97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement »

Jane Ziegelman is the director of the forthcoming culinary program at New York City's Tenement Museum. The founder and director of Kids Cook!, a multiethnic cooking program for children, she has presented food-related talks and cooking classes in libraries and schools across New York City. Her writing on food has appeared in a number of newspapers, magazines, and books, including The New Cook's Catalog, and she is the coauthor of Foie Gras: A Passion. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman explores the culinary life that was the heart and soul of New York's Lower East Side around the turn of the twentieth century—a city within a city, where Germans, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews attempted to forge a new life. Through the experiences of five families, all of them residents of 97 Orchard Street, she takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable tour, from impossibly cramped tenement apartments down dimly lit stairwells where children played and neighbors socialized, beyond the front stoops where immigrant housewives found respite and company, and out into the hubbub of the dirty, teeming streets.

Ziegelman shows how immigrant cooks brought their ingenuity to the daily task of feeding their families, preserving traditions from home but always ready to improvise. While health officials worried that pushcarts were unsanitary and that pickles made immigrants too excitable to be good citizens, a culinary revolution was taking place in the streets of what had been culturally an English city. Along the East River, German immigrants founded breweries, dispensing their beloved lager in the dozens of beer gardens that opened along the Bowery. Russian Jews opened tea parlors serving blintzes and strudel next door to Romanian nightclubs that specialized in goose pastrami. On the streets, Italian peddlers hawked the cheese-and-tomato pies known as pizzarelli, while Jews sold knishes and squares of halvah. Gradually, as Americans began to explore the immigrant ghetto, they uncovered the array of comestible enticements of their foreign-born neighbors. 97 Orchard charts this exciting process of discovery as it lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Ziegelman isn't in the market to romanticize 97 Orchard. Her impeccable research won't permit it. At its best, the tenement was a stepping-stone, a cold-comfort place to circle your wagons and put some food on the campfire. When opportunity knocked, tenants got the hell out. But although Ziegelman's voice is smart, it is also smitten by lives reimagined so vividly you could smell them in the air, all that cabbage and onion and garlic. Orchard Street doesn't smell much any longer, nothing ripe to the point of deliquescence, shocking the nose. Some might think that's a shame.

Acknowledgments

Introduction

One The Glockner Family 1

Two The Moore Family 47

Three The Gumpertz Family 83

Four The Rogarshevsky Family 125

Five The Baldizzi Family 183

Notes 229

Bibliography 235

Photo Credits 239

Index 241