97 Orchard

by Jane Ziegelman

  In towns across central and eastern Europe, Jewish women kept two or three, or, in some cases, a small flock of geese. During the summer months, the birds were free to walk the streets, their mistress trailing behind, waving a switch. In late autumn, they were put into a “goose house.” Now the force-feeding began. The nineteenth-century German cookbook author Rebekka Wolf gives the following instructions for goose fattening or “Ganse zu nudelen,” literally translated as “to dumpling geese”:

  Make dough from coarse meal and bran, adding a handful of salt, some beechwood ashes (if you have some) and water so it forms a good ball in your hand, and make from it dumplings a half a short finger long and a fat finger thick and then dry them on a hot pan or at the baker. In the beginning a goose receives four pieces per serving, which is given four times a day or 16 per day. Do this for three or four days and then for a few days give seven pieces per serving, then nine, then 11 and then at most 13 pieces, where you stay until the goose is fat, which is best felt on the bottom of the bird.13

  Just before Hanukkah, women brought the geese to the local shochet (ritual slaughterer) to give them a proper death. It was the women’s own job, however, to disassemble the bird. Geese had to be plucked, salted (to draw out the blood), scalded, then broken down into parts. The breast was smoked, the skin fried to make gribenes (the kosher answer to bacon); the neck was stuffed and roasted or stewed, while the wings, feet, and giblets were saved for the soup pot. The feathers were used for bedding. The bird’s enlarged liver, the food we know as foie gras, was roasted and dutifully fed to the children as a nutritional supplement, the same way American children were given doses of castor oil. Finally, the fat was rendered and poured into earthenware jars for use throughout the year, or as long as the cook could stretch it.

  The Jewish cook used goose fat for frying, baking, braising, enriching, moistening, and seasoning. It was a stock ingredient in her best, most succulent foods. These were the dishes prepared for the holidays, the kugels and cholents and kreplach, to name just a few. Warming, satiny, with a faintly nutty aftertaste, it imbued foods with a pleasing heaviness, a liability, perhaps, to the modern diner, but for the calorie-deprived a virtue. To the Jewish palate, fat represented the essence of goodness. The nineteenth-century Jewish homemaker brought her reliance on geese and all its by-products to the Lower East Side, where she continued her traditional role as a poultry farmer. Amazingly, immigrants raised geese in tenement yards, basements, hallways, and apartments as well, transplanting a rural industry to the heart of urban America.

  Tenement goose farms belonged to a well-established tradition of animal husbandry on the Lower East Side. During the first half of the nineteenth century, neighborhood streets served as a communal feeding trough for wandering pigs, a common sight through the 1850s. East Side pigs were the property of poor New Yorkers who had set their animals free to scavenge for food, feasting on refuse until they were ready for slaughter. In life, they acted as street cleaners; in death, they supplied their owners with an abundance of virtually free meat. The majority of New York’s pig keepers were recently arrived Irish immigrants, veteran pig farmers from way back. In the years following the Potato Famine, as the number of New York Irish ballooned, so did the number of swine. In 1842, the city was home to roughly ten thousand wandering pigs. Before the decade was up, that figure had doubled.

  Until the 1860s, repeated attempts to rein in the pigs were only marginally successful. The work of removing the animals from Lower Manhattan fell to the newly created sanitary police, a specialized unit within the larger police force, which was established to protect the health and safety of New Yorkers during a period of very rapid population growth. The squad’s four main areas of responsibility were ferries, factories, slaughterhouses, and, most relevant to our story, tenements. Creation of the sanitary police was the first of several related developments in the campaign for a cleaner, more salubrious New York that unfolded in the 1860s. In 1865, the Citizens’ Association, a group of reform-minded New Yorkers, launched a comprehensive, block-by-block, sanitary survey of Manhattan with special focus on conditions in the tenements. The fruit of their labor was the 504-page Report of the Council on Hygiene and Public Health of the Citizen’s Association of New York upon the Sanitary Conditions in the City. One year later, at the council’s strong urging, the city established the Metropolitan Board of Health, America’s first permanent public-health agency.

  With the pig situation under control, “sanitarians” shifted their energy to a new problem: the tenement poultry farms, which began to spring up in the 1870s in heavily Jewish areas of the Lower East Side. Where urban pigs were on public display, tenement poultry farms posed a more insidious threat, hidden away as they were in the same living space as humans. Sanitary inspectors were aghast. While they strived for a professional tone, the sense of horror in their reports is palpable even over a century later. The following description is from 1879:

  One who has only seen poultry kept in the country, where the only nuisance attributable to them is scratching up seeds, can hardly realize what a terrible nuisance they may cause in the city. Where many fowls are huddled together in contracted quarters, they keep up an incessant clucking and cackling, and the odor that rises from them is overpowering. In New York the Board of Health has carried on a struggle for some years, with occasional breathing-spells for both combatants, against the practice of keeping poultry for sale in the manner practiced by Polish and Russian Jews. On the plea that their religion requires them to eat only those fowls that have been killed in their sight by a killer authorized under their ritual, they fill the places where they live with chickens, turkeys, ducks and geese. These poor fowls are huddled together in coops, or crowded into pens, generally in the basement of the house, and make an incessant noise. The smell, too, from fifty or a hundred geese is indescribable and intolerable. And these people live in an adjoining room, and wonder that any person finds their practice obnoxious.14

  Thursdays and Fridays, Jewish shoppers would descend on the farms and select their bird by blowing between the tail feathers for a glimpse of the skin. The yellower the skin, the fatter the bird. With the housewife looking on, the animal was slaughtered in the yard by an itinerant shochet, his only equipment a curved knife and a barrel filled with sawdust to collect the blood.

  Though East Side farmers trafficked in all types of domestic fowl, their bestseller was geese. In tenements along Bayard, Hester, Essex and Ludlow streets, where basements doubled as goose pens, East Side goose farmers did a booming business despite frequent raids by the sanitary police. Some were issued fines, others were hauled off to jail, but Jewish farmers persisted, just as the Irish had done a generation earlier. The Jewish demand for goose meant steady profits, and East Side farms continued to multiply along with the Jewish population.

  In later years, Jewish goose-farming expanded from a cottage industry to a major commercial enterprise, with large poultry yards lining the East River. By the 1920s, the kosher poultry trade was lucrative enough to attract organized crime, and a racketeering operation grew up around the city’s kosher slaughterhouses.15 By 1900, the tenement goose farmers had been reduced to piecework as “dry pickers,” or feather-pluckers, paid just a few cents per bird. Jewish women were also hired as “goose stuffers,” using skills they had acquired centuries ago and passed down from mother to daughter. A widely printed newspaper story from 1903, titled “Some Queer East Side Vocations,” describes what became of the birds’ yellowy-beige, overgrown livers:

  They are made up into a sort of paste, chopped fine with onions, garlic, and other strong-smelling seasoning, or are fried in fat, after being dipped in cracker crumbs…. When these delicacies are to be had on the menu of a kosher restaurant, a card is hung on the window to that effect just as a Christian restaurant announces the fact that it has soft-shell crabs or North River shad.16

  As for the fat-laden skin, it was diced and heated to produce “the rich, thick grease” better known as
schmaltz.

  If a whole fattened goose was beyond the means of the tenement homemaker, she could buy odds and ends—giblets, necks, wings, and skin—cheap but flavorsome parts, if one knew how to handle them. A savvy cook, for example, could create a faux foie gras using goose fat, giblets, and regular chicken livers:

  IMITATION PATE DE FOIE GRAS

  Take as many livers and gizzards of any kind of fowl as you may have on hand; add to these three tablespoons of chicken or goose fat, a finely chopped onion, one tablespoon of pungent sauce, and salt and white pepper to taste. Boil the livers until quite done and drain; when cold, rub into a smooth paste. Take some of the fat and chopped onion and simmer together slowly for ten minutes. Strain through a thin muslin bag, pressing the bag tightly, turn into a bowl and mix with the seasoning; work all together for a long time, then grease a bowl or cups and press this mixture into them; when soft cut up the gizzards into bits and lay between the mixture. You may season this highly, or to suit taste.17

  In the tenement kitchen, the luxuriousness of goose fat elevated the most prosaic ingredients. In the following recipe, a dab of goose fat transforms onion and rye bread into a delicacy.

  Lightly sauté one yellow onion, thinly sliced, in four tablespoons goose or chicken fat. Spread cooked onion on good rye bread. Season generously with crushed black pepper. For a more substantial snack, top with sliced hardboiled egg.18

  As modern methods of chicken breeding improved in the twentieth century, the goose lost its place of prominence on the Jewish table, replaced by its smaller, more economical cousin.

  An East Side “chicken market,” 1939. By the 1920s, chicken had largely replaced geese in the Jewish immigrant’s diet.

  Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

  Chicken fat now took the place of goose fat as the Jew’s favorite cooking fat. The raison d’être for poultry fat of any kind, however, was essentially erased by the invention of scientifically engineered cooking fat derived from vegetables. The new hydrogenated fats came with many names; Flake White, Spry, Snowdrift, and Nyafat, a vegetable shortening pre-seasoned with onion, are just a few. The name best known today, however, is Crisco, a product created by Procter & Gamble, a Cincinnati-based soap manufacturer, in the years before World War I.

  Tellingly, Crisco was originally developed as a cheaper alternative to the lard and beef tallow traditionally used in soaps and candles. Looking to expand its uses, Procter & Gamble introduced Crisco to American cooks in 1911, presenting it as a more economical and “more digestible” substitute for lard and butter. There was nothing Jewish about Procter & Gamble, but in time the company recognized the value of its product to Jewish cooks. Most important, Crisco was pareve, or neutral—a ritually permissible partner to either dairy or meat. The Jewish cook could bake with it, braise, or fry, pairing it with any ingredient she chose. No other fat in the Jewish pantry was as versatile, not even the beloved goose schmaltz. Crisco Recipes for the Jewish Housewife, a promotional cookbook published by Procter & Gamble in 1933, allowed the kosher cook to imagine the freedom awaiting her in the blue-and-white can. Clearly aimed at immigrants (the book was published with both Yiddish and English recipes), it represents the demise of poultry fat as a Jewish staple, bringing to a close a millennium of culinary tradition.

  For a brief time in the 1870s, 97 Orchard was home to a mix of Irish, German, and Jewish families. For each of these groups, dinnertime likely included potatoes, herring, onion, cabbage (either pickled or fresh), lard or goose fat, and some form of dairy. These were the foods that sustained the nineteenth-century East Sider, regardless of national background. Despite this facade of a common cuisine, however, each immigrant group brought to the dinner table food-based assumptions that shaped their experience of eating. German East Siders held up their ancestral foods as cultural trophies, celebrating their German past in grand-scale and very public eating events. The Irish, by contrast, celebrated with drink and music and dance, but confined the serious work of feeding themselves to the privacy of their homes. As for the Jews, they came to the dinner table with a distinct and highly developed zest for eating, a sensibility so evolved and pronounced it deserves a term of its own: food-joy. Like the fondness for fat, Jewish food-joy was born of scarcity. (A firsthand knowledge of hunger was perhaps the single greatest common denominator among all East Side immigrants.) But it was more than that, too. Jewish food-joy was grounded in the elaborate system of culinary laws and rituals that transformed the everyday business of eating into a sacred act. As the rabbis explained, God had honored the Jews with a culinary mandate. Where Gentiles could eat as they pleased, Jews were given the dietary laws as an outward sign of their special relationship with God. In return, they obeyed the laws as a show of devotion, turning mealtime into a form of sacrament. For Jews who followed the letter of the law, blessings were required for every morsel that crossed their lips, continuing reminders of food’s divine provenance.

  A core belief in the sacredness of food was the linchpin of Jewish food culture, always simmering in the Jewish eater’s thoughts. Fridays, in the Jewish kitchen, cooks like Mrs. Gumpertz saved their best ingredients and marshaled their skills for a meal of cosmic significance: Sabbath dinner, a celebration of nothing less than the miracle of creation. The midweek chanting now exploded into full-throated singing and the Jews feasted, even if that meant living on tea and potatoes for the rest of the week. Even for the poorest Jew, Sabbath dinner was a meal set aside for enjoying, quite literally, the sacred fruits of creation. Skimping was out of the question. At the Sabbath table, Jews recast the earthly pleasure of eating as a show of gratitude to the heavenly creator. Pleasure, in fact, was mandatory. After all, God’s first commandment to Adam and Eve was to savor the bounty of Eden.

  On the Lower East Side, the pleasures of food became a common theme in immigrant writing. In the fictional world of Anzia Yezierska, a Russian-born writer who immigrated to New York around 1890, food was the proverbial ray of light in an otherwise bleak experience. The typical Yezierska heroine is the young East Side woman, oppressed by the ugliness of the ghetto, exploited by her sweatshop boss, but still bursting with life. Craving beauty, she finds it in food. The following exchange between the despondent Hannah Brieneh and her neighbor, Mrs. Pelz, is from Hungry Hearts, Yezierska’s first collection:

  “I know what is with you the matter,” said Mrs. Pelz. “You didn’t eat yet today. When it is empty in the stomach, the whole world looks black. Come, only let me give you something good to taste in the mouth. That will freshen you up.” Mrs. Pelz went to the cupboard and brought out the saucepan of gefulte fish that she had cooked for dinner, and placed it in front of Hannah Brieneh. “Give a taste my fish,” she said, taking one slice on a spoon, and handing it to Hannah Brieneh with a piece of bread.

  “Oy wei. How it meltz through all the bones,” she exclaimed, brightening as she ate. “May it be for good luck to all,” she exalted, waving aloft the last precious bite. Mrs. Pelz was so flattered that she even ladled up a spoonful of gravy.

  “There is a bit of onion and carrot in it,” she said, as she handed it to her neighbor.

  Hannah Brieneh sipped the gravy drop by drop, like a connoisseur sipping wine.

  “Ahh. A taste of that gravy lifts me to heaven!”19

  Such is the magic of food-joy! If God created the fruits of the earth, a second act of creation took place in the kitchen, where homemakers performed their most valued task—cooking for the family. Appreciative Jewish eaters expressed their gratitude with extravagant praise, an echo to the food blessings, only these words were for mortal ears.

  As tenement Jews moved up in the world, they became proficient in English; they changed their manner of dress and often their names, and adopted new habits. Men took up cigars; women coiffed their hair and scented their handkerchiefs. Jews who made the voyage to Upper Manhattan (anywhere above 14
th Street) invented a hybrid culture that was reflected with particular clarity in the way they ate. One early chronicler of that culture is the largely forgotten writer Henry Harland, also known as Sidney Luska, Harland’s nom de plume in the early part of his career. Beginning in the 1880s, the Catholic-born Harland went undercover as a German Jew to write a series of romantic novels set mainly on the Lower East Side. The most successful was Yoke of the Thorah, about a young East Side Jew who marries—tragically, as it turns out—into an uptown family of shirtwaist magnates.

  Sunday dinner in the Blums’ Lexington Avenue townhouse is a patchwork of seemingly incompatible foods and food traditions somehow pieced together in a way that makes sense to those at the table. The meal, which begins with the traditional blessing, fills the entire afternoon: ten courses and five kinds of wine, followed by an after-dinner liqueur and cigars for the men; in other words, the quintessential Gilded Age banquet. The banqueters, however, eat with the same earthy sense of relish as their downtown brothers and sisters: