97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (15 page)

The Reinsbergs also lived on a culinary frontier. Located on the edge of German-speaking Europe, East Prussia felt the culinary influences of Central and Eastern Europe in near equal measure, blending German specialties like wursts and kuchens with typically Slavic foods like borscht and pirogi. Add to this complex scenario the fact that most Prussian Jews were Polish transplants. Reversing the normal eastward flow of Jewish migrants, they carried Polish cooking traditions back into Germany, foods like gefilte fish and cholent, or Sabbath stew. Following the usual Jewish pattern, they held on to familiar foods while adopting local staples. For Prussian Jews, that included dairy products like
schmant
(sour cream) and
glumse
(farmer’s cheese), two key foods in the local diet, an abundance of freshwater fish, and Prussian firewater, a combination of grain alcohol and honey. In short, East Prussian Jews were culturally assimilated but traditional in their religious practice. In their kitchens, Prussian cooks followed the food laws as best they could—not always easy in remote towns where the closest source of kosher meat could be miles away.

In the New World, Jewish culinary custom came up against a new set of realities. Living on Orchard Street, Natalie Gumpertz faced a highly precarious financial future. Between 1870 and 1874, her husband, Julius, bounced from one job to another, working as a clerk and then a salesman before returning to his old standby as a shoemaker. Unhinged by the strain of supporting his family, he eventually buckled completely. On October 7, 1874, Julius left the Orchard Street apartment for work and never returned, thus joining the ranks of the East Side’s many “missing husbands.” (The phenomenon was so common that the
Daily Forward
, the city’s leading Yiddish newspaper, ran a regular photo feature called the “Gallery of Missing Husbands.”) Natalie tried to find her missing spouse, but he was never located, leaving the young mother to fend for herself.

Abandonment was a special class of hardship reserved for East Side women. All immigrants, however, faced the challenge of plain economic survival. In America, land of the mighty dollar, businesses ran six days a week, pausing on Sundays so workers might catch their breath. Back in Europe, traditional Jews abstained from toil on the Sabbath. In America, the economic pressures to work on Saturday were hard to resist, and many Jews relented. Similar concessions were made in the realm of food. For some, that meant eating kosher at home but sharing in the wider culinary culture when out in public. Others stayed loyal to traditional foods but consumed them in ways unimaginable to the strictly devout. Vivid examples of how this compromise worked appear in the fiction of Fannie Hurst, a German-Jewish writer with a tremendous following in the 1920s. The only daughter of two assimilated Bavarian Jews, Fannie Hurst was born on her grandmother’s Ohio farm in 1885 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1909, she moved to New York to launch her career, and by the 1930s had produced hundreds of short stories and a string of novels, some of which were made into movies (the best known is the twice-filmed
Imitation of Life
).

The characters Hurst was most drawn to were poor urban women—shopgirls, streetwalkers, maids, and tenement housewives, many of them Jewish immigrants. Often, Hurst’s stories begin in the tenements, following her characters as they break into the middle class. For the typical Hurst heroine, it’s a bittersweet victory, the material rewards of her new middle-class life offset by the demands of assimilation. The fictional Turkletaub family of West 120th Street have made precisely that journey. In the following scene, they have just sat down to an abundant midday meal:

At one o’clock there was dinner, that immemorial Sunday meal of roast chicken with its supplicating legs up off the platter; dressing to be gouged out, sweet potatoes in amber icing; a master stroke of Mrs. Turkletaub’s called “matzos klose,” balls of unleavened bread, sizzling, even as she served them, in a hot butter bath and light-brown onions; a stuffed goose neck, bursting of flavor, cheese pie twice the depth of the fork that cut in; coffee in large cups.

Just a few hours later, Mrs. Turkletaub is back in the kitchen, preparing Sunday night supper, the second feast of the day:

A platter of ruddy sliced tongue; one of noonday remnants of cold chicken, ovals of liverwurst; a mound of potato salad crisscrossed with strips of pimento; a china basket of stuffed dates, all kissed with sugar; half of an enormously thick cheese cake; two uncovered apple pies; a stack of delicious curlicues, known as “schneken,” pickles with a fern of dill across them.
¹¹

Though still bound to some of the old traditions, the Turkletaubs are willing to defy the religious injunction of mixing meat and dairy. Even more, the family has abandoned the traditional Friday night meal and moved it to Sunday, celebrating the Christian day of rest, but doing it with Jewish food! (Incidentally, the Turkletaubs were not alone. As far back as 1859, a contingent of German-Jewish New Yorkers, many of them bankers, experimented with rescheduling the Sabbath—their attempt to reconcile Judaism with the American workweek.)

The Jewish Sunday dinner is one example of the push-pull relationship that soon developed between immigrants like the Turkletaubs, Jews from traditional backgrounds, and their ancestral foods. Sabbath dishes like chicken soup, brisket, or challah became Sunday dinners in America, suddenly free of the old religious restraints. Holiday foods reserved for special times of the year were drained of their symbolism, and eaten on a whim, whatever the season. In Europe, potato pancakes were a winter-time delicacy inextricably connected with the celebration of Hanukkah. In New York, they were sold year-round by East Side street vendors. Blintzes in Europe were a symbolic food of spring, traditionally eaten on Shavuot. On this side of the Atlantic, they were standard fare in the scores of East Side dairy cafés.

Newly flush with American dollars, middle-class Jews like the Turkletaubs turned their dining-room tables into edible landscapes. Three kinds of meats, dumplings and salads, cakes and pie, followed by coffee, then raisins and nuts (a favorite Jewish snack), all in a single meal. Largesse on such a grand scale was impossible back in the Old Country. At mealtime, they unloaded their well-stocked pantries, as if to say: “Look what we have! Incredible, no?”

Downtown in the tenements, where the typical pantry was nine-tenths empty, German Jews relied on a long culinary tradition of “making do.” Mainstays of the tenement cook were starchy, cheap, and filling. She was, for example, an expert noodle maker, her kitchen equipped with a “noodle board” for rolling and cutting dough. If her husband was handy, the noodle board was attached to the wall by a hinge, so it folded up neatly when not in use. To slash the cost of homemade noodles, a bargain food to begin with, she bought broken eggs, a common commodity among East Side vendors. Ever prepared, the East Sider carried an old tin cup or a beer mug in her shopping basket. When she came to the egg stand, she cracked the already-shattered eggs into the cup, sniffed them, and eyed them. If they met with her approval, she carried them home, fully cracked, at the vendor’s discounted price. All she needed now was a few cups of flour to create a meal.

Shoppers inspecting the merchandise on Hester Street, 1898.
“Street Vendors, 1898,” Museum of the City of New York, The Byron Collection

Chicken noodle soup was a luxury food by downtown standards, and commonly reserved for Fridays or holidays. A midweek meal among German Jews might be pea soup with spaetzle, pebble-shaped nuggets of dough grated straight into the soup pot. Another option was noodles stewed with fried onion and perhaps a piece of crumbled liver or “soup meat.” There were also noodles and fruit—dried pears, apricots, or prunes—stewed together over a slow flame. The end result was a stove-top version of noodle kugel, sweet and satisfying.

Where Bavarian cooks looked to noodles as their starch of choice, Jews from Prussia, Posen, and all points east relied on potatoes. No people on earth could equal the Irish in potato consumption, but the Jews of Eastern Europe came close, remarkable when you consider the potatoes’ relatively late arrival on the Jewish food scene. Actually, widespread potato cultivation came surprisingly late to Europe in general. For a solid two hundred years after its European debut in the sixteenth century, the potato remained an obscure sample of New World flora. It was studied by botanists and grown as an ornament, but rarely eaten. The one place it made any headway as a food was the court kitchen, served now and then as a novelty item to aristocratic dinners. Commoners were less favorably impressed. Most Europeans feared the potato as a carrier of disease or scorned it as a food of heathens. Those who tried it, found it plain unappetizing, better suited to livestock than people. The potato showed its virtues mainly when other crops failed. It could withstand long stretches of cold temperatures better than most grains, and matured more quickly. (It takes two to three months for potatoes to mature, versus ten months for wheat.) During times of political turbulence, the edible part of the potato plant stayed buried in the earth, safe from marauders and their torches.

By the start of the eighteenth century, extensive potato farming was found throughout the Low Countries and in parts of France and western Germany. By the middle of the century, Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, had grasped the potatoes’ usefulness as an insurance crop—a backup food when other foods were scarce—and in 1744 commanded wide-scale potato planting. The order took roughly thirty years to implement, but in the end Frederick prevailed through a mix of force, coaxing, and education. (The king distributed free seed potatoes, along with an instructional handbook, to farmers.) By the end of his reign, his dream was realized: Prussia was rich in potatoes. Frederick’s campaign introduced potatoes to the Prussian Jews, numbering over a hundred thousand and a very receptive audience. Even more, he brought the potato to the edge of Eastern Europe and its vast Jewish community. It was just a matter of decades before it spread across Poland and eventually Russia.

Jews embraced the potato for many of the same reasons as the Irish. It was a high-yielding, fast-growing plant, even in poor soil, while the potato itself was dense in both calories and nutrients. Like the Irish, the Jews cooked their potatoes whole, either boiled or roasted, and peeled them at the table. And, like the Irish, Jews “kitchened” their potatoes with some form of dairy food, perhaps a glass of buttermilk, or maybe a few bites of protein, usually herring. When the herring ran out, they dipped their potato into the pickling brine. But sometimes there was nothing—no fish, no brine—and the work of seasoning the potatoes was left to the eater’s imagination. The following domestic scene comes from the Yiddish story “When Does Mame Eat?” by Avrom Reisen. It highlights nicely the power of suggestion as a culinary tool:

In the morning, when Leybele got up, he saw Mame standing by the oven, sticking one pot in and sliding the other out—she was so handy! And she had forks of all kinds—a big one for a big pot, a small one with a small pot, and the middle-sized tines to go with the middle-sized pot. Then, when she removed one pot, she checked its contents, blew away the foam, and put it back in the oven.

What did she cook in those pots? One of them, a day’s worth, was dedicated to hot water, nothing else. “A house,” said Mame, “has to have hot water.” The second pot was surely filled with potatoes, called “fish potatoes” when cut up. But there wasn’t any fish…They didn’t eat fish during the week. “Fish,” said Mame, “is very expensive.” And fish potatoes, even without fish, were tasty too. In any case, Mame was a skilled housewife, that he knew for sure.
¹²

Boiled potatoes with imaginary fish. This was Jewish potato cookery at its most austere. Alongside it, however, Jewish cooks developed a full repertoire of more elaborate potato-based dishes: puddings, dumplings, breads, soups, even baked goods.

Potato kugel, a Sabbath mainstay of Polish Jews, was made from grated raw potatoes and onions, goose fat, eggs, and bread crumbs, all mixed together and baked overnight until golden with crisp, brown edges.
Golkes
, another Polish specialty, were chewy potato dumplings. They were made from grated raw potatoes that had been wrung dry in a towel, then mixed with flour and eggs, rolled into balls, and boiled.
Golkes
were typically eaten in soup or maybe in a bowl of hot milk. (Potatoes and milk, or some form of dairy food, were a very common pairing in the Jewish kitchen, just as in Ireland.) A Lithuanian food called
bondes
was made from grated potatoes mixed with rye or buckwheat flour to form a rough dough. After a good kneading, the dough was placed on cabbage leaves and baked. Lithuanian mothers gave
bondes
to their children to bring to school, but a gourmet treat was
bondes
hot from the oven with sour cream. Another Lithuanian creation, known as “mock fish” (relative of “fish potatoes”), was made from sliced potatoes cooked with onion and goose fat. In the summer, when the cows were producing, “mock fish” was converted into a dairy dish, the potatoes and onions cooked with butter and sour cream. Potatoes, onion, and fat—the Jewish cook explored every conceivable permutation of these three core ingredients, the more fat the fancier the dish. The most extravagant of all was latkes, potato pancakes fried in sizzling pools of precious goose fat.