97 Orchard

by Jane Ziegelman

  Sweeny’s biography is emblematic of the striving immigrant. Born in Ireland in 1810, he emigrated to New York as a teenager, amassing a small fortune as a water vendor. (This was before the construction of the Croton aqueduct, when water was still hauled by bucket from a downtown reservoir.) He learned the restaurant business by working as a waiter. One of his customers was Horace Greeley, editor of the New York Tribune, who supposedly urged Sweeny to open his own eating house, which he did. With the money earned from his restaurant, Sweeny went on to larger, more ambitious projects, including the eponymous hotel that became a social hub for prominent Irish New Yorkers. Among his patrons were newspapermen, political bosses, and high-ranking members of the Catholic clergy. In the 1860s, when the hotel served as the unofficial New York headquarters for the Irish nationalist movement, Sweeny became host to revolutionary heroes like John Mitchell and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. Sweeny staffed his establishments with immigrants like Joseph Moore, Irish waiters who banded together, often rooming in the same boardinghouse and helping one another find jobs.

  Sweeny’s experiment in public dining encouraged a number of imitators, many of them Irish. Patrick Dolan immigrated to New York in 1846 and learned the restaurant business working in Sweeny’s hotel. When he turned twenty-five, Dolan opened a small lunch counter on Ann Street, which in time became a New York institution.

  1906 menu from Dolan’s Restaurant, an Irish-run lunchroom.

  Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

  Dolan’s Restaurant, which later moved to Park Row, was best known for two items. The first was “beef an,” New York shorthand for a slab of corned beef and a side of beans. (A less popular option was “ham an.”) The second was doughnuts, which New Yorkers called “sinkers.” James Gordon Bennet, publisher of the New York Herald and a regular at Dolan’s, was devoted to the oyster pie, as was Jay Gould, the railroad magnate. When Teddy Roosevelt returned to New York after his victory at San Juan Hill, he hired the Dolan’s cook to prepare a dinner for four hundred of his Rough Riders. Alongside the illustrious, Dolan’s fed the city’s boot blacks and newspaper boys, people with limited budgets who demanded cheap, good food, served in a hurry. A typical lunchtime crowd at Dolan’s was a startling mix of high and low, from street kids to robber barons, providing nineteenth-century New Yorkers with the kind of heterogeneous eating experience that no longer exists.

  Joseph Moore most likely began his career in an Irish-owned restaurant similar to Dolan’s. Raised in Dublin, he may have worked there as a waiter before emigrating to the United States, arriving in New York with valuable work experience. But even if he knew the job in a generic way, waiting tables in a New York restaurant required specialized knowledge. By the 1860s, New York waiters had evolved their own peculiar on-the-job dialect, shouting to the cook orders that mystified the average customer. Here are just a few of them:

  pair o’ sleeve buttons–two fish balls

  white wings, end up–poached eggs

  one slaughter on the pan–porterhouse steak

  summertime–bread with milk

  Murphy with his coat on–boiled potato, unpeeled

  solid shot–apple dumpling

  shipwreck–scrambled eggs

  mystery–hash

  one–oyster pie19

  Along with oyster pie, the cheap eating house offered oysters on the half shell, fried oysters, broiled oysters, oyster stew, oyster pan roast, oysters Baltimore-style, and oyster omelet. A dish called oyster patty, a prebaked puff pastry shell filled with oysters in gravy, was created on the spot for waiting customers by the “patty man,” a restaurant worker with a specialized skill. Watching him at work, if he was especially talented, was a form of free entertainment. One New York patty man, an exceptionally nimble Irishman, caught the attention of a local reporter, who deconstructed his manipulations into eight quick, but distinct motions, all performed with consummate grace.

  A mid-nineteenth-century New Yorker enjoying freshly shucked oysters from an Irish-owned oyster stand.

  “The Oyster Stand, 1840,” Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Francis P. Garvan

  The recipe below is from Jennie June’s American Cookery Book, published in 1870:

  OYSTER PATTIES

  Beard the oysters, and, if large, halve them; put them into a saucepan with a piece of butter rolled in flour, some finely shred lemon rind, and a little white pepper, and milk, and a portion of the liquor from the fish; stir all well together, let it simmer for a few minutes, and put it in your patty pans [resembling shallow cupcake pans], which should already be prepared with puff paste in the usual way. Serve hot or cold.20

  New York was growing in size, volume, and stature, assuming its place as a world-class commercial capital. Eating places like Sweeny’s answered the changing culinary needs of a city in transition. At the same time, it literally fed the engine of change. The great nineteenth-century reporter George Foster sums up the dynamic with his customary flair:

  We are inclined to believe that, notwithstanding their steaming-rooms and thin soups, it is to the Eating Houses that New York is in a great measure indebted for that continuous rush of commercial activity around her great business centres, which so strikingly distinguishes her from all other cities…Just think of it—two or three thousand people going up and down the same stairs and dining at the same tables, within three hours! Such a scene cannot be imagined by any but a New Yorker. Nowhere else, either in Europe or America, does anything like it exist. It is the culmination, the consummation, the concentration of Americanism.21

  Apparently, Foster was unaware that this quintessentially American institution had its roots in the driving creativity of immigrants.

  When Bridget and Joseph landed in New York in the 1860s, the food most closely identified with Irish-Americans was already a gastronomic fixture on this side of the Atlantic. Though corned beef and cabbage traveled to the United States with the first Dutch settlers in the early seventeenth century, many of the groups that followed, including the English, the Germans, and the Jews, emigrated with their own corned beef traditions.

  Corned beef belongs to a large family of preserved meats and fish. Many, like smoked salmon, are now considered delicacies, but a century or more ago they were foods of necessity. The invention of modern refrigeration, starting with the icebox in the early nineteenth century, alleviated one of the cook’s most vexing challenges: keeping food relatively fresh and edible. To meet this critical need, women across Europe devised several techniques, each of them based on one, or sometimes two different preserving agents. Those agents were heat, smoke, salt, and acid. So, for example, meats, fish, and fowl were generally smoked, salted, or pickled, while fruits and vegetables were pickled, jarred, or dried.

  The term “corned beef” refers to the large grains, or corns, of salt with which the meat was cured. An early account of how this was done appears in a British domestic manual from 1750, The Country Housewife’s Family Companion:

  After the beef has been sprinkled with salt, and lain to drain out its bloody juice six or seven hours, wipe every piece dry, and rub them all over well with dry hot salt. This done, pack them close in a pot or tub one upon another.22

  Housewives performed the same basic procedure every year around harvest time, or whenever cattle were slaughtered. In the cities, meanwhile, urban dwellers could buy their beef already salted from local food purveyors. A generous portion of it was produced in Cork, Ireland. Along with butter, bacon, cheese, pickled meats, and preserved fish, Irish food manufacturers exported thousands of barrels of corned beef to countries throughout Europe. Some traveled even farther, crossing the Atlantic to European settlements in the New World. Cork provisioners shipped immense quantities of corned beef, along with other edible goods, to the West Indies, where farmland was reserved for the lucrative business of growing sugar cane. Up until 1776, some of those goods, corned beef included, were exported to the English colonies in North Am
erica.

  Wherever corned beef was eaten, cooks developed ways of preparing it that harmonized with local food traditions. In Germany, it was thinly sliced and served with black bread. Scottish cooks combined their corned beef with a regional staple, oats. First, they simmered the meat along with carrots, parsnips, potatoes, cress, and cabbage. When the vegetables were tender, they added a scoop of oatmeal to the pot to thicken the stock. English cooks included corned beef in their savory pies. Just across the North Sea, the Irish improvised their own corned beef creations; one was boiled corned beef and cabbage. In 1854, an information-packed article on Dublin street vendors appeared in an English journal called Ainsworth’s Magazine. The author, an Irishman named Matthew Lynch, lists the many food peddlers who plied their wares. Oysters, cockles, herrings, turnips, peas, cauliflower, strawberries are some of the foods he mentions. Another common item was cabbage, which, according to Lynch, was scarcely ever eaten unless accompanied by either bacon or corned beef. “A rump of beef and cabbage is a favorite dish with all persons in Ireland—either peers or peasants,” Lynch informs us. Maybe this was true in an idealized Ireland, but in reality corned beef was beyond the means of the average farmer. In fact, many of the poor Irish who arrived in the United States after the 1840s had likely never even tasted it. Much more likely, the traditional Irish pairing of corned beef and cabbage had been carried to the United States by well-off merchants and industrialists, most from the Protestant north of Ireland, who had settled here a century earlier.

  Businessmen mingle with street urchins in a downtown lunchroom. Freshly carved corned beef (far left) was a lunchroom staple.

  Provided courtesy of HarpWeek., LLC

  In nineteenth-century America, corned beef and cabbage developed a split personality. At the cheapest New York lunchrooms, a serving large enough to feed a family of five was ladled into tin buckets (an early version of “takeout”) and sold for 15 cents. Corned beef also gave sustenance to the city’s newsboys, a population of orphaned kids who lived on the streets, supporting themselves by hawking the daily papers. Beginning in the 1850s, newsboys were able to buy a bed for the night at one of the city’s Newsboys’ Lodging Houses, a New York charity that remained active well into the twentieth century. In addition to shelter, the boys received two meals a day. For breakfast, they had coffee, oatmeal, and bread and butter, and for supper, a rotating selection of cost-effective entrées. Here is one typical dinner lineup from 1895: “Sunday, roast beef; Monday, pork and beans; Tuesday, beef stew; Wednesday, corned beef and cabbage; Thursday, pork and beans; Friday, fish balls; and Saturday, pork and beans.”23 Inexpensive and easy to cook, corned beef and cabbage was a staple of the institutional kitchen. Along with orphanages and military camps, it also made steady appearances in hospitals and prison mess halls.

  But corned beef and cabbage also led a much more exalted existence, featured in some of the nation’s most exclusive dining venues. Contrary to our romantic projections of the nineteenth-century family Christmas, wealthy New Yorkers frequently spent the holiday in a hotel dining room. In anticipation of Christmas Eve, hotel chefs across the city composed the most lavish multicourse dinners imaginable, competing with one another in a kind of unofficial holiday cook-off. On Christmas Day, their menus were published in the local papers. The New York Times Christmas dinner roundup for 1880 began:

  The discriminating palate of the sybarite was necessary for a full appreciation of yesterday’s Christmas dinners at most of the big hotels in this cosmopolitan town. At the Windsor Hotel, one of several mentioned, the menu was all that a gourmet could ask for.24

  Among the offerings were Maryland terrapin, canvasback duck with currant jelly, and corned beef and cabbage. At a New Year’s Day luncheon hosted by the Fifth Avenue Hotel, corned beef and cabbage shared the table with pâté de foie gras, tournedos of beef with sauce béarnaise, and sweetbreads financière.

  While the well-to-do native New Yorker celebrated with corned beef and cabbage, the Irish had disowned their ancestral food. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, each year on St. Patrick’s Day, Irish-American societies convened for all-male holiday banquets, formal and highly structured events that began with a seven-course meal and ended with a series of very long toasts. The banquet room was customarily decorated with Irish and American flags, portraits of St. Patrick (some executed in sugar paste, others drawn in wax on the mirrors), emblems of harps and shamrocks. The bulk of the menu, however, comprised the same Frenchified foods served at any New York banquet, with perhaps a single symbolically Irish food thrown into the mix as a kind of accent. So, for instance, along with sole farcie au vin blanc, and filet of beef, you might find “potatoes served in their jackets,” or Irish bacon with greens. Like other immigrants, New York’s Irish elite faced the tricky task of straddling two cultures, one rooted in their Irish past, the other in their present lives as assimilated citizens. (The same identity-juggling is reflected in the banquet menus of the well-to-do German vereine. Gathered in their meeting halls, the banquet room decorated with German and American flags, vereine members feasted on Kennebec salmon with sauce Hollandaise, chicken à la Reine, and potatoes Parisienne, foods that represented the culinary cutting edge. In acknowledgment of their ethnic roots, however, the menu also included a handful of token German specialties, perhaps asparagus with Westphalian ham, or chicken soup with marrow-filled dumplings.)

  Through a gradual, haphazard process, second-and third-generation immigrants reclaimed corned beef and cabbage as a quintessentially Irish food. One early instance of this culinary appropriation can be found in a comic strip. “Bringing Up Father,” created by George MacManus in 1913, stars Maggie and Jiggs, an Irish immigrant couple suddenly thrust into high society. How each of them responds to their newfound wealth provides the comic’s basic story line. Maggie is a dedicated social climber, determined to wash away all traces of her working-class roots, while Jiggs is happy to go on carousing with his pals as if nothing has changed. A continuing point of tension between them is Jiggs’s unshakable affection for corned beef and cabbage, the food of his hardscrabble past. Below is one example of their many corned beef–inspired spats:

  © 1937 King Features Syndicate

  Maggie and Jiggs’s high jinks inadvertently launched a chain of gastronomic events that transformed both the perception and reality of Irish-American food ways. In 1914, a New York saloon-keeper, James Moore, opened a restaurant on West 47th Street, in the city’s emerging theater district. In homage to Maggie and Jiggs, he called it Dinty Moore’s, the comic-strip tavern to which Jiggs is always sneaking off. Like the fictional version, the real-life Dinty Moore’s served homey cooking, but the crowd it attracted was distinctly upscale; theater and publishing luminaries, politicians, and, in later years, broadcasting executives. Having grown up in a rough-and-tumble Irish neighborhood, James Moore was catapulted into New York society, but, like Jiggs, he held tight to his culinary roots, proudly known as “the corned beef and cabbage king,” a dish that remained on his menu until his death in 1952.

  Thus, in two very public forums—the comic strip and the restaurant—corned beef and cabbage became reattached to its Irish past. When Joseph and Bridget Moore lived at 97 Orchard Street, they would have marked St. Patrick’s Day with, perhaps, a dish of pig jowls, a common celebratory food among Irish East Siders. By the 1940s, during the lifetime of their great-grandchildren, corned beef and cabbage had become the mandatory St. Patrick’s Day meal. At the same time, the era’s food authorities denounced it as a culinary myth—a food pretending to be Irish that wasn’t Irish at all. To explain its prevalence among Irish-Americans, they invented a number of historic scenarios. In the one most oft-repeated, Irish-Americans were introduced to corned beef, a food unknown to them in Ireland, by their Jewish neighbors and adopted it as a cheaper substitute for their beloved bacon.

  The story of corned beef illustrates a larger point: immigrants used food as a medium to express who they were and who they wanted to
become. They used it to assert identity, and in some cases to deny it. In the nineteenth century, socially prominent Irish-Americans, like our well-heeled banquet guests, found it expedient to distance themselves from certain low-status foods. But as the immigrants’ social position evolved and anti-Irish feelings began to fade, the significance of their foods evolved too. The language of food, like any expressive medium, is never fixed but perpetually a work in progress.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Gumpertz Family

  Our visit with Mrs. Gumpertz begins on a Friday, late morning, over a steaming pot of fish, a carp. The fish lays snugly in an oblong vessel, like a newborn in a watery cradle. From our current vantage point, it looks intact. In reality, however, the fish has been surgically disassembled and reassembled. It is the kind of culinary operation worthy of the trained professional, yet the responsible party is standing in front of us, an ordinary home cook. The process begins with a slit down the backbone. Mrs. Gumpertz opens the fish the same way one opens a book. Carefully, she scrapes the flesh from the skin, chopping it fine so it forms a paste, what the French call a forcemeat. Reduced to a mere envelope, head at one end, tail at the other, it is now the perfect receptacle for stuffing. Mrs. Gumpertz fills the skin with the paste and sews it shut. She lays the reconstructed carp on a bed of fish bones and onion—sliced but unpeeled—then puts it up to simmer. Just now, she is standing over the open pot, wondering if it needs more time. She prods it with a spoon; the fish is ready. She lifts the pot from the stove, moves it to a chair in the parlor, and leaves it there to cool by an open window. Moments before sundown, start of the Jewish Sabbath, she slices her carp crosswise into ovals and lays them on a plate. The cooking broth, rich in gelatin from the fish bones, has turned to jelly. The onion skin has tinted it gold. Mrs. Gumpertz spoons that up too, dabbing it over the fish in glistening puddles. To a hungry Jew at the end of the workweek, could any sight be more beautiful?