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

97 Orchard simultaneously provides insight into the immigrant experience, eating habits and the evolution of American cuisine (particularly the ways in which ethnic foods first began to influence it), and life in New York circa 1900. Each of these topics could be its own volume, and in the case of, say The Long Way Home or The Food of a Younger Land, this premise has been proven. Yet Jane Ziegelman tackles the challenge deftly, incorporating these aspects like ingredients into a finely mixed dough.

In crafting her narrative, Ziegelman examines the lives and cuisines of five families who lived in the tenement apartments at 97 Orchard Street. First came the German Glockners, with their sauerkraut and heavy stews. The Glockners are an ideal starting point because Mr. Glockner actually built and owned the building and were the first to inhabit their apartment, moving into 97 Orchard Street in 1863, in the midst of the Civil War. (Mr. Glockner's draft card, Ziegelman informs her reader, indicated he was a tailor.) The Glockners were followed by the Irish Moores, whose ethnic foods included little more than the potatoes that had failed them at home and oatcakes. The Irish immigration was largely comprised of teenagers, we learn, and following the brutal policies of the English, the ancient and rich food traditions of the Emerald Isle had been whittled down to potatoes. The Irish was generally happy to adopt and adapt the foods of their new land.

Due to their strict food laws, the Jewish immigrants were much less malleable, and Ziegelman then looks at how the Gumpertz family - German Jews - and the Rogarshevsky family, from Lithuania, lived and ate in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Matzoh, kugel, knish, and carp featured heavily, although immigrants of all religions consumed significant amounts of cabbage, potatoes, and root vegetables. I was personally taken with the history of Jewish poultry farming inside the tenements themselves. While the language of the day was not, well, sensitive, I could certainly understand the horror of the journalists, social workers, and reformers who encountered the sights, sounds, and smells that accompanied this practice.

Last but not least, Ziegelman introduces the Baldizzis, Sicilians who immigrated illegally (he as a stowaway, she on a doctored passport) in the early-1920s. The Italians, Ziegelman notes, understood better than any other group that they were not wanted in America, and that they were here to do the hard and dirty jobs (digging subway tunnels, erecting skycrapers, building roads) that the natives did not want. Sound familiar? They bore their lot stoically - In questa vita si fa uva - but their food was their comfort, and the Italians were the least interested in adopting or adapting the foods of the new country. Italian grocers imported pastas, tomato sauces, and olive oils that not only tasted like home, but came from home. Americans were suspicious. Pretty much no one in 1925 would have believed that spaghetti and meatballs would one day be as quintessentially American as apple pie. (Pie, I learned, is pretty much the one truly American dish. Americans were known almost universally as "pie eaters" to wave after wave of immigrants.)

Through the decades, Ziegelman describes the evolution of the city's geographical and political landscape evolves, the food, and the perception of various immigrant groups (German in 1900 = model immigrant; German in 1914 = terror of the Hun). I enjoyed the tour, if you will immensely.

Five stars.