A cooking class for immigrant girls at the Educational Alliance. The girls here are learning how to make corn muffins.
From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York
Of the eight thousand East Siders that passed through the doors of the Educational Alliance each day, the vast majority came to take advantage of the free legal aid, use the public baths, or let their children loose on the rooftop garden. The cooking classes were only a modest success. The reason was simple: the Jewish homemaker already knew how to cook.
In 1916, the New York Board of Health issued a recipe booklet of cheap and nutritious foods intended for the East Side homemaker. Distributed by neighborhood settlement houses, How to Feed the Family was something of a flop among its intended audience. A reporter curious about the East Sider’s reaction found out why. (The interview is transcribed in dialect, a common practice in period newspapers when dealing with working-class subjects.) The Board of Health, one woman explained,
ain’t got no right to say what I should cook and how. Y’understand? Already when I was little I knew how oatmeal it should be cooked. You do it with a double boiler. I ain’t got no use for peoples what teaches me how to cook things that a long time before I done better as what they did.
Her neighbor concurred. “The East Side is the East,” she told the reporter. “I make like my Grossmutter Selig and my mother Gefullte fish and stuffed helzel [poultry neck]. What I care for the Board of Health?”14 But if the Board of Health failed to impress them, immigrant cooks felt the pressure to Americanize from other sources. The most persuasive were the cook’s own children.
No single institution exerted more influence on the culinary lives of immigrant children than the American public school. Here, beginning in 1888, immigrant daughters were taught the fundamentals of American cookery in a then-experimental course based on the principles of domestic science. Declared a success by city educators, the experiment in “manual training” (the classes also gave instruction in sewing, housekeeping, and nursing) became a permanent fixture of the New York public schools. Over the next decades, it expanded and evolved along with the changing profile of the city. For poor students, classes in manual training opened up employment opportunities, but middle-class girls could benefit too. The classes taught them discipline, neatness, and organization, the qualities that would help them manage their own future households.
The program’s original audience was native-born American girls, but the focus shifted as immigrants continued to descend on New York. To reach their foreign-born students, educators hit upon a novel teaching strategy. They replaced the conventional classroom with “model flats,” simulated tenement apartments that mimicked the students’ own tenement homes. In their stage-set kitchens, the girls learned how to maintain the highest sanitary standards, every dish and utensil neatly stowed in its rightful place. They were taught the importance of established mealtimes, the family sitting down together at a properly set table, the food “served” rather than “grabbed.” Finally, they were tutored in the science of cooking with lessons on food chemistry, kitchen mechanics, and human physiology.
Model flats were the brainchild of Mabel Kittredge, a domestic scientist who worked with Lillian Wald at the Henry Street Settlement. The first model flat opened in 1902 in a tenement building in the heart of the Jewish ghetto. Before long, they were scattered through the tenement district, some housed in actual tenements, others in school buildings, including P.S. 7 on Hester Street. Miss Kittredge developed a housekeeping curriculum based on the model flats, which she compiled into a textbook. Today, Practical Homemaking provides a detailed picture of the public school cooking class circa 1914, when the book was published. The recipes in Practical Homemaking, hand-selected for the tenement population, were centered around three core ingredients: milk, cereals, and potatoes. Miss Kittredge saw little use for vegetables, with the exception of beans, the only form of plant life rich in “nutritive value.” She was equally unimpressed by fruit, which, after all, was composed mostly of water. The immigrants’ first cooking lesson was devoted to nature’s most perfect food, milk, from which the girls were taught to make cocoa. Future lessons were devoted to white sauce, boiled cereals like oatmeal and Wheatena, boiled potatoes, and cooked apples. Promoting the foods that Kittredge felt were best suited to the East Sider, the lessons were also designed to wean immigrants away from their less desirable culinary habits. For Jews, that meant forsaking their over-spiced pickles and delicatessen meats, while Italians were asked to cut back on their beloved macaroni and olive oil. Returning to their real-life tenement flats, the girls shared what they had learned, teaching their mothers how to poach eggs, or cook vegetables in boiling water rather than goose schmaltz. Teachers also made home visits to reinforce the lessons and monitor their students’ progress. As one contemporary described it, the girls served as missionaries to their foreign-born parents, a role that the public schools exploited for all it was worth.
Dieticians from local schools and settlement houses paid visits to the tenements. The dietician pictured is teaching immigrant women how to cook hot cereal in a double boiler.
CSS Photography Archives, Courtesy of Community Service Society of New York and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
A second powerful influence on the food habits of immigrant children was the school lunchroom. Up until the twentieth century, most city kids returned from school each day for a home-cooked meal. That began to change as more and more women found work outside the home, leaving their kids to fend for themselves. With no one to feed them, the kids were given two or three pennies to buy lunch from a local pushcart or delicatessen. In 1908, a group of private citizens, alarmed by this new development, founded the New York School Lunch Committee, a charity that provided three-penny lunches to undernourished children. In place of pickles and candy—the typical pushcart meal—the committee provided hot soups and stews for two cents a serving, and one-penny treats like rice pudding or baked sweet potato. The school lunch committee lasted through World War I, but in 1920, responsibility for feeding the city’s children shifted to the Board of Education. As it happens, the shift coincided with a groundswell of anti-immigrant thinking in the United States, which culminated in the Johnson Reed Act, a far-reaching immigrant quota system passed by Congress in 1924. Calls to Americanize the foreign-born reverberated through government offices and monopolized the editorial pages of the nation’s leading newspapers. With so much attention on the immigrant threat, the Board of Education looked to the school lunchroom to Americanize the immigrant palate. Below is a typical school lunch menu circa 1920:
MONDAY: Cocoa, buttered roll, stewed corn, stewed prunes
TUESDAY: Cream of pea soup, peanut and cottage cheese sandwich, Brown Betty with lemon sauce, fruit tapioca
WEDNESDAY: Vegetable soup, baked beans, vanilla cornstarch with chocolate sauce
THURSDAY: Lima bean and tomato soup, buttered roll, cream tapioca, rice pudding
FRIDAY: Cocoa, salmon sandwiches, sliced fruit, oatmeal cookies15
To extend the lunchroom’s influence, mothers were invited to eat with their kids. During the meal, domestic-science teachers would point out the benefits of the particular dishes served, urging them to prepare similar foods in their own homes. Across America, educators seized on the lunchroom’s educational possibilities, establishing similar programs of their own. A domestic-science teacher named Emma Smedley summed up the new awareness most succinctly. “No branch of the school activities,” she wrote, “offers greater opportunity of fitting in with the Americanization plan than the school lunch.”16 The process was gradual, but in the school lunchroom, kids of diverse backgrounds found a culinary common ground, one tentative bite at a time.
In 1884, a new entry made its debut in Trow’s New York Business Directory, ancestor to the modern-day Yellow Pages. Sandwiched between “Deeds (Acknowledgement of)” and “Dental Equipment” now appeared “Delicatessens.�
�� These specialized groceries had existed in New York for at least thirty years, most of them clustered along First and Second Avenues. Even so, 1884 was a kind of birthday for this immigrant food shop, the year it captured the attention of the Trow’s editors, asserting its place in the city’s food economy.
If the New York Tribune is correct, the city’s first “delicatessen handler,” or deli man, for short, was an immigrant named Paul Gabel, who landed in New York in 1848, the year of revolution in Europe and the start of the great German migration. (Gabel made a good living in America. By 1870, he had moved his store and his family to stately Brooklyn Heights, his fortune now worth $20,000, a substantial amount by the standards of the day.) Shops like Mr. Gabel’s carried a limited stock of sausages, cheeses, and sweets, but as the century progressed, delicatessens added “made dishes” to their lineup of provisions—foods that were cooked and ready to eat, prepared by the owner’s wife in a small kitchen behind the store. Hungry city-dwellers visiting their local delicatessen could choose among the following: meat pies, smoked beef shoulder, smoked tongue, smoked fowls, roast fowls, smoked, pickled, and salted herring, fresh ham, baked beans, potato salad, beet salad, cabbage, parsnip, and celery salads, in addition to all the usual wursts, breads, and cheeses. Though still in the hands of German New Yorkers, the delicatessens’ clientele had now widened to include the city’s growing population of Irish immigrants, along with native-born Americans. By the 1890s, delicatessens were “as common as bricks in a building” the great majority, however, could be found on the Lower East Side. Rich New Yorkers, with their live-in servants and private cooks, had little real need for the delicatessen. But among the tenements, delicatessens assumed the role of a poor person’s catering shop. Bachelors, shopgirls, boarders and lodgers, working mothers, people with little time for the kitchen, some with no kitchens at all, relied on the delicatessens to cook for them. Their ser vices were particularly indispensable during the hot summer months, when firing up the kitchen stove turned the tenement apartment into a sweatbox.
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the “delicatessen habit” moved up the economic ladder and caught on among the middle class. With this development, a new tradition was born: the Sunday delicatessen supper, a meal composed of cooked foods, hot and ready to serve. Not only in New York, but across urban America, the delicatessen was now so thoroughly entrenched that it sparked an anti-delicatessen backlash. Domestic scientists, among other concerned Americans, blamed the delicatessen for an array of social maladies. A few links of sausage, a loaf of white bread, and a bottle of ketchup, the standard delicatessen meal, drives the workingman straight to the nearest saloon, these women argued. Along with intemperance—a source of growing apprehension in pre–World War I America—delicatessens were thought responsible for the nation’s climbing divorce rate. “If fewer women depended on the delicatessen store,” one expert argued, “there would be fewer broken homes.”17 Disgruntled husbands could be made manageable if their wives would only take the trouble to cook for them.
The history of the Jewish delicatessen follows a separate but roughly parallel track. The country’s first Jewish delicatessens opened for business on the Lower East Side early in the 1850s. Established by German Jews, they specialized in smoked, brined, and spiced meats, much like their Gentile counterparts. They also carried myriad forms of herring, pumpernickel, and the standard assortment of German salads. The two stores even looked alike. The delicatessen’s main staging area was a white marble counter, where the meats were displayed and sliced for the customer. The salads were arrayed in a row of stoneware crocks. What set the Jewish delicatessen apart was the total absence of any product derived from pigs. In its place, German Jews turned to geese. The following description is taken from an 1897 story that ran in the New York Tribune:
There are delicatessen shops in New York where roast fowl and sliced ham are unknown, where pigs’ feet would not be tolerated, and where an order of venison would be given in vain. The Kosher delicatessen places of the crowded East Side, although in name like those in Sixth-ave., carry a stock of goods unlike those of any other place. There, in season, may be bought the various dainties made from goose meat. Among these are Gansekleines, Gansegruben, and fattened goose liver. Gansekleines is the name given to the small pieces of the dressed goose, like wings, feet, and neck, and Gansegruben are the pieces of the brown crackling from which the fat has been extracted. In some of these places they also prepare what is known as Gesetztes Essen. This consists of a mixture of barley and dried peas, which is prepared on Friday for consumption on Saturday when the pious Jews do no cooking.18
Without a doubt, the Sabbath stew glistened with goose schmaltz.
Beyond these goose-based dainties, Jewish delicatessens sold kosher wursts and frankfurters, corned beef and corned tongue. In the early days, the cured meats were shipped over from Germany, but as the Jewish community settled in, it became more self-sufficient. During the 1870s, kosher sausage factories sprang up on the Lower East Side to supply the quickly multiplying number of Jewish delicatessens in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and smaller cities as well. In 1872, a German butcher named Isaac Gellis produced some of America’s first domestic kosher frankfurters in his sausage factory at 37 Essex Street. As the company was passed down from father to son to grandson, it grew into an empire, with delicatessen restaurants selling nothing but the Gellis brand scattered through Manhattan. One of them, Fine & Schapiro, can still be found on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Moses Zimmerman, also from Germany, was another early sausage-maker. His factory on East Houston Street opened in 1877, producing bolognas, frankfurters, wienerwursts, corned beef, and corned tongue, along with kosher cooking fat.
In the 1880s, as migration patterns shifted and large numbers of Eastern European Jews sailed for America, they discovered the delicatessen in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The great majority had never seen one before. Older immigrants looked on the delicatessen with suspicion (it was “too spicy” and “too fancy”), while their children were intoxicated by its distinct perfume, a blend of boiled beef, garlic, pepper, and vinegar. Mondays through Fridays, they rushed from school to the local deli for a lunch of pickles and halvah. On Saturdays, the delicatessen was closed for the Sabbath, but it opened again Saturday evenings at sundown. This was a moment that ghetto kids looked forward to with crazed anticipation, famously captured by Alfred Kazin in his food-rich memoir, A Walker in the City. Saturdays at twilight, Kazin writes, neighborhood kids haunted the local delicatessen, waiting for it to reopen. As soon as it did, the kids raced in, “panting for the hot dogs sizzling on the gas plate just inside the window. The look of that blackened empty gas plate had driven us wild all through the wearisome Sabbath day. And now, as the electric sign blazed up again, lighting up the words Jewish National Delicatessen, it was as if we had entered our rightful heritage.”19
The irony here is that the delicatessen was not, in fact, a pillar of Jewish food culture, at least not for the Russians, or the Poles, or the Litvaks, but the Jews declared it one all the same. If their mothers disapproved—and most mothers did—for Jewish kids, the delicatessen was like a second home, part lunchroom, part urban clubhouse, and at night, an after-hours meeting place for ghetto sweethearts. With their limited pocket money, East Side kids were confined to the cheapest items on the delicatessen menu: a frankfurter with yellow mustard or a salami sandwich. The big-ticket item was a plate of sliced deli meat served with a tub of pickles. The most aristocratic option of all was the “mixed plate”: a combination of pastrami, corned beef, and tongue.
Inch by inch, their kids leading the way, the new Jewish immigrants developed a taste for the cured meats of their German brothers and sisters. Those with an entrepreneurial bent looked to the delicatessen as a business opportunity and opened stores of their own. Samuel Chotzinoff, a Russian immigrant and future concert pianist, remembers exactly what that entailed. The Chotzinoff family arrived in New York in
the late 1890s when Samuel was around eight years old. A few years later, when his mother decided to open a delicatessen, she paid a visit to one of the local sausage manufacturers. In keeping with East Side custom, the Mandelbaum Sausage factory offered her a kind of delicatessen start-up package. It included fixtures for the store (paid for on an installment plan) and three months of credit toward supplies. The sausage people even taught her how to cut meat into the thinnest possible slices, the delicatessen’s key to financial success. A seltzer company lent Mrs. Chotzinoff a soda-water fountain for making syrup drinks. The store kitchen was a backroom with a three-burner stove, where she cooked her own corned beef in a tin clothes boiler. The entire operation cost her only $150 upfront, money that she borrowed from a well-off landsman.
Looking beyond the delicatessen, the Jewish East Side was home to a staggering variety of eating places. Neighborhood restaurants catered to every nameable niche and subniche of the local population—geographic, economic, professional, and even political—attracting a highly specialized clientele of like-minded diners. Every national group had its corresponding restaurant. The more modest establishments were located in tenement apartments temporarily converted into public eating spaces. Blurring the line between home and business, the private restaurant offered diners a truly Old World eating experience: a home-cooked meal prepared in the style of a particular region or city back in Europe. A visitor to the East Side in 1919, who discovered these private restaurants, explains how they worked:
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