A great many of the emigrants from Russia and Rumania, even after years of alienation, have an intense craving for the dishes of their native province. They cannot assimilate the American cuisine, even though they accept its citizenship. It is, therefore, the practice of the inhabitants of particular province to convert her front parlor (usually located on the ground floor of a tenement) into a miniature dining room, where she caters to a limited number of her home-town folk. Her shingle announces the name of her province, such as “Pinsker,” “Dwinsker,” “Minsker,” “Saraslover,” “Bialystoker,” etc., as the case may be. Here the aliens meet their friends from the Old Country and lose their homesickness in the midst of familiar faces and dialects and in the odors from the kitchen, which evoke for them images for their home and surroundings.20
Parlor restaurants answered the needs of the working person, but the ghetto also provided for the local population of well-off merchants, factory owners, lawyers, doctors, and real estate barons. By the turn of the century, a half dozen glittering eating-places had opened on the Lower East Side, which catered to the downtown aristocracy. Most of them were in the hands of Romanian Jews, the self-proclaimed bon vivants of the ghetto.
The Romanian quarter of the Lower East Side began at Grand Street and continued north until Houston Street. It was bounded on the west by the Bowery, the border between the Jewish ghetto and Little Italy, and by Clinton Street to the east, the thoroughfare that separated the Romanians from the Poles. The streets within this square quarter-mile were unusually dense with pastry shops, cafés, delicatessens, and restaurants, the most opulent eateries south of 14th Street. Dining rooms were decorated in the sinuous Art Nouveau style, a raised platform at one end for the house orchestra, the tables arrayed along a well-polished dance floor. Sunday nights, when ghetto restaurants were at their busiest, the dance floors were crowded with ample-bodied Jewish women, the grand dames of the Lower East Side, decked out in their finest gowns and sparkliest diamonds.
The deluxe surroundings belied the earthy, garlic-laced cuisine typical of the Romanian rathskeller. The following account of Perlman’s Rumanian Rathskellar at 158 East Houston Street comes from a 1930 restaurant guide:
The food for the most part is invariably unspellable and wholly delicious. Sweetbreads such as you never encountered before; smoked goose pastrami, aromatic salami, chicken livers, chopped fine and sprinkled with chopped onions; Wiener schnitzel; pickled tomatoes and pickled peppers; sweet-and-sour tongue; and huge black radishes. Because it’s so good, you eat and eat until your head swims, drinking seltzer to help it along.21
The Romanian restaurants were also known for their “broilings,” or grilled strip steaks, and for their carnitzi, sausages that were so pungent they seemed one part ground meat to one part garlic.
Romanians shared East Houston Street with Hungarians, and together the two groups transformed a generous chunk of the Lower East Side into New York’s leading café district. Where Russian Jews were devoted tea drinkers, the Hungarians had acquired a love for coffee, a habit learned from the Ottoman Turks. (Along with Austria, Hungary was part of the vast territory claimed by the Ottomans between 1544 and 1699.) Settling in the United States in the late nineteenth century, the Hungarians brought their coffee habit with them, establishing scores of coffee houses in immigrant enclaves. Visitors to the East Side counted at least one café on nearly every block of the Hungarian quarter, while some streets had four or five. Coffee on the East Side was served in the European style, with a small pot of cream and a tumbler of water, a symbolic gesture of hospitality. That was for patrons who asked for their coffee schwartzen. Coffee with milk was served in a glass. Whichever style, Hungarian coffee was often consumed with pastry, maybe a slice of strudel, apple or poppy seed, or a plate of kiperln, the crescent-shaped cookies that we know as rugelach.
After dark, well-heeled New Yorkers descended on the cafés for a night of “slumming,” a term coined in the nineteenth century. For the uptown city-dweller, slumming on the Lower East Side was both an opportunity for cultural enrichment, like a visit to the museum, and a form of ribald entertainment. The adventure began as the uptowner crossed 14th Street and entered the foreign quarter, seeking immigrant cafés with olive-skinned waitresses, gypsy violinists, and fiery (to the uptown palate) Hungarian cooking. A favorite destination was Little Hungary, a haunt of Theodore Roosevelt during his term as New York police commissioner. Below, a 1903 guide to the East Side cafés deciphers the menu at Little Hungary for the bewildered uptown diner. First among the entrées is, of course “Szekelye Gulyas,” a sharp-seasoned ragout of veal and pork, with sauerkraut. Then there are such things as:
Lammporkolt mit Eiergeste—a goulash of lamb
Peishel mit Nockerln—a goulash of lung
Wiener Backhendle—fried chicken, breaded
Kas-Fleckerl—vermicelli with grated cheese
Zigeuner-Auflauf—vermicelli with prune jelly
Palacsinken—a sort of French pancake
Kaiserschmarren—a German pancake cut into small pieces while baking, and mixed with seeded raisins
Strumpfbandle—noodles with cinnamon and sugar Among the most noted pastries are Apfel-Strudel, Mohn, and
Nuss-Kipferl22
It didn’t seem to matter to the uptown patrons that the café crowd was made up of fellow slummers. High on slivovitz, they tumbled into their waiting carriages and bounced homeward, their taste buds still reeling from the onslaught of garlic and paprika.
The Russian quarter of the Lower East Side hosted its own café network, only here the action unfolded around steaming glasses of amber-colored tea. In his drinking habits, the Russian Jew was the inverse of the Irishman. The Irishman drank his tea at home, but socialized over whiskey in the East Side saloons. The Jew, by contrast, consumed his alcohol around the family table while tea was his drink of public fellowship. Café tea was brewed in samovars and served in glass tumblers with a thick slice of lemon and a lump of sugar that the drinker clamped between his front teeth. The hot liquid was then sucked through the sugar with a loud, slurping sound. In the process of drinking, a few tablespoonfuls always splashed over the edge of the tumbler into the saucer beneath. When the glass was empty, the drinker raised the saucer to his lips and drained that as well.
In Little Hungary, music was part and parcel of the café atmosphere. In the Russian quarter, music was replaced by the sound of talk—feverish, theatrical, and at times contentious. The food and drink were secondary. For this reason, the cafés came to be known as kibitzarnia, from the Yiddish verb kibetzn. Roughly translated, to kibitz is to banter, in a sometimes mocking or intrusive way. The Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, who was born in Russia in 1859 and lived for a short time on the Lower East Side, explains that to kibitz “is to engage in repartee of a special sort, to needle someone, tickle him in the ribs, pull his leg, gnaw at his vitals, sprinkle salt on his wounds, give him the kiss of death, and all with a sweet smile, with a flash of rapier-like wit, with whimsy and humor…” In the kibitzarnia, he continues, the customer orders a cup of tea and a bite to eat, in prelude to the real action. Now the kibitzing starts:
The barbed compliments fly between the tables. Racy stories and witticisms are passed around, each calculated to step on someone’s toes where the shoe pinches most…The kibitzarnia, dear reader, is a sort of free Gehenna [hell] where people rake each other over the coals, a steam bath where they beat each other with bundles of twigs until the blood spurts. Here opinions are formed, reputations are made and destroyed, careers decided.23
During the day, the café doubled as a conventional working person’s restaurant serving traditional Russian fare: bean soup, borscht, kasha varnishkes, and herring in all its forms. At Leavitt’s Café on Division Street, stomping ground of the East Side literary set, patrons could order a plate of chopped chicken liver for a nickel, or meatballs with farfel for 15 cents. After the dinner hour, the café assumed its nighttime role as the local debate club/lectu
re hall/classroom/salon, where the talking continued unabated until two or three in the morning. In the East Side hierarchy of daily necessities, good conversation trumped a good night’s sleep.
A café existed for patrons of every political conviction. All of the “-ists” were represented: Socialists, Marxists, Zionists, Bundists, anarchists, and even the lonely capitalist, odd man out among Russian Jews, could find a sympathetic audience in one café or another. And not just men, but women too, were at home in the politically charged café environment. To the uptown observer, the sight of these “unwomanly women,” sitting in mixed company and denouncing this or that government, came as a shock. To the café regulars, hungry for revolution on any front—political, artistic, or social—it exemplified the new world to come. Revolution, however, was for the young…. The older generation had their own establishments, where the talk centered on spiritual matters, and men in derbies (the café patron never removed his hat) disputed esoteric points of Talmud over a glass of tea and a slice of strudel. This is where we may have found the pious Mr. Rogarshevsky, president of his synagogue, embroiled in religious debate with his fellow congregants. The café also served the ordinary working people—the factory hands, shopkeepers, and peddlers who were more concerned with earning a living than with Nietzsche or Marx. This last group, repairing to the café at the close of the workday, sucked down glass after glass of hot tea—ten, twelve, fifteen glasses in succession—to soothe their throats, raw from a day of shouting.
Another expression of culinary specialization could be found in the East Side knish parlors, restaurants dispensing that one item and not much else. Starchy and filling, the knish, or knysz, was Russian peasant food, a rolled pastry traditionally filled with kasha. Because it was portable, it could be carried into the fields for a calorie-dense midday meal. Adopted by the Jews, the knish was transplanted to America, where it became the quintessential East Side street snack. Hot knishes were initially sold from carts that resembled tin bedroom dressers but were actually coal-burning ovens on wheels. The knishes were stored in the warming drawers. Like other East Side street foods—the bagel included—the knish eventually moved inside to a proper shop, the knishery.
The Jews made two basic types of knishes, milchich and fleishich, dairy and meat. The dairy knish was filled with pot cheese, the meat knish with liver. Knishes filled with kasha, potato, and sauerkraut could go either way, their status determined by the type of shortening used in the dough, butter or schmaltz. Deep into the 1920s, East Side knish-makers still followed the traditional strudel-like blueprint, stretching their dough, slathering it with one or another filling, then rolling it up like a carpet. After baking, the baton-shaped pastry was cut into sections. But this represented only one possible configuration. When uptowners discovered the knish sometime around World War I, they were baffled by it. A visitor to the East Side in 1919, on a tour of local eating spots, responded to the knish with typical befuddlement:
Another institution which is part of the multifarious life of the lower East Side is the “knishe” restaurant. The “knishe” is a singular composition. One may look in all the cook books and culinary annals of all times for the recipe of a “knishe,” but his efforts will be futile. Its sole habitat is the East Side.24
And so began the mythological association between this Slavic pastry and New York City, birthplace of the knish in the American culinary imagination.
Everything about the knish was so well-suited to the mode of life on the Lower East Side that it seemed to have sprung from the asphalt. Its portability was one of its major assets. Another was its price. What other food could deliver so much satisfaction for only three cents? At midday, it was a cheap and filling lunch for the sweatshop worker. At night, theatergoers devoured a quick knish at intermission or stopped by the local knishery for an after-show snack. In fact, an important connection developed between knishes and theater that helped establish a place for the knish in the local ecosystem. The home of the Yiddish theater in the early twentieth century was Second Avenue, the playhouses concentrated between 14th and Houston streets. That same strip came to be known as “knish alley” in recognition of the many knish joints that had sprung up within a few blocks’ radius. Knish parlors followed theaters the same way that pilot fish follow sharks. Wherever a theater opened, a knishery followed. In 1910, a Romanian immigrant named Joseph Berger opened a knish restaurant at 137 East Houston Street, directly next door to the Houston Hippodrome, a Yiddish vaudeville house that also showed moving pictures. The restaurant was named for Berger’s cousin and former partner, Yonah Schimmel, the knish vendor who had started the business two decades earlier with a pushcart on Coney Island. Berger’s son, Arthur, took over from his father in 1924, and continued selling knishes for the next fifty years. Eventually, the business was sold to outside investors. The Hippodrome building is still a movie theater, now a five-screen multiplex. When the shows let out, hungry theatergoers walk the same thirty feet to Yonah Schimmel’s, functioning time capsule and last of the East Side knisheries.
One measure of wealth among East Side Jews was how much meat a person could afford. Because they came from a meat-scarce society, its sudden availability in America represented the unlimited bounty of their adopted home, and Jews aspired to eat as much of it as possible. This fixation on meat helps explain the exalted place of the delicatessen in the life of the ghetto. But shortly after the turn of the century, a new type of eating place appeared on the East Side, which served no meat at all: the dairy restaurant. Here, with the exception of fish, the kitchen was strictly vegetarian, concentrating on foods made from grain, vegetables, milk, and eggs. On the face of it, the dairy restaurant was a natural outgrowth of the Jewish dietary law that forbids the mixing of meat and milk. On closer inspection, however, its appearance in New York around 1900 was a product of culinary forces that extended beyond the ghetto.
First, the East Side dairy restaurant was part of a growing interest in vegetarian dining that had recently taken hold of New York. The city’s first vegetarian restaurant opened in 1895 and more followed, providing patrons with a meatless menu of salads, nut-butter sandwiches, omelets, vegetable cutlets, and dairy dishes like berries and cream. American vegetarians came to their dietary views by way of religion. One early proponent was the Reverend Sylvester Graham (advocate for whole-grain bread) who helped found the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. Another was John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist and culinary inventor responsible for the creation of corn flakes. At his sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg also experimented with faux meat compounds made primarily from gluten and nuts, which became a staple of the East Side dairy menu.
The appearance of the first Jewish dairy restaurants coincided with a culinary crisis on the Lower East Side, which centered on the high cost of kosher meat. In the spring of 1902, a sudden jump in the price of kosher beef uncorked the pent-up outrage of East Side housewives. The women organized a neighborhood-wide boycott for the morning of May 15, with picketers stationed in front of every neighborhood butcher shop. Patrons who crossed the picket line had their purchases seized and doused with kerosene. At eleven a.m., a group of women and boys marched down Orchard Street and smashed the windows of every butcher en route, including the basement shop at number 97. Police who tried to stop the women became the target of their anger. The demonstrators pounced on the officers and wrestled them to the ground or pelted them with garbage. That night, five hundred women assembled at an East Side meeting hall. As the surrounding streets filled with angry supporters, tensions escalated between the crowd and the police. The inevitable fight broke out, and within the hour the neighborhood was engulfed in violence. The rioting subsided by the following afternoon, but the meat troubles continued for another decade, sparking boycotts and protests, though nothing on the scale of 1902.
The East Side’s first dairy restaurants, born in the midst of the kosher-meat crisis, were shoestring operations, the menu limited to a handful of traditi
onal dishes like blintzes, kasha, and herring. By the 1940s, however, this working person’s lunchroom had evolved into a more ambitious enterprise. The most ambitious of all was Ratner’s, which had originally opened in 1905 in a cramped storefront on Pitt Street. In 1918, the restaurant moved to its new home on Delancey Street, right next door to the Loew’s Delancey, then a neighborhood vaudeville theater. In 1928, the Loew’s Delancey became the Loew’s Commodore, one of the new and fantastically ornate movie palaces that had begun to appear in the city. That same year, Ratner’s received its own renovation at a cost of $150,000, transforming the old-time lunchroom into the “East Side’s premier dining place.” In its more elegant guise, its menu blossomed, and by 1940 covered a vast gastronomic territory ranging from the traditional herring salad to asparagus on toast to caviar sandwiches, among the most expensive items on the menu. But the most creative dishes to emerge from the dairy restaurant were their counterfeit meats. In place of actual beef or chicken or lamb, the dairy restaurants served meat substitutes that craftily mimicked the original. There was vegetarian stuffed turkey neck, chicken giblet fricassee, or chopped liver, all traditional Jewish foods. Diners with more assimilated taste could have vegetarian lamb chops or meatless veal cutlet. All of these foods were grouped under a section of the menu labeled “Roasts.” Under the same heading was a selection of the faux meat products manufactured by Kellogg at his Michigan plant. The most popular was Protose steak, which the dairy restaurants served with fried onions or mushroom gravy. Here’s a classic recipe for vegetarian chopped liver, with the “livery” taste surprisingly coming from the canned peas:
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