared a drink for Josephine made of raw egg and milk whipped together with sugar and a splash of Marsala wine. Breakfast for the parents was hard bread dipped in coffee that Mrs. Baldizzi boiled in a pot. Coffee grinds, like tea bags, were reused two or three times before being consigned to the trash. The Baldizzi children returned home for a lunch of fried eggs and potato, or vegetable frittata. A typical evening meal was pasta and lentils or vegetable soup, which Mr. Baldizzi referred to as “belly wash.” On Saturday evenings, he made the family scrambled egg sandwiches with American ketchup.
Though America’s bounty eluded the Baldizzis, Rosaria understood the power of food over the human psyche and used it—what little she had—as an antidote to the daily humiliations of poverty. Dinner in the Baldizzi household was a formal event, the table set with the good Italian linen that Rosaria had brought over from Sicily, the napkins ironed and starched so they stood up on their own. If the menu was limited, the food was expertly cooked and regally presented. On occasion, as a treat for the children, Rosaria would arrange their dinners on individual trays and present it to them as edible gifts. One of Josephine’s clearest childhood memories is of her mother standing in front of the black stove at 97 Orchard, holding a tray of “pizza”—a large round loaf of Sicilian bread, sliced crosswise like a hamburger bun, rubbed with olive oil, sprinkled with cheese, and baked in the oven. “You see,” Rosaria says, “you are somebody!” Such was the power of food in the immigrant kitchen: to confer dignity on a skinny tenement kid with cardboard soles in her shoes.
On birthdays and holidays, edible gift–giving rose to the level of ritual. For All Souls Day, when ancestral spirits deigned to visit the living, Mrs. Baldizzi gave the kids a tray piled with the candied almonds known as confetti, torrone, Indian nuts, and Josephine’s personal favorite, one-cent Hooten Bars. That night, the children would slip the tray under the bed, in case the spirits should arrive hungry. The next day, after the ancestors had presumably helped themselves, it was the children’s turn. On Easter, each child received a marzipan representation of the Paschal lamb. Candy was also part of the Nativity scene displayed each December on the Baldizzis’ kitchen table, the manger strewn with confetti and American-style peppermint drops.
Much of the candy sold in New York in the early twentieth century—Italian and otherwise—was produced locally in factories scattered through the city. In fact, by the turn of the century, New York was the center of the American candy trade, employing more people than any other food-related industry aside from bread. New York candy-makers were tied to another local industry with deep historical roots: the sugar trade. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ships carrying raw sugar from the Caribbean delivered their cargo to the refineries or “sugar houses” that were clustered near Wall Street, converting the coarse brown crystals into loaves of white table sugar. Candy factories began to appear in Lower Manhattan in the early 1800s, before migrating uptown to Astor Place, then to midtown and Brooklyn.
By the late nineteenth century, immigrants were important players in the candy business. Some owned factories specializing in their native sweets, but many, many more worked as candy laborers. In New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, all major candy-making cities, foreign-born women, chiefly Italians and Poles, worked the assembly lines, dipping, wrapping, and boxing. Italian Women in Industry, a study published in 1919 that looked specifically at New York, reported that 94 percent of all Italian working women in 1900 were engaged in some form of manufacturing. While the overwhelming majority worked in the needle trades, about 6 percent were candy workers, a job that required no prior training or skills. The dirtiest, most onerous jobs—peeling coconuts, cracking almonds, and sorting peanuts—went to the older women who spoke no English. For their labor, they were paid roughly $4.50 for a sixty-five-hour workweek. (Women who worked in the needle trades generally earned $8 a week, while sewing machine operators, the most skilled garment workers, brought in $12 weekly or more.) The long hours and filthy conditions in the factories made candy work one of the least desirable jobs for Italian women. Mothers who worked in the candy factories for most of their adult lives prayed that daughters “would never go into it, unless they were forced to.”
Another class of candy workers could be found in the tenements. Candy outworkers were immigrant women hired by the factories, who brought their work home to their tenement apartments, completing specific tasks within the larger manufacturing process. This two-tiered arrangement of factory workers and home workers was widespread on the Lower East Side and used by several of the most important local industries. The largest and best-documented was the garment industry, in which factory hands were responsible for the more critical jobs of cutting, sewing, and pressing, while home workers did “finishing work”: small, repetitive tasks, like sewing on buttons, stitching buttonholes, and pulling out basting threads, a job that often fell to children. In the candy trade, finishing work meant wrapping candies and boxing them. It also included nut-picking: carefully separating the meat from the nutshell with the help of an improvised tool, like a hairpin or a nail. These were jobs often performed as a family activity, by an Italian mother and her kids, sitting at the kitchen table with a fifty-pound bag of licorice drops lugged home from the factory that morning, a small mountain of boxes at their feet.
Unlike her sisters in the factories, the home worker fell beyond the reach of protective labor laws that regulated the length of her workday along with her minimum wage. Her children were also unprotected. In the Old Country, children worked side by side with their fathers in the fields. In cities like New York, the moment they returned from school they went to work shelling hazelnuts or walnuts until deep into the night. During the rush seasons just before Christmas and Easter, they were kept home from school entirely.
In the eyes of middle-class America, the candy home worker was an ambiguous figure, equal parts victim and villain. Bullied and abused by greedy factory owners, she attracted support from social reformers like the National Consumer League, which advocated on her behalf. At the same time, the outworker was a threat to public safety, the foods that touched her hands contaminated by the same germs that flourished in her tenement home. Pasta, wine, matzoh, and pickles were also produced in the tenements, foods made by immigrants for immigrants. Candy, however, was different. While made by foreigners, it was destined for the wider public, available in the most exclusive uptown stores.
As middle-class Americans became aware of tenement candy workers, panic set in. Tenement-made candy, they surmised, was the perfect vehicle for transporting working-class diseases like cholera and tuberculosis from the downtown slums to the more pristine neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan. “Table Tidbits Prepared Under Revolting Conditions,” a story that ran in the New York Tribune in 1913, sounded the alarm:
Foodstuffs prepared in tenement houses? For whom? For you, fastidious reader and for everybody! A pleasant subject this for meditation. Slum squalor has been reaching uptown in many insidious ways. It was bad enough to think that the clothing one wore had been handled in stuffy rooms, where sanitary conditions and ventilation were deplorable…When it is learned, however, that many of the things actually eaten or put to the lips have been prepared by some poor slattern in indifferent or bad health and by more or less dirty tots of the slums amid surroundings that would cause humanity to hold its nose, a brilliant future looms up for some of the scourges scientists are busily endeavoring to stamp out.10
An immigrant family shelling nuts at their kitchen table. This photo was used to demonstrate the unsanitary conditions that prevailed among tenement home workers.
Library of Congress
Stories like this one, brimming over in lurid details, enumerated the many sanitary breaches committed by the home worker. She was known, for example, to crack nuts with her teeth and pick them with her fingernails. At mealtime, picked nuts were swept to the side of the table, or removed to the floor or the bed. But most alarming of all, home workers performed their tasks in rooms shared by tuberculosis sufferers or children sick with measles. In some cases, the home worker was sick herself, like the consumptive woman who was too weak to leave her bed but somehow managed to go on with her work as a cigarette maker. The one detail consistently absent from these stories was mention of any documented illness linked to tenement-made goods. They may have occurred, but the looming threat posed by the home worker was more compelling than the actual risk.
While immigrant candy workers fed the national sweet tooth, in their own communities, Italian confectioners made sweets for their fellow countrymen. The more prosperous owned their own shops, or bottege di confetti, preparing the candy in large copper pots at the back of the store. Marzipan, torrone (a nougat-like candy made with egg whites and honey), and panforte, a dense cake made of honey, nuts, and fruit, were specialties of the confectioner’s art. The confetti shops also sold pastries like cannoli and cassata, an ornate Sicilian cake made with ricotta, candied fruit, sponge cake, and marzipan. In the months leading up to Easter, store owners created window displays of their gaudiest, most eye-catching sweets. Herds of marzipan lambs grazed in one corner of the window, beside a field of cannoli. Pyramids of marzipan fruits and vegetables, each crafted in fine detail, loomed in the background. Most eye-catching of all, however, were candy statues representing the main actors in the Passion story: a weeping Virgin Mary in her blue cloak; Christ in his loincloth staggering under the weight of the cross; Mary Magdalene; and even the heartless Roman soldiers brandishing their spears, all cast from molten sugar.
The Easter celebration was a family event centered on the home. More conspicuous occasions for candy consumption were the religious festivals held through the year in the streets of Little Italy. The feste were open-air celebrations in honor of a particular saint, each one connected with a town or village back home. Sponsored by fellow towns people, they combined religious observance in the form of a solemn procession with brass bands, fireworks, and public feasting, the exact nature of food determined by the immigrants’ birthplace. A Sicilian festival, for example, would include torrone, but not the kind made with egg whites. Sicilian torrone was a glossy nut brittle made with almonds or hazelnuts, a confection brought to Sicily by the Arabs. There was also cubbaita, or sesame brittle, another Arab sweet, and insolde, a Sicilian version of panforte. Below is a description of the foods, candy included, available at a 1903 festival held in Harlem, the uptown Little Italy, honoring Our Lady of Mount Carmel:
Nut peddler at an Italian street festival.
Library of Congress
The crowd is chiefly buying things to eat from street vendors. Men push through the masses of people on the sidewalks, carrying trays full of brick ice cream of brilliant hues and yelling “Gelati Italiani”—Italian ices. “Lupini,” the “ginney beans” of the New York Arab; “ciceretti,” the little roasted peas and squash seeds are favorite refreshments. Great ropes of Brazil nuts soaked in water and threaded on a string, or roasted chestnuts, strung in the same way, lie around the vendor’s neck. Boys carry long sticks strung with rings of bread. All manner of “biscuitini,” small Italian cakes, are for sale, frosted in gorgeous hues, chiefly a bright magenta cheerful to look upon but rather ghastly to contemplate as an article of food.
Boys at the door of bakeshops vociferate “Pizzarelli caldi”—hot pizzarelli. The pizzarello is a little flat cake of fried dough, probably the Neapolitan equivalent of a doughnut. They sell for a penny a piece. Sometimes the cook makes them as big as the frying pan, putting in tomato and cheese—a mixture beloved of all Italians. These big ones cost 15 cents, but there is enough for a taste all around the family. The bakers are frying them hot all through the feast. A certain cake made with molasses, and full of peanuts or almonds, baked in a long slab and cut in little squares, four or five for a cent, is much eaten. So is “coppetta,” a thick, hard white candy full of nuts; and the children all carry bags of “confetti,” little bright-colored candies with nuts inside. Here and there the sun flashes on great bunches of bright, new tin pails, heaped on the back and shoulders of the vendor: and the new pail bought and filled with lemonade passes impartially from lip to lip of the family parties lunching on the benches in Thomas Jefferson Park.11
Below is a recipe for croccante, or almond brittle. It is adapted from The Italian Cook Book by Maria Gentile, published in 1919, among the earliest Italian cookbooks published in the United States.
CROCCANTE
3 cups blanched sliced almonds
2 cups sugar
1–2 tablespoons mildly flavored vegetable oil
1 lemon cut in half
Preheat to 400ºF. Liberally grease a baking tray with the vegetable oil and put aside. Spread almonds on a separate tray and toast in hot oven until golden, about 5 minutes. Heat sugar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook until sugar has completely melted. Add almonds and stir. Pour hot mixture onto greased baking tray, using the cut side of the lemon to spread evenly. Allow to cool and break into pieces.12
In the descriptive names that immigrants invented for the United States is a measure of what they expected to find. To Eastern European Jews, America was the Goldene Medina, or “Golden Land,” a place of extravagant wealth. For the Chinese immigrants who settled on the West Coast, America was “the gold mountain,” a reference to the California hills that would make them rich. Sicilians, by contrast, referred to America as “the land of bread and work,” an image of grim survival, comparatively speaking. To the Sicilian, however, bread was its own form of wealth. More than other Italians, Sicilians felt a special closeness to this elemental food, a “God-bequeathed friend,” in the words of Jerre Mangione, “who would keep bodies and souls together when nothing else would.”13 The Sicilian respect for bread was rooted in a long history. From the sixteenth century forward, bread formed the axis of the peasant diet, sustaining—though just barely—generations of Sicilian field workers. The typical Sicilian loaf was made from a locally cultivated strain of wheat, triticum durum, which Arab settlers had brought to Sicily, along with almonds, lemons, oranges, and sugar, back in the ninth century. The wheat grew on giant estates called latifundi, and by the Middle Ages it covered most of Sicily’s arable land. Durum was a particularly hardy strain with a high protein content, producing a dense, chewy bread with a powerful crust. When mixed with water, it could be stretched into thin sheets that resisted tearing, making it ideal for pasta, too.
Peasants who worked all day in the field packed a hunk of bread and maybe an onion for their lunch. For dinner, there was bean soup, and yet more bread. As minimal as this sounds, the Sicilian pantry became even more spare during periods of famine, which in Sicily amounted to “a time without bread.” A Sicilian proverb recounted by Mary Taylor Simeti in Pomp and Sustenance sums it up beautifully:
If I had a saucepan, water, and salt,
I’d make a bread stew—if I had bread.
A loaf of bread for Sicilians embodied the basic goodness of life. Where we might say a person is “as good as gold,” a Sicilian says “as good as bread.” A piece of bread that fell to the ground was kissed, like a child with a scraped knee.
When Sicilians described America as the land of bread and work, they imagined a country without hunger, which, in their experience, was just as miraculous as a city paved in gold. One thing they never imagined, however, was that bread would fall into their hands like manna from heaven. Richard Gambino, describing the powerful work ethic that guided his Brooklyn neighborhood, remembers a phrase often repeated by the local men, “In questa vita si fa uva,” literally translated as, “In this life, one produces grapes.” In other words, each one of us has been put on this earth to be useful. Gambino also remembers his grandfather’s Sicilian friends holding up their calloused workers’ hands and saying “America e icca,” meaning “America is here—this is America.”14For the Sicilian, bread and work were locked together in a kind of dance that began early in life, the day the young Sicilian was old enough to contribute.
Sicilians carried their bread tradition to America, where it continued with certain necessary revisions. On Saturdays in Sicily, women did all their baking for the coming week, a way to preserve precious fuel. In cities like New York, the Italian laborer, now on his own, purchased his weekly ration each Saturday in Little Italy. Here, Italian peddlers sold loaves prepared expressly for the “diggers and ditchers,” immense crusty loaves nearly the size of a wagon wheel. Anyone who could not afford to buy their bread fresh, bought stale loaves, a special sideline of the retail bread trade controlled by women. Bread that was once thrown away was sold by the larger bakeries and retail houses to middlemen who, in turn, sold it to the peddlers, women who sat on the curbstone, their goods piled in a blanket beside them. As the immigrant’s finances swelled, his diet branched out in new directions. Pasta, eggs, and, eventually, meat diverted some of his affection for bread but never replaced it. In the Mangione household, bread was eaten with every course of the Sunday feast, except for the pasta. A bowl of soup without bread was bereft of its faithful companion. Meat without bread was considered sinful.
Curbside bread peddler on Mulberry Street, selling her wares from a basket.
Elizabeth Street in the 1930s hosted two groceries, two butcher shops, one fish store, and one candy store, but six bakeries. In New York, the typical Sicilian loaf was a simple round bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, weighing roughly two pounds. On holidays and feast days, however, the baker’s imagination took flight, and the Elizabeth shops offered fantastic bread sculptures, each shape tied to a particular saint. One resembled a curving bowl of flowers, another was shaped like a swirling backward S with frilled edges. Though each of these fanciful shapes was created for the saints, the baker hedged his bets by including breads that were braided or knotted, traditional forms of protection from the evil eye.
When they lived on Orchard Street, the Baldizzis relied on bread as a food of survival in much the same way it had been for generations of Sicilian peasants. It was eaten at every meal, and for breakfast it was the meal. Stale or hard bread was never thrown away. Instead, Rosaria would rub it with a little water and oil and put it in a warm oven to soften it up. Bread that was too far gone to revive was turned into bread crumbs, the indispensable ally of all Sicilian cooks. Bread crumbs were used to stretch more costly ingredients like meat, and sometimes to replace it entirely. Combined with oil, parsley, and garlic, bread crumbs were used as a stuffing for peppers, zucchini, artichokes, and other vegetables. Bread crumbs, parsley, and eggs were used to make frittata, a standard midday meal for the Italian laborers who dug the New York subway system. Bread crumbs were also toasted in hot oil and sprinkled over pasta or pizza as a replacement for the more expensive grated cheese. Even as their incomes rose, Sicilian-Americans continued to cook with bread crumbs, a former food of necessity. Nothing made a crunchier coating for fried calamari or arancini, the creamy, fist-size rice balls filled with ground meat or cheese, sold as street food and prepared in the home for holidays and parties. Today, they appear on the menus of old-time Sicilian restaurants and delicatessens. Below are two bread crumb recipes. The first is for a bread-crumb frittata.
ZUCCHINI FRITTATA
4 large or 6 small zucchini
1 small onion sliced
3 tablespoons olive oil
5 eggs
½ cup grated Romano cheese
1/3 cup bread crumbs
Salt and pepper
Rinse and grate zucchini using the large holes on a hand-held grater. You could also use the shredding disc on a food processor. Place grated zucchini in a colander over the sink. Sprinkle with a teaspoon of salt, toss, and let sit 15 minutes or longer, until the zucchini begins to “weep.” Squeeze out the extra moisture with your hands. Put aside.
Sauté the onion in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil until lightly golden. Add the zucchini. Cook until zucchini is slightly browned in spots and most of the remaining moisture has cooked away. Season with salt and pepper, and remove from the stove. Meanwhile, beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the warm zucchini, along with the grated cheese and bread crumbs. Let the mixture sit a minute or two, so the bread crumbs can drink up some of the egg. Add remaining oil to the frying pan, and let it get hot. Add egg mixture, then turn down the heat. Cook over a low flame until frittata starts to set around the edges. Place under a hot broiler to finish cooking the top. Slide onto a plate. Eat at room temperature.15
The pasta recipe below comes to us from Concetta Rizzolo, an immigrant from Avellino, a town east of Naples, who settled in New Jersey in the 1910s. The toasted bread crumbs can be stored in the refrigerator for several weeks.
SPAGHETTI CON AGLIO E OLIO
½ cup olive oil
6 cloves garlic, minced
½ to 1 tsp red pepper flakes
10 black peppercorns
1 pound spaghetti
½ cup chopped parsley
½ cup toasted bread crumbs
To toast bread crumbs, coat a frying pan with olive oil and heat over a medium flame. When the oil is warm, add 1 cup homemade bread crumbs. Stir bread crumbs to prevent them from burning or sticking. They are ready as soon as they turn a uniform golden-brown.
Boil water for spaghetti. Meanwhile, heat oil over low flame. Add garlic and peppercorns. Cook garlic over a very low flame until it is soft and translucent, but do not allow it to brown. Add pepper flakes and continue to cook for about five minutes.
Drain pasta but reserve about a cup of cooking water. Add to oil and garlic mixture and heat over low flame. Toss with spaghetti and serve immediately with parsley and toasted bread crumbs.16
Living on Orchard Street, in the heart of the Jewish East Side, the Baldizzis formed close relationships with their Jewish neighbors, Fannie Rogarshevsky in particular. After her husband died, when Fannie assumed the role of building janitor, Mr. Baldizzi, a trained carpenter, often helped her with repairs. The two became good friends. Sometime in the early 1930s, to alleviate crowding in the Rogarshevsky household, one of Fannie’s grandsons was sent to live with the Baldizzis. Conversely, Fannie regularly fixed school-day lunches for the Baldizzi kids when their mother was at work. (Rosaria Baldizzi worked for a short time during the Depression but had to give up her job or forfeit her check from Home Relief.) The young Josephine, Fannie Rogarshevsky’s designated shabbos goy, was fascinated by the way the Jewish homemaker koshered her chickens, scrubbing them at the kitchen sink the way an Italian mother might scrub an especially dirty child. Every evening, Mr. Baldizzi stopped by Schreiber’s Delicatessen on Broome Street for a glass of schnapps, his ritual nightcap. On weekends he took the kids on long walks that carried them over the Manhattan Bridge and back again, stopping along the way for hot potato pancakes, that quintessentially Jewish snack sold by the East Side vendors. Even so, when it was time to shop for groceries, Mrs. Baldizzi found limited use for the pushcart market directly below her window. Instead, the food she depended on could be found a few blocks away, in the Italian pushcart market on Mulberry Street. By the time of the mayor’s pushcart commission in 1906, Mulberry Street was already a full-ser vice open-air market catering to the Italian homemaker. Satellite markets sprang up on Elizabeth and Bleecker streets and along First Avenue below 14th Street. The largest of all, however, extended for nearly a mile from 100th to 119th streets on First Avenue in East Harlem. The pushcart markets were the single most important source of food for immigrant New Yorkers from the 1880s through the late 1930s, when Mayor La Guardia, the son of immigrants himself, finally prevailed in the decades-long battle between the pushcart peddlers and the city government. In anticipation of the upcoming World’s Fair and the multitudes that would soon descend on New York, La Guardia shut down one market after another, consolidating some and moving others into newly built market buildings more befitting a modern city. The Mulberry Street market fell to the mayor’s ax in 1939, the year the fair opened. In the meantime, however, the Mulberry Street pushcarts supplied Italian cooks like Mrs. Baldizzi with foods unknown in the Jewish quarter. The Italian peddlers, for example, did a brisk business in mussels, periwinkles, conch, oysters, and clams. The last two items were sold as street food, the Italian equivalent to the Jewish knish.
Clams on the half-shell, a common street food in Little Italy.
Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations
In the Old Country, Italian women foraged for snails, a free source of precious protein. In America, the snail peddler became a fixture of the Italian pushcart market. His mode of advertising, unique among street vendors, was an upright board with the snails clinging to it. The bulk of his delicate stock could be found in a crate under the pushcart to keep the snails shaded and cool. Italian cooks soaked their snails in cold water, prompting the animal to inch out of its shell, then fried it with garlic, creating a savory and inexpensive topping for pasta. Other sea creatures sold at the market were squid, octopus, and eels, which the Italian cook stewed with tomatoes.
But the most remarkable feature of the Italian markets was the selection of greens and other vegetables that figured so prominently in the immigrants’ diet. Early accounts of the pushcart markets offer a partial list of the many forms of plant life sold by Italian peddlers. There was cabbage and cauliflower—though no mention of broccoli—cow peas, cucumbers, celery (distinct from American celery), fennel, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, onion, garlic, chickweed, beet tops, lettuce, and many other forms of leafy greens which the Americans had no names for. As a convenience to the homemaker, beans could be purchased dried or already soaked to hasten the cooking time. The Italian vegetable peddlers, many of them women, were fastidious in the presentation of their goods. As one observer noted, “They clean, cut, and freshen the vegetables, constantly rearranging them so that they appear to the best advantage on the stands.”17 The women scrubbed their celery and their fennel until the stalks gleamed; they buffed the peppers and sprinkled the lettuce with water to keep it from wilting. Americans, who still thought of salads as an assemblage of vegetables and meats, often bound with mayonnaise, were struck by the Italians’ more restrained approach to the same dish. “No other people in the world,” one observer remarked,
use so many salads. They never mix tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers as Americans do in their salads. Each is kept separate. For their tomato salad, they clean the tomatoes, but do not peel them, split or slice them, and dress them with oil, but no vinegar. Then they strew over them stems of “regona,” a herb of aromatic taste and smell which comes dried from Italy…Cucumbers they peel and eat with both oil and vinegar, regona, and garlic. The heart of the lettuce, which they call “lattuga,” is a prime favorite, dressed with olive oil and Italian vinegar.18
The Italian’s devotion to these simple preparations was also noteworthy. “The Italian invariably has a salad for dinner if he can afford it,” our observer adds, “and it seems often to supply the place of meat to him.” To the American, the Italian salad habit was a source of puzzlement. How could a plate of lettuce, they wondered, take the place of a good roast? More curious still, how could a diet so lacking in substance provide the nourishment required to sustain human life?
Come spring, immigrants scoured the vacant lots of Brooklyn and the Bronx for wild dandelions, a food they had once gathered in the fields around their native villages. In New York, dandelions were a source of income for Italian women who collected the greens, cleaned them, and sold them at the pushcart markets, a washtub’s worth for a nickel. Italian cooks used the wild green for dandelion soup, or fried them in olive oil with tomatoes and pepper. When boiled for several hours, the filtered cooking liquid, “acqua di cicorie” was used as a tonic for “dyspepsia and general weakness.”19 An Italian summer delicacy was cucuzza, an extremely long squash with smooth, pale green skin and a hook at one end like an umbrella handle. Peddlers displayed the cucuzze by looping the hooked ends over a horizontal pole so they hung like stockings on a wash line. The leaves of the plant, sold as a separate vegetable, were heaped in crates on the pushcart below. Cucuzza was especially popular with Sicilian cooks, who added it to soups or fried it with garlic and tomatoes. Sicilian confectioners, meanwhile, chopped the squash into small pieces or shaved it into ribbons, then boiled it in sugar syrup until the opaque white interior had turned deep gold and was almost transparent.
Much of the produce sold on Mulberry Street was grown on immigrant “truck farms” in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey, a few hours commute from the wholesale markets in Lower Manhattan. A bit farther out from the city, Italians established a vibrant farming community in Vineland, New Jersey, which by 1900 comprised two hundred and sixty immigrant families. The Vineland farmers cultivated fruits and vegetables for the immigrant market using seeds imported from Italy. Their crops included garlic, peppers, cauliflower, cabbage, beets, fennel, cardoons (a relative of artichokes), chestnuts, figs, plums, and ten varieties of grapes.
In the nineteenth century, immigrant Jews carried their goose-farming tradition to America, establishing urban poultry farms in the East Side tenements. Several decades later, Italian immigrants brought their treasured home gardens to urban America, now reconfigured as a tenement window box. In wooden planters made from discarded soapboxes, Italian homemakers grew oregano, basil, mint, peppers, tomatoes, and lettuce. (The more ambitious urban farmers planted their gardens on tenement rooftops.) The tradition of the home garden continues today in Italian neighborhoods like Hoboken, New Jersey, and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where second-and third-generation immigrants grow basil and plum tomatoes in emptied institutional-size cans of pomodori pelati.
Though removed from the soil, transplanted Italian women moved to the rhythm of the agricultural year. Each fall, in New York’s Little Italy, they bought up great loads of peppers and preserved them for the coming winter. The peppers were split and brined in tubs of saltwater or packed in jars filled with vinegar. The women also dried their peppers in the sun, just as they used to in the Old Country. In New York, however, they threaded the peppers onto long strings and suspended them from the fire escapes in great dangling loops. Tomatoes were also dried in the sun, along with eggplant, which the women first cut into strips. Each of these dried vegetables was soaked in water for several hours prior to cooking, then fried in olive oil or added to soup. The eggplant recipe below is from Maria Gentile.
EGGPLANTS IN THE OVEN
Skin five or six eggplants, cut them in round slices, and salt them so that they throw out the water that they contain. After a few hours, dip in flour and frying oil.
Take a fireproof vase or baking tin and place the slices in layers, with grated cheese between each layer, abundantly seasoned with tomato sauce.
Beat one egg with a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of tomato sauce, a teaspoonful of grated cheese and two of crumbs of bread, and cover the upper layer with this sauce. Put the vase in the oven and when the egg is coagulated, serve hot.20
The contempt for Italian cooking that prevailed in this country a hundred-plus years ago is a buried fact in our culinary history and a surprising one, too, considering how much attitudes have changed. In the United States today, no immigrant cuisine is more embraced by the American cook, her kitchen stocked with tomato paste, canned tomatoes, jarred marinara sauce, olive oil, parmesan cheese, garlic, and above all pasta, mainstay of the American dinner table. And what food, if not pizza, is more beloved by American schoolchildren?
This national love affair unfolded in two overlapping yet disconnected chapters. Chapter one began in the mid-nineteenth century, as immigrants from northern Italy settled in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Boston, and San Francisco. Italians who belonged to this first wave were largely people of culture—artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, and other professionals. Among the early immigrants were restaurant-keepers. In the 1850s and 1860s, as the Italian settlements gathered critical mass, they opened eating places to feed their transplanted countrymen. New York’s first Italian restaurants were clustered near Union Square, close to 14th Street, then the city’s main entertainment thoroughfare and home to the Academy of Music, the nation’s first official opera house. In 1857, an Italian named Stefano Moretti opened a pleasingly shabby second-floor restaurant directly across the street from the Academy, which became New York’s first important Bohemian dining spot. The favorite haunt of Italian opera stars, Moretti’s began to attract native-born musicians, artists, and writers. The avant-garde of their day, they were drawn to Moretti’s by the delightfully foreign atmosphere as well as the food, a five-course dinner for a dollar, a fair price for the time though well beyond the means of the working class. The dishes they encountered were typical of the northern kitchen. Risotto with kidney was a house specialty, along with wild duck and quail, both served with salad. But Signor Moretti was also known for his spaghetti, “tender as first love” and “sweet beyond comparison.” Though nineteenth-century Americans were generally familiar with macaroni, the pipe-stem-shaped pasta used today for mac ’n’ cheese, spaghetti was still utterly alien. American diners were simultaneously baffled, alarmed, and enchanted by these attenuated strands of dough that they discovered in Italian restaurants but still had no name for. If the food itself was bizarre, the complicated procedure of eating it left Americans awestruck. The following description of a New York Italian restaurant circa 1889 captures the air of adventure surrounding this novel food. The second course consisted
of a substance resembling macaroni that has been pulled out until each piece is at least two feet long, while the thickness has proportionally diminished. You are told that it is wholly bad form to cut this reptile-like food; you must eat as the Italians do. Thereupon you suddenly cease to feel hungry, and spend the time in observation. They, to the manner born, lift a mass of this slippery thing upon the fork, give the wrist several expert twists, and then, with lightning rapidity, place it in the mouth. If by misfortune a string escapes, it is gradually recovered in the most nonchalant manner imaginable. It is a fascinating operation, though by no means one to inspire a desire to emulate the operator.21
The only thing more diverting than this queer new food was the foreign crowd, a collection of singers, ballerinas, professors, journalists, and businessmen.
As the city’s theaters migrated from 14th Street to Broadway, the restaurants followed. For New Yorkers out on the town, tired of their native chop houses and oyster saloons, Italian food was a refreshing change of pace, and much cheaper than French, the foreign cuisine favored by elite society. Italian food, by contrast, along with German, was the foreign cuisine of the American middle class. The kind of food New Yorkers could expect to find at the new Broadway restaurants was more attuned to American tastes. For the less adventuresome eater, they offered both chops and oysters. The rest of the menu was still rooted in the more mildly flavored and buttery cuisine of northern Italy. An inventory of recommended dishes that ran in the New York Sun advised diners to stick with the cheaper items on the menu, like spaghetti in meat sauce, “a chopped-up soupy compound,” and to skip the more expensive meats in favor of veal, lamb, and giblets:
The leg of veal, usually used for a soup bone, is delicious when it comes on the table as osso buco. The leg is roasted, there is a suggestion of herbs and garlic and a sauce of brown butter over the risotto that accompanies it. Then there is the delicious marrow in the bone that has been opened in order that it may easily be eaten.
The veal cutlets, whether they are served à la Milanaise, with cêpes cut up over them and put into a sauce of butter and cheese, or with herbs, are superior to any that can be eaten at the best of Fifth avenue restaurants.
Arostino, which means a little roast, is a slice of the veal served with the kidney embedded into it and cooked with thyme and a thick brown sauce covering it and a bed of risotto. Such a cut of veal is unknown to American butchers.
The kidneys au sauce Medere are made in accordance with an Italian formula and are remarkable from the fact that only very small kidneys are used and they are served with champignons of about the same size.
It is in such dishes as these that the Italian restaurants excel, and to them they owe their present popularity, for they alone are able to serve them in such excellence in cooking and at such prices.22
The Broadway restaurants offered just enough novelty (and garlic) to stimulate the imagination while providing diners with the niceties of New York’s finest eating establishments, including an Italian menu printed in French.
After 1880, an entirely different kind of Italian eating place could be found in New York. These were the basement restaurants on Mulberry and Mott streets that catered to the new wave of Italian immigrants, peasant farmers from the southern half of the country who began to settle in New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood, moving into the ramshackle tenements once occupied by American blacks and poor Irish. The Italians also took over the low-paying jobs once held by the Irish to become the city’s new street cleaners and ditch diggers. Native-born New Yorkers drew a firm distinction between these new immigrants and the Italians they already knew, “honest,” “industrious,” and “orderly” people. An 1875 editorial that ran in the New York Times presented this thumbnail portrait of the new arrivals:
They are extremely ignorant, and have been reared in the belief that brigandage is a manly occupation, and that assassination is the natural sequence of the most trivial quarrel. They are miserably poor, and it is not strange that they resort to theft and robbery. It is, perhaps, hopeless to think of civilizing them.23
While the north vs. south distinction was rooted in historical fact (southerners were poor and uneducated), it became the foundation for pernicious stereotypes imposed on southern Italians, which Americans returned to again and again, using the immigrants’ birthplace to explain everything about them, from their violent nature to their deplorable eating habits. As a result, several years passed before Americans were able to gather up their courage and sample the fruits of the southerners’ kitchen.
The first restaurants in Little Italy reflected the immigrants’ meager earnings. A visitor to the Italian colony in 1884 counted four neighborhood restaurants where laborers could buy a two-cent plate of macaroni, three cents worth of coffee and bread, or splurge on coffee and mutton chops, the most expensive item on the menu, for a total of six cents. Basement restaurants also provided laborers with a place to gather, to smoke their pipes, play cards, and enjoy the talents of their musical peers. (The neighborhood’s busiest social spots, however, were the stale-beer dives, as they were known, where the house drink was made from the beer dregs collected from a better class of saloons.) The dining rooms attached to boardinghouses and cheap hotels were another eating option for the transplanted Italian. A typical menu consisted of coffee with anisette and hard bread for breakfast, and for supper, minestrone, spaghetti or macaroni, followed by a stew made with garlic and oil.
The early restaurants reflected the strong connections that immigrants felt for their native villages. As they settled in New York, Italians recreated the geography of home, with Neapolitans on Mulberry Street, Calabrians on Mott, Sicilians on Elizabeth, and so on. Within these regional encampments, Italians from a particular town or village tended to cluster on the same city block and sometimes in the same building. At their festa, villagers came together to honor their local saint, but also to celebrate their ties with each other. Italians have a word for the special connectedness felt among towns people. Campanilismo, from the Italian word for “bell,” describes the bonds of solidarity felt among people who live within hearing distance of the same church bell.
Restaurants preserved these regional loyalties. Some of the first restaurants were hidden within the Italian groceries that began to appear in New York in the 1880s, the provisions lined up on one half of the room, the other half set aside for tables. Like many immigrant restaurants, these were family-run businesses. The store/café occupied the front room of a ground-floor apartment, while the family slept in the back. This was also where the proprietor’s wife cooked for her customers. An 1889 article from Harper’smagazine describes the convivial scene inside one of these store/cafés, this one owned by a family of Sicilians:
Notwithstanding the poverty of the place, it is as busy as a beehive. At the long table, a number of men, who probably work at night on the scows of the Street-cleaning Department, are drinking the black coffee, which, despite its cheapness, is palatable enough to the drinkers. A handful of Italian women, whose dresses and shawls are bright with the gaudy colors so dear to them, are chaffering with the proprietor’s wife over a string of garlic or a pound of sausage. The chairs about the room are occupied by friends and customers of the house, who are smoking villainous short pipes and talking so loudly that one ignorant of the language would suspect them to be on the point of a riot.
The air is blue with tobacco smoke, and the place reeks with the conglomeration of stenches that no language can describe, yet all the people appear to enjoy the best of health, and even the children display a robustness and physical vigor that would do credit to those born with silver spoons. The food served in this, as in all places of a similar sort, does not lack nutrition, though the materials gathered would not recommend themselves to the fastidious. The stew, made up of scraps gathered here and there, is spiced until savory to a hungry man, and the macaroni, though manufactured from the cheapest and coarsest flour in some eastside shop, is usually wholesome.24
If Americans were charmed by the Italians’ earthiness, an establishment like the Sicilian café was best experienced in the pages of magazines.
Once confined to the Five Points, New York’s most notorious slum, by 1910 Little Italy stretched north toward Houston Street and west toward Greenwich Village. As the colony expanded, its physical character also changed. In 1895, the tenements surrounding Mulberry Bend, the heart of the Five Points, were torn down to make way for Columbus Park, Little Italy’s new “town square.” Two blocks west of the Bend, more tenements were razed to widen Elm Street, creating a broad thoroughfare known today as Lafayette Street. Now open to light and air, Little Italy was no longer the “foul core of New York slums” that Jacob Riis described in the 1890s. What’s more, Little Italy was no longer the bachelor community it once had been. By 1900, Italian immigrants were largely men and women who came to the United States to start a family and lay down roots.
Chapter two of the American romance with Italian food began at the turn of the century, as native New Yorkers wandered into the now-expanded Italian colony. One stop on their itinerary was the Italian grocery, which exposed the visitor to enticements they had never known existed. The heart of their education, however, took place in the Italian restaurants that served as culinary classrooms. For Americans who believed that Italians subsisted on bread and macaroni, the edible delights available in the downtown restaurants came as a revelation. Published accounts of these gastronomic forays were quick to warn readers of certain possible pitfalls. To quote one newspaper reporter: “The Italian taste in cookery is not always such as pleases the native American palate.”25Properly advised, however, American diners could find an array of delectable dishes: minestrone that was “thick and tasteful” kidneys, liver, and veal, prepared southern-style with peppers and onions; simmered polpette, or meatballs; fried calamari; and a host of tantalizing vegetable dishes based on eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers. But the dish that most enchanted American diners was spaghetti.
Discovered by an earlier generation of adventuresome eaters, in the early 1900s spaghetti reentered the American culinary consciousness and quickly moved from restaurant kitchens to the family dinner table. Recipes for spaghetti began to appear in American cookbooks, including The Boston Cooking School Cook Book by Fannie Farmer published in 1896. In her 1902 cookbook, Sarah Tyson Rorer, a leading voice of the domestic science movement, explains precisely how this still-novel food should be cooked:
Spaghetti is always served in the long form in which it is purchased. Grasp the given quantity in your hand; put the ends down into boiling water; as they soften, press gently until the whole length is in the water; boil rapidly for twenty minutes. Drain, and blanch in cold water.26
Around the same time, recipes for spaghetti began to appear on the women’s pages of American newspapers. Many sent in by readers, newspaper recipes leave a vivid record of the creative, often zany applications that American home cooks found for spaghetti. There was “Mexican Spaghetti” with tomatoes, paprika, peppers, and bacon served in a chafing dish; “Chicken and Spaghetti Croquettes” made with cooked spaghetti, finely chopped; and the popular “Tomatoes Stuffed with Spaghetti.” In 1908, the women’s page of the Chicago Tribune featured a reader’s recipe for “Spaghetti and Meat Balls,” one of the earliest references to this future staple of the Italian-American kitchen:
SPAGHETTI AND MEAT BALLS
Take one pound of round steak, run through meat grinder two or three times; one egg, three rolled crackers or grated stale bread, one small onion grated, four sprigs parsley chopped fine, and pepper and salt to suit taste. Mix and form into small balls, a teaspoonful and a half each.
Prepare sauce as follows: One can tomatoes, one green or red pepper, one onion, two bay leaves, and a quart water. Boil one hour, then strain through colander. Add small piece of butter, and pepper and salt to suit taste. Return to fire and place meatballs in it and boil slowly for forty minutes.
Spaghetti: take one pound of spaghetti, boil it in two quarts of saltwater for twenty minutes, drain, pour over sauce and all, and serve hot.27
The Baldizzis’ financial prospects improved considerably when America entered the war in 1941. By this time, the family was living in Brooklyn. Adolfo found work in the wartime naval yards, while Rosaria returned to her job in the garment district. With both parents employed full-time, the pall cast over the Baldizzi household began to lift. On Orchard Street, the family had owned a radio, which Rosaria kept tuned to the opera stations. In Brooklyn, she bought a record player and kept it running whenever she was home, filling the house with music. On holidays, the Baldizzis hosted family parties complete with music and dancing. The new prosperity brought very welcome changes to the family dinner table. At last, Rosaria could afford to buy the meat that was so conspicuously absent from the Orchard Street kitchen. The most festive meal of the year, however, was entirely meatless. Christmas dinner traditionally began at ten o’clock, to coordinate with the midnight mass. The first course was octopus salad, followed by a pan of lasagna, rich with ricotta, eggs, and mozzarella, but the climax of the meal was a stew made with baccala—salt cod. Here is the Baldizzi family recipe for the holiday staple:
Josephine and John Baldizzi on the roof of 97 Orchard Street, 1935.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
CHRISTMAS BACCALA
1 stalk celery, diced
½ cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 tablespoon salted capers (or more to taste)
2 small cans tomato sauce
2 ½ to 3 pounds baccala
Two days before Christmas, soak the baccala in cold water, changing the water at least two times a day. Cut baccala into pieces.
Sauté celery for five minutes. Add onion, garlic, and capers and cook a few minutes, until soft. Add tomato sauce. Cook over a low flame fifteen minutes. Add baccala and cook until fish comes apart with a fork.28
On New Year’s Eve, the Baldizzis celebrated with sfinge, a kind of hole-less doughnut. Rosaria started the batter in the afternoon, mixing the flour, yeast, and water in a large pot, then covering it with a blanket and leaving it to rise. Just before midnight, she put a pot of oil on the stove, testing the temperature with a drop of water. When it splattered, the oil was sufficiently hot. The second the clock struck twelve, she dropped the first spoonful of batter, which caused the oil to bubble wildly, producing a loud zhoosh-ing sound. It took roughly a minute for the sfingeto cook up, puffy and golden. After scooping them from the pot, she dipped them in sugar. Then she fed them to the kids, still hot, so their first taste of the New Year would be sweet.