One quart of potatoes a day at .10 a quart: 70
Vegetables: 70
Bread, 5 loaves at .05=.25 a day: 1.75
One and one-half pound of butter at .30 a pound: 45
Jam, .05 a day, except on Sunday: 30
One-half pound of tea, no coffee: 20
One can of Baker’s cocoa: 18
7 lbs of sugar at .20 for 3½ lbs: 40
Meat .25 a day: 1.75
Sundries: 18
Total: $8.5012
Potatoes, milk, oatmeal, and butter were core staples among the working-class Irish families, all foods familiar to the immigrant, though not perhaps in the same quantities. Cabbage, onions, and turnips, the few vegetables consumed by Irish-Americans, were familiar too. Other foods, however, were acquired in America, like bread and tea. But a greater change was the new abundance of meat. In Ireland, meat appeared on the dinner table several times a year, if that much. In America, mutton, beef, and veal became everyday fare, fried simply in a pan or cooked into stews for the evening meal. One woman in the study devised an ingenuous soup recipe based on salt pork, onion, and macaroni, an ingredient adopted from one of her Italian neighbors. An entire pot of it cost only 6 cents.
Another innovation: sugar. As the study shows, the Irish-American housewife went through several pounds a week, using it to sweeten the tea that she consumed more as a food than a beverage. Rich in caffeine, a cup of sweetened tea was an inexpensive way to stave off hunger between meals, while supplying the homemaker with the energy required to complete her daily tasks. Where Irishmen were notorious for their whiskey intake, Irishwomen were known for their tea habit—“tea inebriates” is how one doctor described them. The balance of the sugar went into the children’s cocoa or was used for baking pies, cakes, and puddings, a skill the homemaker may have learned in her servant days. Below is a recipe for a “cheap pudding” from the Irish Times:
CHEAP PUDDING
Gather up all crusts and stale pieces of bread until you have sufficient for an ordinary-sized pudding; soak in water overnight, then pour off and add two tablespoonfuls of flour or rice, which goes to substitute for eggs; one ounce of raisins, the same of currants; one tablespoonful of cinnamon or whatever seasoning is preferred; add milk consistent, and mix well. Put in a buttered bowl to steam for two hours; or put it into a pudding dish to bake.13
Bridget and Joseph, along with the great majority of immigrants coming to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, entered the country through Castle Garden in Lower Manhattan. Originally built as a fort, it was converted into an amusement hall in 1824 before its final transformation into the nation’s first immigrant landing depot in 1855. The octagonal main hall and the complex of buildings surrounding it were a full-ser vice operation, complete with a foreign money exchange, railway ticket office, hospital, quarantine, post office, showers, and restaurant. Here, immigrants got their first literal taste of America. It came in the form of sausage, pie, bread (both brown and white), beer, and cigars.
Each morning, the New York newspapers printed the names and ETAs of ships scheduled to arrive at the Garden that day. Scanning the daily announcements, immigrants living in and around the city could meet their relatives in the Castle Garden reception room. Like an audience in a theater, the crowd in the reception room watched the unspooling drama of one teary-eyed reunion after another. “It is certainly interesting to witness these meetings,” one observer notes:
Here is the name of a comely Irish girl called out, she enters blushing and is the next moment in the arms of her faithful sweetheart, who left her home in Ireland three years ago, and has now sent for her to make her his bride. There is kissing and crying and squeezing, and applause from the bystanders, who for the moment forget that they themselves will probably do the same sort of thing.14
A scene very much like this (only the genders would have been reversed) may have taken place between Bridget and Joseph. Seventeen-year-old Bridget Meehan landed at New York’s Castle Garden in 1863. Two years later, Joseph Moore, a twenty-year-old Dubliner, made the same trip. By the end of the year, the two were married and parents of their first of eight children. Judging from the accelerated sequence of events, Joseph and Bridget had met in Ireland, and were likely engaged at the time of Bridget’s departure.
Like many newly landed Irish, they found lodging in Manhattan’s crowded sixth ward. Their first daughter, Mary Catherine, was born at 65 Mott Street in the Five Points, a section of the Lower East Side famous for its high crime rate, decrepit housing, and unsanitary living conditions. (Outbreaks of cholera, typhus, and other deadly infections were commonplace, and mortality rates were higher in the Five Points than most other city neighborhoods.) Over the next ten years, Bridget gave birth to seven more children: Jane, Agnes, Cecilia, Theresa, Veronica, Josephine, and Elizabeth. Only four survived childhood.
Jane Moore Hanrahan, circa 1900, daughter of Bridget and Joseph Moore.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
Roger Joseph Hanrahan, a baggage clerk, and Jane Moore were married in New York in 1895.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
After Mott Street, they lived at 150 Forsyth Street and remained there for a relatively extended stay, from 1866 to 1869. With three young daughters, they picked up again and moved into 97 Orchard Street in the heart of German Kleindeutschland.
Immigrants who arrived in the United States with no family to meet them spent their first days or weeks in a boardinghouse. To help new arrivals find a reputable establishment (many were not), an area had been set aside within Castle Garden, where licensed boardinghouse-keepers could solicit potential customers. Just beyond Castle Garden, immigrants met up with a much shadier class of boardinghouse representative. Known as “runners,” they were scam artists of the first order, regularly vilified in the local press. To rope in customers, runners employed a handful of standard ploys: they would snatch the immigrants’ baggage and offer to cart it—free of charge—anywhere in the city, delivering it to a local boardinghouse where it was immediately “put into storage.” With his baggage held hostage, the immigrant was forced to spend the night, paying any fee the owner demanded. Or they would abscond with one of the immigrants’ children, forcing the parents to follow. More insidious runners played on feelings of national kinship to establish a rapport with their marks and win their trust. Then they fleeced them.
In 1867, the Irish politician and newspaperman John Francis Maguire toured the United States to see how his countrymen were faring in their new home, and published his observations in a book called The Irish in America. To illustrate the depravity of boardinghouse runners, he included the following story, told to him by a great, broad-shouldered Irishman “over six feet in his stocking vamps.” On landing in New York, the strapping Irishman was
[p]ounced upon by two runners, one seizing the box of tools, and the other confiscating the clothes. The future American citizen assured his obliging friends that he was quite capable of carrying his own luggage; but no, they should relieve him—this stranger, and guest of the republic—of that trouble…He remembered that the two gentlemen wore very pronounced green neckties, and spoke with a richness of accent that denoted special if not conscientious cultivation; and on his arrival at the boardinghouse, he was cheered with the announcement that its proprietor was from “the ould counthry, and loved every sod of it, God bless!”15
A two-night stay at the boardinghouse cost the Irishman a small fortune, more than he would have paid for a sumptuous dinner at the Astor Hotel.
Immigrant boardinghouses were scattered through Lower Manhattan, but were concentrated near the wharves. They were especially thick along Hudson, Washington, and Greenwich Streets, because of their proximity to Castle Garden. Here, one could find boardinghouses with owners of every nationality, each patronized by their respective countrymen. No group, however, was better represented than the Irish. Not just in New York, but throughout urban America, Irish entrepreneurs ope
ned boardinghouses and hotels, a business they had no particular background in but which answered a pressing demand for immigrant housing and which they learned “on the job.”
In 1848, during the height of the Irish exodus, a self-promoting but charming Irishman named Jeremiah O’Donovan conducted a rambling tour of the eastern United States. The purpose of his trip was to hawk his masterpiece, a history of Ireland written in epic verse, a kind of Irish Aeneid with O’Donovan cast in the role of Virgil. O’Donovan kept a detailed travel log, and in 1864 it was published as a book. A Brief Account of the Author’s Interview with His Countrymen is essentially a glorified record of every Irishman he meets on his American wanderings, with special attention given to those who bought his book. Like the well-bred host at a dinner party, he is gracious to a fault. O’Donovan cites every customer by name (there are thousands of them), describing each with a thumbnail dossier, complete with occupation and place of birth, followed by a long-winded account of the customer’s most outstanding virtues. A Brief Account is exceedingly repetitive, but O’Donovan’s intention is more than mere entertainment. Aside from confirming his own reputation, O’Donovan is engaged in a public relations campaign on behalf of Irish-Americans, his attempt to counter negative attitudes directed at the immigrant community.
Buried in O’Donovan’s flood of adjectives are valuable kernels of information. For example, O’Donovan describes an extensive network of Irish “boardinghouses” and “hotels” (the distinction between the two is not always clear) that was already in place by the mid-nineteenth century. It covered the major East Coast cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, extended west to Cincinnati and south to St. Louis, but also reached into more out-of-the-way places like Kittanning, Pennsylvania, and Lawrence, Massachusetts. O’Donovan also tells us something about the boarders. They included seamstresses, bakers, priests, medicine salesmen, boot-makers—all of them Irish. Finally, the author imparts a clear sense of the pressing need for room and board among a foreign population that was unusually young, most of the immigrants single and alone in a foreign country. Every boardinghouse along his winding itinerary is filled to capacity, the guests “as thick in numbers as swallows in a sand bank.”16 At many, O’Donovan is turned away for lack of space; others manage to shoehorn him in even if it means sharing a bed.
Many of the immigrant boardinghouses in New York had been carved from the city’s most venerable old homes. Sturdy brick structures with sloping tiled roofs, they were built in the mid-eighteenth century by the merchant princes who dominated the colonial economy. Many had names familiar to us today: Rutgers, Monroe, Crosby, Roosevelt are just a few. Around 1750, one of those merchants, William Walton, started construction on a fabulous new estate along the East River. Built from the most expensive materials—English timber, German tiles, Italian marble, and rare tropical woods for its interior—the structure stood three stories tall with views of the water. The house remained in the Walton family for several generations, but over time the wide-open expanse that once surrounded it was filled in with warehouses, factories, and other commercial structures. The neighborhood lost its cachet, and Walton’s descendants moved uptown to join the rest of fashionable New York. The once-grand interior was pillaged down to its shell. The ground floor was leased out to a German saloon-keeper, a plate-glass distributor, and a manufacturer of election flags. The main tenant, however, was Mrs. Connors, an Irish boardinghouse-keeper who rented the two upper floors.
A reporter who toured the old mansion in 1872 offers a quick glimpse into her kitchen, now housed in the former bedroom of the first Mrs. Walton. The original fireplace, he tells us, was ripped out and replaced with a monstrous black stove. Covered with various-size kettles and saucepans, it was presided over by the boardinghouse cook and her ever-bustling assistants. On the reporter’s visit, the kitchen was redolent with the smell of boiling cabbage and burned ham, both typically Irish foods. For the most part, however, Irish boardinghouse cooking was governed more by issues of economy than national origin.
The American boardinghouse is today close to extinction, but for most of the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth it was a very common living option. Writing about New York in 1872, the journalist James McCabe portrayed the city as one vast boardinghouse, a description that could also apply to Philadelphia, Boston, and other large cities. City dwellers regarded the boardinghouse as a necessary evil, a kind of residential purgatory that one must endure before moving on to other forms of housing. The woman who stood at the helm of this much-disparaged institution, the boardinghouse landlady, became a stock character in the popular imagination of nineteenth-century urban America, best known for her cheapness. She made regular appearances in newspaper and magazine stories, often seen prowling the public markets for third-rate ingredients. Here she is shopping at one of the city’s night markets, outdoor venues that catered to the budget-conscious:
That woman in the red reps underskirt, over-trimmed with velveteen, with very little bonnet but a jungle of artificial flowers and parterre of chignon, with almost the entire back of a gallipagos turtle in her tortoise-shell earrings…with the coarse hand in the soiled gloves, and the large greasy pocketbook tightly clasped—who is she? Her index finger is uncovered. She uses it as a convenient prod to go through meat and find out how tough it really is. Know her business? Of course she does. A slatternly Irish girl, maid of all work, with a basket big enough for a laboring man to carry, follows diligently at her heels. “Beef,” said the lady of the earrings very laconically, stopping full before the butcher. He looks at her for a moment, and with a long pole hooks down a piece of meat. It is a long, stringy portion of singularly unappetizing appearance.17
Her purchase tells the story, in encapsulated form, of boardinghouse cuisine. As a rule, it was built on the most gristly cuts of beef, mutton, and pork, organ meats, including heart, liver, and kidney, salt mackerel, root vegetables, potatoes, cabbage, and dried beans—the core ingredients of urban working people. Boardinghouse cooks were known for their tough steaks, greasy, waterlogged vegetables, and insipid stews. Their signature dishes—hash, soup, and pies—were recycled from previous meals. The corned beef served for dinner might reappear as the next day’s breakfast steak, only to turn up again in a meat pie or a hash.
Though hash in its many forms (not just corned beef) has drifted to the culinary margins, at one time it was an American staple, especially among working people. Along with meat pies, its raison d’être was to use up leftovers. Economy-minded cookbooks of the period devoted whole chapters to hash. Miss Beecher, for example, the well-known domestic authority, gives eighteen hash recipes in her Housekeeper and Healthkeeper. Among them are ham hash with bread crumbs, beefsteak hash with turnips, and veal hash with crackers. Though hash was found in home kitchens and cheap restaurants, it was most closely tied to the boardinghouse. “Hash eaters,” a common nineteenth-century label, was a synonym for boardinghouse dwellers, while “boardinghouse hash” was a term used to denote any mixture—edible or not—of uncertain composition. The recipe that follows is adapted from First Principles of Household Management and Cookery by Maria Parloa, who taught at the Boston Cooking School. The ingredients are inexpensive, but the end product is extremely satisfying—just what a good hash should be.
FISH HASH
One half pint of finely chopped salt fish, six good-sized cold boiled potatoes chopped fine, one half cup of milk or water, salt and pepper to taste. Have two ounces of pork cut in thin slices and fried brown; take the pork out of the fry pan, and pour some of the gravy over the hash; mix all thoroughly, and then turn it into the fry pan, even it over with a knife, cover tight, and let it stand where it will brown slowly for half an hour; then fold over, turn out on the platter, and garnish with the salt pork.18
1836 was a watershed year in the culinary history of New York. Before that time, the city had relatively few public eating houses aside from taverns, which concentrated more on fluids than solids. Me
als were generally consumed at home, with men returning from their place of work at midday, and again in the evening for supper. New York was much smaller then, so commuting twice a day was manageable, the distance between home and work no greater than a fifteen-minute walk. Public dining was reserved for the rich, or, paradoxically, the poor who took their meals at “coffee and cake shops”—a misleading name, since they also served pork and beans, hash, pies, and other low-budget dishes. Open twenty-four hours a day, their customers were laborers, newsboys, petty criminals, firemen, and other night workers, people of limited means with few eating options. Known for their “dyspepsia-laden cake,” “oleaginous pork,” and “treacherous beans,” they were places to avoid if possible. As the city stretched northward, it began to divide itself amoeba-style into an uptown residential quarter and a downtown business district. Geographically cut off from their uptown homes, businessmen working in Lower Manhattan needed to be fed. In 1836, an Irishman named Daniel Sweeny opened a cheap eating house geared to the downtown worker of “medium class.” Though prices were low (6 cents a plate), the food was decent and nourishing, the ser vice efficient, and the surroundings clean. Sweeny’s menu offered a fairly broad selection of nineteenth-century staples: oysters, roast beef, corned beef, boiled mutton, pork and beans, with pies and puddings for dessert. The restaurant was an immediate success, filling a gap in the city’s culinary needs which no one before him had identified.
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