For Eastern European Jews, the city’s pushcart markets were a reminder of home. The shtetlach that the immigrants had left behind had one key feature in common: an outdoor food market where, once a week, Jewish homemakers shopped for their supplies. Some of what they needed could be found in stores, but they relied on the market for their produce, their poultry, fish, milk, cheese, and butter, as well as household goods like candles, pots, and pans. When they arrived in New York, they found themselves perfectly at home in the tumult of the East Side pushcart markets that had been created by their immigrant predecessors.
To uptown visitors, the East Side pushcart markets were garbagestrewn streets aswirl with foreigners, women in tattered wigs, baskets over one arm, haggling at top volume over third-rate merchandise. In other words, retail mayhem. The more Bohemian of the uptown visitors swooned over the romance of the pushcarts. They came to the markets as sightseers (never as customers) to drink in the Old World atmosphere and observe the local customs. Whenever the city threatened to close down the markets, which it did at regular intervals, they mourned the impending loss, mostly on aesthetic grounds. The pushcart markets on Hester, Orchard, and Essex streets were among the most picturesque spots in New York, and the city would be a much grayer place without them. The point that seemed to elude them was the usefulness of the markets to the people they served. For the tenement housewife, the pushcarts were America’s antidote to hunger. They provided her with a wide assortment of familiar foods at the lowest possible prices, and allowed her to buy them in the quantities she desired. Where else in New York could she buy half a parsnip or a handful of barley, not a single ounce more than she needed? The minuscule purchases possible at the pushcarts surprised uptown New Yorkers, who wondered why anyone would buy a single egg, but to the tenement housewife, it was eminently practical. She had no pantry to store her provisions and no ice box to keep foods from spoiling. More compelling still, small purchases were the only kind she could afford.
Tenement housewives like Fannie Rogarshevsky shuttled between the pushcart and the kitchen at least twice a day. In the mornings, before the children were awake, they bought their breakfast supplies, some hard rolls and maybe a cup of pot cheese. In the afternoon, they returned to the market for their dinner ingredients. To the uptown city-dweller, the idea of shopping meal-by-meal was hopelessly inefficient. The tenement housewife saw things differently, treating the pushcarts as an extension of her own kitchen. For Mrs. Rogarshevsky, who lived directly above the Orchard Street market, this was almost literally the case, and the same was true for thousands of other East Side women.
The pushcart market was a boon to East Siders on both sides of the equation, shopper and peddler alike. A line of work familiar to the Eastern European Jew, peddling was the fallback occupation of new immigrants. It required little capital, no special work skills, and scant knowledge of English. All immigrants needed were a basket and a few dollars to invest. Many started with dry goods—suspenders, collar buttons, sewing pins, and the like—which they peddled door to door. The pushcart, a larger retail venue, demanded more capital and a deeper knowledge of the workings of the city. Pushcart peddlers rented their carts for 10 cents a day from one of the many East Side garages or pushcart stables. They began work each morning around four a.m., wheeling the carts to a wholesale produce market on Catherine Slip along the East River, which catered specifically to the pushcart trade. By five a.m., carts loaded, they were on the street and ready for business. At some point in the afternoon, the peddlers’ wives took over the cart so the men could rest up for the next day’s early start. (Actually, a fair percentage of peddlers were women, and only some were partners with their husbands.) The chief attraction of peddling for the Eastern European Jews was the independent nature of the work. The sweatshop worker had precise hours to keep, quotas to meet, and supervisors to appease. The peddler, by contrast, was his own boss. As one East Sider put it, “the peddler was a man who had seen the sweatshops and thought they were for someone else.” There was dignity in peddling, but, even more to the point, the peddler was free to set his own hours and keep the Sabbath. To observant Jews, this was a crucial advantage over the sweatshops, which followed the Gentile business week and stayed open Monday through Saturday.
Beginning in the 1890s, the pushcart market became a regular destination for New York journalists, who were lured by its literary possibilities. They came in search of good copy and found it in characters like the Polish fishmonger with her barrels of two-penny herrings, or the horseradish peddler, bent over his mechanical grinder, literally reduced to tears by the rising fumes. A more quantitative rendering of the pushcart market was provided by New York mayor George B. McClellan, who presided over City Hall from 1904 to 1909. Pressured by public concern over the quickly growing number of pushcarts, Mayor McClellan appointed a commission to investigate what some New Yorkers referred to as “the pushcart evil.” Their complaints were many. The pushcarts, they said, were a threat to public health. They generated garbage and interfered with proper street-cleaning. They sold contaminated food—moldy bread, worm-ridden cheese, rotten produce—to New York’s most vulnerable citizens. Even more pressing, the pushcarts interfered with the free flow of traffic in a rapidly expanding metropolis, a matter of great concern to city officials.
To establish a common body of facts, Mayor McClellan ordered a systematic “pushcart census,” and on May 11, 1905, a small army of police officers fanned out over the Lower East Side, each one armed with a stack of questionnaires. To some measure, the census confirmed what everybody already knew. The one neighborhood with more pushcarts than any other was unequivocally the Jewish ghetto. Of the four thousand pushcarts counted in Manhattan, two thousand five hundred were on the Lower East Side, with the highest concentration on Hester, Orchard, and Essex streets. The census also brought surprises. The pushcart peddlers earned a better living than anyone suspected, and stayed in their jobs longer than anticipated. Peddling was not just a stepping-stone job, as most people believed, but a destination. Another surprise was the high quality of the goods. Contrary to expectation, more than 90 percent of the fruits, vegetables, eggs, butter, cheese, and bread sold from the pushcarts was declared fresh and wholesome, of better quality than the same items found in a store. The public world of the market offers a rare glimpse into the private realm of the kitchen. Thanks to the mayor’s census, we know precisely what foods were available to the tenement housewife and which she relied on most.
Health workers who studied the immigrants’ eating habits in the early part of the twentieth century bemoaned the shortage of vegetables on the Jewish dinner table. The ghetto market, however, abounded with vegetable peddlers. Of course, there were potatoes, but there were also beets, cabbage, carrots, eggplant, parsnip, parsley, rhubarb, onions, peppers, peas, beans, cucumbers, radishes, and a food listed as “salad greens.” One reason the health workers may have overlooked Jewish vegetable consumption is that so much of it came in the form of soup.
There’s an old Yiddish proverb that goes: “Poor people cook with a lot of water.” The truth of the proverb was borne out on a daily basis in the immigrant soup pot. In the winter months, Jewish cooks like Mrs. Rogarshevsky prepared tangy, magenta-colored borschts; cabbage soup; chicken soup with carrots, celery, and parsnip; potato soup enriched with milk; and, most economical of all, bean soup, a dish found throughout the tenement district regardless of the cook’s religion or country of origin. Lima beans, fava beans, white beans, lentils, chickpeas, and dried peas both yellow and green were cheap, nutritious, and easy to cook. Jewish cooks liked to combine their beans with onion, carrot, celery, and barley, producing soups that were deeply flavored and slightly chewy. They called the soup krupnik, a dish traditionally served to impoverished yeshiva students. In its simplest form, krupnik was indeed a spartan dish, nothing more than lima beans, a handful of barley, and maybe a chunk of potato. Adding a marrow bone was one way to make it more substantial. For meatless krupniks, the c
ook might add a splash of milk or maybe some dried mushrooms, an ingredient that mimicked the savoriness of meat.
In the mid-1930s, the Daily Forward, the East Side’s leading Yiddish newspaper, began a regular cooking feature edited by Regina Frishwasser. The recipes that appeared in the column were sent in by readers—home cooks with limited time and limited budgets as well. In the 1940s, Frishwasser collected the recipes into Jewish American Cook Book. The purpose of the book, she writes in her preface, “is not to bring glamour to a menu, but rather to bring our foods in the easiest way possible to those who want them.” Here is her recipe for a krupnik that used dried mushrooms, barley, lima beans, and yellow split peas.
KRUPNIK
Bring 2 quarts water to a boil, and add 1 cup yellow split peas, ½ cup minute barley, ½ cup lima beans, and 1 teaspoon salt. Simmer 1 hour and add 1 ounce broken dried mushrooms, 1 minced onion, 1 diced carrot, and 1 diced parsley [root]. Cook until the vegetables are tender. Fry 1 minced onion in 2 tablespoons butter until golden brown, then add to the soup.8
Come summer, Jewish cooks turned to chilled soups, like meatless borscht served with sour cream and boiled egg, just one of the many mouth-puckering foods consumed by the immigrants, a taste preference they had acquired on the other side of the ocean. Back in Europe, the traditional souring agent in borscht was home-fermented beet juice otherwise known as rossel. Once in America, cooks turned to a store-bought product called sour salt (tartaric acid) to give their borscht the required zing. Like lemonade, it was the sourness of borscht that made it so refreshing. Schav was another cold and sour soup that the Jews consumed as a summer tonic. Murky green in color, it was made from boiled and chopped sorrel leaves, a plant loaded with vitamin C. The appearance of sorrel on the East Side pushcarts signaled that spring had come to the ghetto. Tenement housewives prepared their first batch of schav sometime in mid-May, and served it “the old Ghetto way,” with sour cream, bits of chopped egg, cucumber, and scallion, so it was part soup and part salad. Schav was also popular in the East Side cafés, where customers sipped it from a glass like iced tea.
In warm weather, as pushcarts filled with summer vegetables, the Jews became avid salad-eaters, though not the leafy green kind favored by the Italians that we are most familiar with today. Instead, they chopped cucumber, radish, scallion, and pepper into bite-size chunks and sprinkled them with a little salt and pepper. In a more luxurious version, the raw vegetables were crowned with a scoop of cottage cheese or sour cream, a dish once referred to as “farmer’s chop suey.” This classic Jewish creation was reportedly the food that Harry Houdini (a Hungarian-born Jew) requested on his deathbed.
When the first pushcart survey was taken in 1905, fruit peddlers held sway over the market, occupying more curb space than vendors of any other food. On the far side of the ocean, Jewish fruit consumption was more or less limited to whatever grew locally, including apples, peaches, cherries, berries, and, above all, plums, which grew on the outskirts of the shtetls and which Jewish cooks made into a thick, dark preserve called pavel, a kind of plum butter. Plums were also dried along with apples and used in cooking. Jewish cooks added prunes to festive dishes like tzimmes (sweet glazed carrots) and cholent, or used it as a filling for hamantaschen, the triangle-shaped Purim cookie. When crushed and left to ferment, plums were the foundation for slivovitz, a kind of Eastern European firewater. At the pushcart market, immigrant Jews discovered an Eden of melons, citrus, stone fruits, and tropical wonderments like pineapple, banana, and even coconut, which the vendor sold, pre-cracked, the white oily shards floating in jars of cloudy water. In fact, many kinds of fruits—melons, pineapple, even oranges—were sold presliced and hawked as street food, a practice that city officials frowned on. (According to the New York sanitary police, the consumption of bad fruit purchased from street peddlers was a leading cause of death among East Side children.) Where other vendors packed up by dinnertime, the fruit vendors remained on the street long after the sun went down, their carts illuminated by flaming torches. Fathers coming home from work would stop by the fruit peddler for penny apples to give to the kids. On summer nights, when tenement-dwellers poured into the streets for a breath of fresh air, strolling East Siders paused at the fruit carts for a cool slice of watermelon. Fruit was the great affordable luxury of the tenement Jews.
Family members often took turns at the pushcart. Children peddled in the afternoon when school let out.
CSS Photography Archives, Courtesy of Community Service Society of New York and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
In the early 1920s, a Boston dietician named Bertha Wood conducted a multiethnic study of immigrant eating habits, eventually published as a book, Foods of the Foreign-Born in Relation to Health. As the title suggests, the book was written for health-care professionals—visiting nurses, settlement workers, and dispensary doctors—who served the immigrant community. Though well versed in current medical practice, they knew very little about the immigrants’ foodways, a tremendous handicap in treating the immigrant patient. For each group in her study, Wood identified the leading food deficiencies and most harmful tendencies. She was also ready, however, to point out where the immigrant cook was superior to her native-born counterpart.
At less than a hundred pages, Foods of the Foreign-Born is a curious little book. Ms. Wood approaches her immigrant subjects with a degree of culinary open-mindedness unusual for the 1920s, a particularly anxious period in American political history. At the same time, she is firmly moored in the food wisdom of her day, with a deep faith in the value of bland, unadorned cooking like creamed soups and boiled vegetables. Her 1920s perspective helps explain Wood’s two most persistent concerns with the immigrant kitchen: too much seasoning and too little milk. Ms. Wood declared the Jews guilty of both preparing highly seasoned foods (one reason the Jews were so nervous) and depriving their children of sufficient milk, “nature’s most perfect food.”
Red Cross workers distributing milk, “nature’s most perfect food,” to newly landed immigrants.
Library of Congress
Among the foods that Ms. Wood objected to most was a much-loved Jewish staple: the pickle. “Perhaps no other people,” Wood observed, “have so many ‘sours’ as the Jews. In the Jewish sections of our large cities,” she continued,
There are storekeepers whose only goods are pickles. They have cabbages pickled whole, shredded, or chopped and rolled in leaves; peppers pickled; also string beans; cucumbers, sour, half sour, and salted; beets; and many kinds of meat and fish. This excessive use of pickled foods destroys the taste for milder flavors, causes irritation, and renders assimilation more difficult.9
More alarming still was the pickle habit among Jewish school kids, who spent their lunch money on pickles and nothing else, their appetites ruined for more appropriate foods like milk and crackers. The taste of the standard Jewish pickle was so aggressive—briny, garlicky, sour—and so foreign to the native palate that Americans like Ms. Wood wondered how anyone, children especially, could eat them by choice. Instead, they saw pickle-eating as a kind of compulsion. The undernourished child was drawn to pickles the same way an adult was drawn to alcohol. More than a food, the pickle was a kind of drug for tenement children, who were still too young for whiskey.
At the pushcart market, the pickle stand was a rendezvous for shoppers. Here, standing among the barrels, hungry East Siders could buy a single pickle and eat it on the spot, then continue with their errands. Pickles were also sold in bulk, dished from the barrel with a sieve and packed into jars supplied by the shopper. Uptown visitors to the market were shocked by the size of Jewish pickles, some “large enough to kill a baby.” These overgrown sours were cut into thick rounds that sold for a penny a piece and placed between bread to make a pickle sandwich, a typical East Side lunch.
The following recipe is adapted from Jennie Grossinger’s The Art of Jewish Cooking:
DILL PICKLES
30 Kirby cucumbers of roughly th
e same size
½ cup kosher salt
2 quarts water
2 tablespoons white vinegar
4 cloves garlic
1 dried red pepper
¼ teaspoon mustard seed
2 coin-sized slices fresh horseradish
1 teaspoon mixed pickling spice
20 sprigs of dill
Wash and dry cucumbers and arrange them in a large jar or two smaller jars, alternating a layer of cucumbers with a layer of dill. Combine salt and water and bring to boil. Turn off heat. Add vinegar and spices and pour liquid over cucumbers. They should be immersed. If necessary, add more saltwater. Cover and keep in a cool place for 1 week. If you like green pickles, Mrs. Grossinger recommends you try one after 5 days.10
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