97 Orchard

by Jane Ziegelman

  In the mid-nineteenth century, German Jews brought their experience in the hospitality business to America. At Lustig’s Restaurant in New York, nineteenth-century Jewish businessmen dined on German specialties like sweet-and-sour tongue, stuffed goose neck, and almond cake, all prepared to the highest kosher standards. Nicknamed the Jewish Delmonico’s, the Mercer Street restaurant stood in the heart of the old dry-goods district. Restaurant patrons were observant Jews from around the city, mainly wealthy merchants, who congregated at Lustig’s for the refined kosher cooking, but also for the traditional ambience.

  In the Lustig’s dining room, with its bare wood floor and simple furnishings, customers performed the food-based rituals inseparable from the traditional Jewish dining experience. Like a visiting anthropologist, a New York reporter wrote up his observations of the lunchtime scene:

  As each customer came in, he would take off his overcoat, hang it up, and then go to the washstand and wash his hands, looking very devout in the meantime and moving his lips in rapid muttering. He was repeating in Hebrew this prayer: “Blessed be Thou, O Lord our God, king of the universe, who hast sanctified us with Thy command, and has ordered us to wash hands.” Having thus performed his first duty, he took his seat and ordered his dinner.

  The close of the meal was marked by the same kind of singsong praying that had opened it. In between, diners performed other curious acts, like dipping their bread into salt and praying over that as well. Also odd was how none of the customers removed their hats, a clear breach of dining etiquette. All in all, the experience was so foreign that the reporter exited Lustig’s feeling disoriented, like “a traveler returned from strange lands to his native heath.”7

  When he left his office and boarded the uptown streetcar, the typical Lustig’s customer returned to a traditional Jewish life. Beginning in the fall with Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, he celebrated the full calendar of holidays, and every week observed the Sabbath. Friday evenings he went to synagogue, and Saturdays too, returning home at midday for lunch and a nap. The rest of the afternoon he devoted to Torah. While the man of the house prayed and studied, responsibility for guarding the purity of the home fell to his wife. A task that revolved around food, the work was relentless. Training began in childhood, when she was old enough to stand on a chair in her mother’s kitchen and help pluck the chicken or grate the potatoes. Over the years, she absorbed an immense store of food knowledge, allowing her to one day take control of her own kitchen. This happened the day she was married.

  The traditional Jewish homemaker inherited her mother’s recipes along with her expert command of the Jewish food laws. Each day of her married life, as she shopped for groceries, or cooked, or even cleaned, she called on her knowledge of kashruth, ensuring every morsel of food served to the family was ritually pure. In other words, kosher. Such cooks could be found among New York’s German Jews, some on the Lower East Side, walking distance from Ansche Chesed on Norfolk Street, the Orthodox congregation founded by German immigrants in 1828. In the same urban population, however, were Jewish cooks with a radically new outlook on the dietary laws: women serving oyster stew, baked ham, and creamed chicken casserole, a full menu of forbidden foods.

  The readiness to break away from tradition, more pronounced among Germans than any other Jewish group, had its roots in a wider cultural movement that began in Germany in the late eighteenth century, the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. For centuries, German Jews had lived as outsiders on the distant fringes of the wider Christian society. Their communities were self-governing and inward-looking, sealed off from the culture around them. But not entirely. Inspired by the European Enlightenment, eighteenth-century Jews began to question their own separateness. Men like Moses Mendelsohn, the eighteenth-century German scholar and philosopher, argued for the value of a secular education for Jewish school kids, a revolutionary suggestion at a time when education meant one thing only: the study of Torah. Mendelsohn’s ideas took hold, so by the middle of the nineteenth century Jewish children were learning to read and write in German, their passport to the larger world of secular thought. German Jews discovered Goethe and Schiller, along with German translations of the European classics. Even in the countryside, far from the intellectual ferment of the big cities, Jewish families spent the evenings reading aloud from Voltaire and Shakespeare.

  The new openness in education encouraged other forms of change, particularly in the cities. Here, “modern-thinking” Jews developed a more relaxed approach to religious observance. On the Sabbath, shopkeepers kept their stores open. Men shaved their beards; women abandoned their traditional bonnets, trading them in for wigs, or went bareheaded. In their synagogues, modern-thinking Jews rejected traditional forms of worship, installing organs and choirs, the rabbi standing before his congregants in a long black frock and delivering sermons, very much like his Christian counterparts.

  In the German-Jewish kitchen, a quiet revolution was likewise in progress. For the first time, home cooks felt they could choose among the food laws, holding on to some, dropping others. Of course, the willingness to improvise fell along a sliding scale, with each cook determining her own culinary threshold. Some abandoned the time-consuming practice of salting and soaking their meat, the traditional method for drawing out blood, a substance banned from the Jewish table. Others gave up on kosher meat entirely and started shopping from the gentile butcher. In private recipe collections, we see Jewish cooks experimenting with pork and other forbidden foods. Outside the home, Jews began patronizing Christian-owned establishments, while Jewish-owned eateries, like the palatial Restaurant Kempinski in Berlin, served oysters, crayfish, and lobsters.

  Changing food attitudes were carried to America, setting the stage for a remarkable document. In the second half of the nineteenth century, a Cincinnati homemaker named Bertha Kramer began a collection of her best recipes, compiling them into a manuscript. Her idea was to pass the collection on to her daughter. This was nothing unusual. Handwritten recipe books were common presents for new brides, some handed down for several generations with each cook adding her own favorite dishes. Such collections generally ended up in attics or cellars or trash heaps or, in some cases, archives. Kramer’s collection, however, was unveiled to the reading public, published in 1889 under the pseudonym “Aunt Babette.” A Star of David emblazoned on the title page, “Aunt Babette’s” Cook Book was intended for young Jewish homemakers, but only the most “modern-thinking,” or, as we would describe them, assimilated.

  Title page for “Aunt Babette’s” Cook Book.

  Author’s collection

  The recipes in Aunt Babette’s systematically, brazenly, play havoc with the food commandments, including the prohibitions against pork, shell-fish, wild game, blood, and mixing meat and dairy. Shrimp and lobster salads, oysters on the half-shell, chopped ham mixed with cream, broiled squirrel, venison, and rabbit pie—all ritually forbidden foods—find their way into Aunt Babette’s, but so do recipes for matzoh pudding, Purim doughnuts, and gefilte fish, resulting in an eclectic feast of old and new, foreign and domestic, all in one volume. The freewheeling approach continues beyond the recipes into the “valuable hints” section. Here, at the back of the book, the reader will find a home remedy for a sore throat that involves swathing the patient’s neck in raw strips of bacon.8

  Babette’s position on kashruth is very much in tune with the mindset of her time and place. In separating the pure (kosher) from the impure (treyf), she defers to contemporary standards of good hygiene over ancient law, divine or otherwise. She sums it up this way: “Nothing is trefa that is healthy and clean,” dispensing with five thousand years of culinary tradition in a few well-chosen words. Living in Cincinnati, Mrs. Kramer belonged to the largest community of Reformed Judaism in nineteenth-century America. Her publisher, the Cincinnati-based Bloch Printing and Publishing Company, was the unofficial voice of the Reform movement, with strong connections to the movement’s leadership. The company president, Edward Bl
och, was the brother-in-law of Chief Rabbi Isaac Wise, father of Reformed Judaism and founder of Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College. Mrs. Kramer was likely acquainted with both of them, moving in the same social circles, a member of the same clubs and charities. Given the local culture it is fitting that America’s first “treyf cookbook” was a product of the “Queen City.”

  In New York, the first wave of German-Jewish immigrants, most from Bavaria, latched on to the city’s older and well-established community of Sephardic Jews. In the 1830s, they joined the Sephardic congregation, Shearith Israel, founded in the seventeenth century, when New York was still New Amsterdam, and married into Sephardic families, blending into the city’s Jewish aristocracy to the best of their ability. Tensions developed, however, as the number of Germans continued to swell. The decisive break came in the mid-nineteenth century, as the first generation of modern-thinking Germans landed in New York, forming their own settlement in the old tenth ward of the Lower East Side, then part of Kleindeutschland. Here, in a converted church on Chrystie Street, they established New York’s first Reform synagogue, Temple Emanuel. With their assimilated habits and enlightenment ideals, the new immigrants were philosophically out of step with New York’s Jewish elite. The Sephardim (along with their Bavarian brothers and sisters) were Orthodox, with a strong sense of their own exalted history, but the newly arrived German Jews had reasons to feel superior too. They were cultured, educated, some with university degrees, and solidly middle-class.

  In the realm of food, they took full advantage of enlightenment principles to share in the gastronomic culture of their adopted country. The following account shows the free reinterpretation of ancient custom as it played itself out in the Jewish dining room. The meal described below took place in New York shortly after the Civil War:

  A friend of mine, not long since was invited to dine with a wealthy Jew whose name is well known among the most eminent businessmen of the city. The table was elegantly spread, and among the dishes was a fine ham and some oysters, both forbidden by the law of Moses. A little surprised to see these prohibited dishes on the table and anxious to now hear how a Jew would explain the introduction of such forbidden food, in consistency with his allegiance to the Mosaic law, my friend called the attention of the Jew to their presence. “Well,” said the host, “I belong to that portion of the people of Israel who are changing the customs of our fathers to conform to the times and country in which we live. We make a distinction between what is moral in the law, and, of course, binding, and what is sanitary. The pork of Palestine was diseased and unwholesome. It was not fit to be eaten, and therefore was prohibited. But Moses never tasted a slice of Cincinnati ham. Had he done so, he would have commanded it to be eaten. The oysters of Palestine were coppery and poisonous. Had the great law-giver enjoyed a fry or stew of Saddlerocks or Chesapeake Bay oysters, he would have made an exception in their favor.”9

  When this dinner was held, circa 1869, the presence of ham or shellfish on a Jewish table required explaining. By the end of the century, the same menu was unremarkable, standard fare among the city’s Reformed Jews. Or, rather, it was almost standard. Still, even the most assimilated Jew felt a certain unshakable reticence with regard to pork. Shellfish, however, was another story entirely. Here was a food thoroughly embraced by assimilated eaters, in their homes and in public, too. Most surprising, perhaps, shellfish were commonly served at Jewish-sponsored events, like the infamous “trefa banquet” held in Cincinnati in 1883, to celebrate the first ordination of rabbis from the Hebrew Union College. On the menu that evening were Little Neck clams on the half-shell, soft-shell crabs l’Amérique, and finally, “Salade of Shrimp.”

  In private kitchens, the Jewish home-cook experimented freely with the whole array of crustacea. The Famous Cook Book, another synagogue-based charity cookbook, this one from Seattle and published in 1908, gives five separate recipes for clam chowder, each one contributed by a different member of the congregation. Clearly, the dish was a regional favorite growing out of the local clam trade. A few pages further on are recipes using Dungeness crab, another creature indigenous to Pacific waters. The Famous Cook Book is just one example of a much broader trend. In fact, few Jewish charity cookbooks do not include at least a handful of shellfish dishes.

  The assimilated cook made full use of the shellfish available to her, depending on the local markets. By the century’s end, however, one marine animal was available just about everywhere. It was the oyster, the Jews’ favorite forbidden food. This appreciation was a reflection of the larger American culinary culture. Throughout the nineteenth century, oysters were consumed with equal gusto by society swells and poor working stiffs, men and women, East Coasters and West Coasters. Perhaps no other food held such universal appeal. By the 1870s, New York alone was home to 850 oyster eateries, some grandly decorated in true Gilded Age style, others no more than a stall at the market. And thanks to the newly constructed railroad, the oyster craze penetrated to the middle of the country as well. For the assimilated Jew, it was impossible to resist the tug of the oyster—more so, it seems, than other treyf foods. Rabbi Wise, whom we have already met, personally refrained from everything treyf with the exception of oysters, which he claimed were technically kosher, their shells equivalent to the scales of a fish, protecting the bivalve from “poisonous gases in the water.” In a similar spirit, one Kansas City rabbi argued that oysters were not, in fact, shellfish at all, but rather a form of underwater plant. These were the kinds of legal defenses put forth by clergymen, but down in the culinary trenches, Jewish eaters followed their own logic. More persuasive than any technical loophole was the oyster itself, plump, briny, undeniably delicious. American Jews were incredulous that any food so patently good could be forbidden.

  True to her time, Aunt Babette was enamored of the oyster, providing instructions for an all-oyster supper: “In giving an oyster supper always serve raw oysters first, then stewed, fried and so on. Serve nice, white crisp celery, olives, lemons, good catsup, cold slaw and pickles and do not forget to have two or three kinds of crackers on the table.” Jewish cooks in New York were equally enthralled. In 1909, the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society, a prominent New York charity, published a cookbook. With recipes contributed by society members, The Auxiliary Cook Book provides a direct and focused picture of Jewish food ways at a particular moment in time. Among the half dozen oyster recipes included in this slender volume are fricassee of oysters cooked in brown butter, oyster stew, and oyster cocktail. These were the kind of standard American oyster dishes adopted by the assimilated homemaker. But the Jewish cook could be more creative as well, fusing Old and New World culinary traditions in highly unorthodox ways. Perhaps the best example of this is the “oyster noodle kugel,” a recipe found in the Council Cook Book published by the Council of Jewish Women in 1909: “Into a pudding dish put layers of broad boiled noodles, alternating with layers of oysters dipped in cracker crumbs, with plenty of butter and salt to taste; pour over the whole pint of pastry cream and the juice of the oysters; bake until brown—about twenty minutes.”10

  Like most East Siders, when Natalie Gumpertz departed this world, she left very little behind in the way of documentation. No diary, no book of household accounts, no correspondence, and no family recipes—the kind of detailed and personal records left by middle-class women. The poor, meanwhile, left behind a different class of evidence: census and draft records, marriage licenses, birth and death certificates—the kinds of documents that fill our municipal archives, the city’s official memory. According to her death certificate, Natalie Reinsberg Gumpertz was born in Ortelsburg, East Prussia, an out-of-the-way market town with a small community of Jewish merchants and tradesmen. As a girl in Ortelsburg, Natalie would have received a state-sponsored education, in German, but may have spoken Yiddish as well. The region surrounding Ortelsburg was known as the poorest in Prussia, its Jewish population largely impoverished. Natalie’s father, however, was a person of at least some means, con
tributing money to build the town’s first synagogue.

  Natalie Gumpertz, circa 1890. Mrs. Gumpertz lived on Orchard Street from 1870 to 1886.

  Courtesy of the Tenement Museum

  Small-town Jews like the Reinsbergs lived on a cultural frontier between Germany’s larger, more modernized Jewish communities and the traditional shtetl Jews of Poland and Lithuania. They spoke German and embraced German culture with the same pride of ownership as their Christian neighbors. In their daily lives, they moved with relative freedom among their non-Jewish countrymen, doing business, even socializing with Christians, a pattern rarely found among the Jews of small-town Bavaria. Their version of Judaism, however, was closer to the religion of their Eastern brothers and sisters. They followed Polish religious custom, prayed in an Orthodox synagogue, and led Orthodox lives. Tucked away in the Prussian lake region, they lived beyond the reach of Reform thinking, a movement centered in the cities.