97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (23 page)

Similar efforts to Americanize the immigrant took place in settlement cooking classes. The class curriculum was shaped by a relatively new approach to housework, known as domestic science, a movement that gained ground with American homemakers in the final decades of the nineteenth century. The women who led the domestic science charge set out to ennoble the homemaker’s daily grind of cooking and cleaning by grounding it in scientific theory and method. They envisioned the home as a kind of domestic laboratory in which women applied their knowledge of chemistry, sanitation, dietetics, physiology, and economics to the everyday work of cooking and cleaning. To help spread their gospel, they established cooking schools in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, and domestic science programs in colleges and universities, including the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Columbia University in Manhattan. The Russian-American writer Anzia Yezierska was granted a scholarship to study at the Columbia School of Household Arts, but private cooking programs were generally beyond the means of working-class women. The domestic-science movement reached the working class through charitable institutions like churches, YMCAs, and settlement houses, where classes were offered for free or at prices scaled to the working person’s budget.

The classes focused on the simplest and plainest American foods, beginning with a lesson on how to make toast and brew coffee in a freshly scoured coffee pot. Students learned how to properly boil oatmeal, rice, and potatoes, how to make pea soup, mutton stew, creamed codfish, biscuits, and gingerbread. Settlement houses that catered to Jews adapted the standard lesson plan so it conformed to Jewish dietary law, but only because they had no choice. The people who ran the settlement houses were Reform Jews, many from German families, who had immigrated to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, oyster-eaters. In their desire to Americanize the immigrant, they would have preferred to dispense with kosher laws—and some, in fact, tried—but their students wouldn’t allow it. As one settlement worker explained it, “There are some kosher laws that have to be followed, else the teaching would go no further than the classroom and would never show practical results.”

A cooking class for immigrant girls at the Educational Alliance. The girls here are learning how to make corn muffins.
From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

Of the eight thousand East Siders that passed through the doors of the Educational Alliance each day, the vast majority came to take advantage of the free legal aid, use the public baths, or let their children loose on the rooftop garden. The cooking classes were only a modest success. The reason was simple: the Jewish homemaker already knew how to cook.

In 1916, the New York Board of Health issued a recipe booklet of cheap and nutritious foods intended for the East Side homemaker. Distributed by neighborhood settlement houses,
How to Feed the Family
was something of a flop among its intended audience. A reporter curious about the East Sider’s reaction found out why. (The interview is transcribed in dialect, a common practice in period newspapers when dealing with working-class subjects.) The Board of Health, one woman explained,

ain’t got no right to say what I should cook and how. Y’understand? Already when I was little I knew how oatmeal it should be cooked. You do it with a double boiler. I ain’t got no use for peoples what teaches me how to cook things that a long time before I done better as what they did.

Her neighbor concurred. “The East Side is the East,” she told the reporter. “I make like my Grossmutter Selig and my mother Gefullte fish and stuffed
helzel
[poultry neck]. What I care for the Board of Health?”
¹⁴
But if the Board of Health failed to impress them, immigrant cooks felt the pressure to Americanize from other sources. The most persuasive were the cook’s own children.

No single institution exerted more influence on the culinary lives of immigrant children than the American public school. Here, beginning in 1888, immigrant daughters were taught the fundamentals of American cookery in a then-experimental course based on the principles of domestic science. Declared a success by city educators, the experiment in “manual training” (the classes also gave instruction in sewing, housekeeping, and nursing) became a permanent fixture of the New York public schools. Over the next decades, it expanded and evolved along with the changing profile of the city. For poor students, classes in manual training opened up employment opportunities, but middle-class girls could benefit too. The classes taught them discipline, neatness, and organization, the qualities that would help them manage their own future households.

The program’s original audience was native-born American girls, but the focus shifted as immigrants continued to descend on New York. To reach their foreign-born students, educators hit upon a novel teaching strategy. They replaced the conventional classroom with “model flats,” simulated tenement apartments that mimicked the students’ own tenement homes. In their stage-set kitchens, the girls learned how to maintain the highest sanitary standards, every dish and utensil neatly stowed in its rightful place. They were taught the importance of established mealtimes, the family sitting down together at a properly set table, the food “served” rather than “grabbed.” Finally, they were tutored in the science of cooking with lessons on food chemistry, kitchen mechanics, and human physiology.

Model flats were the brainchild of Mabel Kittredge, a domestic scientist who worked with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement. The first model flat opened in 1902 in a tenement building in the heart of the Jewish ghetto. Before long, they were scattered through the tenement district, some housed in actual tenements, others in school buildings, including P.S. 7 on Hester Street. Miss Kittredge developed a housekeeping curriculum based on the model flats, which she compiled into a textbook. Today,
Practical Homemaking
provides a detailed picture of the public school cooking class circa 1914, when the book was published. The recipes in
Practical Homemaking
, hand-selected for the tenement population, were centered around three core ingredients: milk, cereals, and potatoes. Miss Kittredge saw little use for vegetables, with the exception of beans, the only form of plant life rich in “nutritive value.” She was equally unimpressed by fruit, which, after all, was composed mostly of water. The immigrants’ first cooking lesson was devoted to nature’s most perfect food, milk, from which the girls were taught to make cocoa. Future lessons were devoted to white sauce, boiled cereals like oatmeal and Wheatena, boiled potatoes, and cooked apples. Promoting the foods that Kittredge felt were best suited to the East Sider, the lessons were also designed to wean immigrants away from their less desirable culinary habits. For Jews, that meant forsaking their over-spiced pickles and delicatessen meats, while Italians were asked to cut back on their beloved macaroni and olive oil. Returning to their real-life tenement flats, the girls shared what they had learned, teaching their mothers how to poach eggs, or cook vegetables in boiling water rather than goose schmaltz. Teachers also made home visits to reinforce the lessons and monitor their students’ progress. As one contemporary described it, the girls served as missionaries to their foreign-born parents, a role that the public schools exploited for all it was worth.

Dieticians from local schools and settlement houses paid visits to the tenements. The dietician pictured is teaching immigrant women how to cook hot cereal in a double boiler.
CSS Photography Archives, Courtesy of Community Service Society of New York and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

A second powerful influence on the food habits of immigrant children was the school lunchroom. Up until the twentieth century, most city kids returned from school each day for a home-cooked meal. That began to change as more and more women found work outside the home, leaving their kids to fend for themselves. With no one to feed them, the kids were given two or three pennies to buy lunch from a local pushcart or delicatessen. In 1908, a group of private citizens, alarmed by this new development, founded the New York School Lunch Committee, a charity that provided three-penny lunches to undernourished children. In place of pickles and candy—the typical pushcart meal—the committee provided hot soups and stews for two cents a serving, and one-penny treats like rice pudding or baked sweet potato. The school lunch committee lasted through World War I, but in 1920, responsibility for feeding the city’s children shifted to the Board of Education. As it happens, the shift coincided with a groundswell of anti-immigrant thinking in the United States, which culminated in the Johnson Reed Act, a far-reaching immigrant quota system passed by Congress in 1924. Calls to Americanize the foreign-born reverberated through government offices and monopolized the editorial pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. With so much attention on the immigrant threat, the Board of Education looked to the school lunchroom to Americanize the immigrant palate. Below is a typical school lunch menu circa 1920:

M
ONDAY:
Cocoa, buttered roll, stewed corn, stewed prunes

T
UESDAY:
Cream of pea soup, peanut and cottage cheese sandwich, Brown Betty with lemon sauce, fruit tapioca

W
EDNESDAY:
Vegetable soup, baked beans, vanilla cornstarch with chocolate sauce

T
HURSDAY:
Lima bean and tomato soup, buttered roll, cream tapioca, rice pudding

F
RIDAY:
Cocoa, salmon sandwiches, sliced fruit, oatmeal cookies
¹⁵

To extend the lunchroom’s influence, mothers were invited to eat with their kids. During the meal, domestic-science teachers would point out the benefits of the particular dishes served, urging them to prepare similar foods in their own homes. Across America, educators seized on the lunchroom’s educational possibilities, establishing similar programs of their own. A domestic-science teacher named Emma Smedley summed up the new awareness most succinctly. “No branch of the school activities,” she wrote, “offers greater opportunity of fitting in with the Americanization plan than the school lunch.”
¹⁶
The process was gradual, but in the school lunchroom, kids of diverse backgrounds found a culinary common ground, one tentative bite at a time.

In 1884, a new entry made its debut in Trow’s New York Business Directory, ancestor to the modern-day Yellow Pages. Sandwiched between “Deeds (Acknowledgement of)” and “Dental Equipment” now appeared “Delicatessens.” These specialized groceries had existed in New York for at least thirty years, most of them clustered along First and Second Avenues. Even so, 1884 was a kind of birthday for this immigrant food shop, the year it captured the attention of the Trow’s editors, asserting its place in the city’s food economy.

If the
New York Tribune
is correct, the city’s first “delicatessen handler,” or deli man, for short, was an immigrant named Paul Gabel, who landed in New York in 1848, the year of revolution in Europe and the start of the great German migration. (Gabel made a good living in America. By 1870, he had moved his store and his family to stately Brooklyn Heights, his fortune now worth $20,000, a substantial amount by the standards of the day.) Shops like Mr. Gabel’s carried a limited stock of sausages, cheeses, and sweets, but as the century progressed, delicatessens added “made dishes” to their lineup of provisions—foods that were cooked and ready to eat, prepared by the owner’s wife in a small kitchen behind the store. Hungry city-dwellers visiting their local delicatessen could choose among the following: meat pies, smoked beef shoulder, smoked tongue, smoked fowls, roast fowls, smoked, pickled, and salted herring, fresh ham, baked beans, potato salad, beet salad, cabbage, parsnip, and celery salads, in addition to all the usual wursts, breads, and cheeses. Though still in the hands of German New Yorkers, the delicatessens’ clientele had now widened to include the city’s growing population of Irish immigrants, along with native-born Americans. By the 1890s, delicatessens were “as common as bricks in a building” the great majority, however, could be found on the Lower East Side. Rich New Yorkers, with their live-in servants and private cooks, had little real need for the delicatessen. But among the tenements, delicatessens assumed the role of a poor person’s catering shop. Bachelors, shopgirls, boarders and lodgers, working mothers, people with little time for the kitchen, some with no kitchens at all, relied on the delicatessens to cook for them. Their ser vices were particularly indispensable during the hot summer months, when firing up the kitchen stove turned the tenement apartment into a sweatbox.