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But no diet was more reviled than the rag-picker’s—a hodgepodge of bread crusts, vegetable trimmings, bones, and meat scraps plucked from middle-class trash bins. One particularly desperate class of rag-pickers scavenged only for food, eating some of what they gathered and selling the rest for profit. Italian women from Mulberry, Baxter, and Crosby streets, the food scavengers targeted the city’s markets, grocers, fruit stands, butchers, and fishmongers. An 1883 newspaper story from the New York Times describes how they operated:
Partially decayed potatoes, onions, carrots, apples, oranges, bananas, and pineapples are the principal finds in the mess of garbage that is overhauled. The greatest prize to the garbage-searching old hag is a mess of the outside leaves of cabbage that are torn off before the odorous vegetable is displayed for sale on the stands. The rescued stuff—cabbage leaves, onions, bananas, oranges, &c.—is dumped into a filthy bit of sacking, and the whole carted, as soon as a day’s labor is concluded, to the miserable quarters which the old hag is forced to call home. Here a sorting process is gone through with. If the husband or son is sufficiently endowed with this world’s goods to be the proprietor of a fruit-stand, everything that may possibly be sold for no matter how small a sum is transferred to him. The remainder is subdivided. The cabbage leaves which are fresh are sold for use in the cheap restaurants to be served with corned beef. Such as will not serve for that purpose is stripped of decayed portions and used as the body of the poor Italian’s favorite dish—cabbage soup. In the composition of this dish, often for days at a time the only food save stale bread, which a family has to dine upon, are mixed the portions of the potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables which are not absolutely rotten. The tomatoes are used in making a gravy for the macaroni, this delicacy being secured in exchange for decayed fruits and vegetables at the groceries or restaurants of the Italian quarter. This process of exchange is carried on quite extensively as the store-keepers prefer it, and find an addition to their meager profits in the system of barter.6
Despite the revulsion of middle-class America, the rag-picker’s harvest provided her and her family with a windfall of edible wealth. American queasiness over “rescued food” was a luxury that the struggling immigrant could easily overlook. The heaps of discarded food, some of it perfectly good, which materialized each day in city trash bins, must have left the rag-picker gaping in wonderment. On the one hand, the rag-picker’s lack of skills, education, and English left her consigned to the outer fringes of American society. Still, she was able to make a living off America’s leftovers. American abundance was so staggering that the garbage that accumulated daily in cities like New York could support a shadow system of food distribution operated largely by immigrants. The rag-picker was a key player in this shadow economy, redistributing her daily harvest to peddlers, restaurants, and neighborhood groceries. In her own kitchen, the rag-picker’s culinary gleanings formed the basis of a limited but nourishing diet. (Sanitary inspectors were often surprised by the rag-picker’s good health.) Even more surprising, the rag-picker cook was determined to both nourish and delight, bartering for macaroni—a luxury food in the immigrant diet—while turning her rescued fruit into jellies and marmalade.
Expressions of anti-Italian bias continued until the start of World War I, when the nation shifted focus to fighting the Germans. German-Americans, once regarded as model immigrants, were now considered a threat to national security. Suspected of loyalty to the Fatherland, they were declared “enemy aliens” by President Woodrow Wilson and subject to a string of government restrictions. Thousands were arrested or interned. In the anxious years after the war, animosity directed at the Germans spread to other foreigners, placing immigrants and immigration at the center of a national debate. Though many of the old fears persisted, the new nativists turned to the faux science of race studies, a potent blend of anthropology, biology, and eugenics. American prosperity, they argued, rested on the superior mental traits of the Anglo-Saxon, attributes that were passed down from parent to offspring in much the same way as eye color. Alarmed by the recent influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans, the nativists claimed that decades of unchecked immigration had compromised the greatness of America, and the danger would continue as long as the gates stayed open. If they did, the outcome was assured: race suicide. By this reckoning, the settlement workers and schoolteachers who had worked so hard to Americanize the foreign-born were hopelessly misguided. American greatness could not be taught. It was literally in “the blood.”
Among the leading voices of the new nativists was a New Yorker named Madison Grant, a lawyer and amateur zoologist who helped found the Bronx Zoo. Alongside his interest in wildlife, Grant developed a taste for politics, chiefly in the field of immigration policy. He encountered like-minded thinkers in such organizations as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Defense Society, a group originally founded to protect America from German aggression. Once the armistice was signed, the group shifted focus to a new enemy, the immigrant. Grant published his manifesto, The Passing of a Great Race, in 1916. The book never sold very well, but the ideas laid down by Grant filtered into Washington. Here, they became the quasi-scientific basis for a series of anti-immigration laws culminating in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, the most stringent immigrant quota system in United States history. After 1924, the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year became one hundred and fifty thousand, a minuscule number compared to earlier times. What’s more, Johnson-Reed was specific about who those immigrants could be. America was now prepared to admit two percent of each foreign population living in the United States as of 1890, a year strategically chosen to make room for Western Europeans while shutting out less desirable types—Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Jews.
More than other groups, Italians arrived in this country with the firm knowledge that they were unwanted. In the workplace, Italians were paid less than other ethnicities, or denied jobs entirely. Landlords with a no-Italians policy denied them housing. The fact that few spoke English offered little protection against ethnic slurs, sources of the deepest humiliation for the transplanted Italian. The immigrant soon discovered that words like dago and ginny were accepted features of American speech, and not only in the streets and the schoolyards. “The Rights of the Dago” and “Big Dago Riot at Castle Gate” were the kinds of headlines Americans could expect to find in their morning paper. The quota laws effectively made anti-Italian discrimination the official policy of the United States government.
In the hostile environment first encountered by Italians, food took on new meanings and new powers. The many forms of discrimination leveled at Italians encouraged immigrants to seal themselves off, culturally speaking, from the rest of America. This circling of the wagons, a response typical of many persecuted people, was interpreted by Americans as Italian “clannishness,” an unwelcome trait in any immigrant but especially so for an already suspect group—poor, uneducated, and Catholic. The metaphorical walls built up by Italian-Americans served a double purpose. On the one hand, they protected the immigrant from outside menace, both real and invented. On the other, they carved out a space where Italians could carry on with their native traditions in relative peace, away from American disapproval. As it happens, the traditions they seemed most devoted to were those connected with food. Certainly, culinary continuity was important to other foreign groups, but Italian-Americans were bonded to their gastronomic heritage with an intensity unknown to Russians, Germans, or Irish, and went to great lengths to protect it. The Jews had their religion; the Germans had their poets, their composers, and their beer; and the Irish had their politics. The Italians arrived with a strong musical tradition; they also had their faith. But food was their cultural touchstone, their way of defying the critics, of tolerating the slurs and all of the other injustices. It was their way of being Italian.
Harsh critics of Italian eating habits, Americans tried through various means to reform the immigrant cook. The Italians were u
nmoved. Despite the cooking classes and public school lectures, and despite the persistent advice of visiting nurses and settlement workers, the immigrants’ belief in the superiority of their native foods was unwavering. Respect for the skills of the Italian cook, the goodness that she could extract from her raw materials, was one thing, but the immigrants were equally devoted to the materials themselves. For them, good Italian cooking was made from foods that grew from the Italian soil, and they used imported ingredients whenever possible. Olives and olive oil, anchovies, jarred peppers, dried mushrooms, artichokes cured in salt, canned tomatoes and tomato paste, vinegar, oregano, garlic, a variety of cured meats and cheeses, and, above all, pasta, were some of the products found in the Italian groceries that served America’s many Little Italys. Here, Italian homemakers, working women of limited means, could stock their pantries with native foods, despite the daunting cost of imported goods. The financial sacrifice was proof of the Italian’s dedication. A 1903 newspaper story describing the Italian grocery for readers who had never seen one took note of the Italians’ food priorities:
No people are more devoted to their native foods than the Italians, and Italian groceries filled with imported edibles flourish in all the different colonies of the city. The price of the imported good is a drain on the purses of the patrons and they wearily try to get the same satisfaction out of American-made substitutes, which have the same names and the same appearance, but never, never, the same taste.7
To the immigrant palate, Italian-style hams made in America were cured too quickly; American-made caciocavallo, the cheese beloved by Sicilians, was lacking in butterfat and quickly spoiled; American garlic was tasteless; and American vinegar was the wrong color. But the saddest disappointment was American pasta, much of it produced on Elizabeth Street in Sicilian-owned pasta factories. Made from standard white flour—not semolina—it was pale and, once cooked, it went soft. Domestic pasta was half the price of imported, but Italians were loath to buy it and literally saved their pennies for the genuine article.
Back home in Italy, peasant families had managed to survive another kind of hostile environment. Oppressive landowners, unfairly high taxes, and periodic crop failures meant a precarious life for the contadini, the field workers of southern Italy. Even in good times, when the peasant had enough to eat, starvation remained a looming possibility, always one crop failure away. If nothing else was guaranteed to the peasant—and nothing was—the unshakable bond of family was his bedrock. The family patriarch was an unchallenged authority who demanded absolute obedience from his wife and children, his helpers in the fields. The needs of the family came before those of the individual, and loyalty among family was unwavering. In America, as Italians adapted to a new way of life, the old values of family solidarity were put to the test. For the first time, children left their parents’ side to attend school. Here they were exposed to a world of people and ideas apart from their family. Italian girls, no longer under the constant surveillance of their elders, were now free—though not entirely—to make their own friends, and eventually to find their own husbands. As Italian women left their homes to work in American factories, they too developed lives separate from the family, discovering a level of independence they had never known in the Old Country.
Despite all these changes, the old values lived on in the nightly ritual of the evening meal, a tangible expression of family solidarity, loyalty, and love. To borrow a phrase from Blood of My Blood, Richard Gambino’s wonderful book about Brooklyn Sicilians, the evening meal was “a communion of the family.” Sicilians, and southern Italians in general, arrived in America with a deep reverence for the preciousness of food. They knew full well the human labor required to coax it from the earth, and how, on occasion, the earth would refuse them. In America, though now removed from the soil, the Italian still labored for his food, working for relatively low wages in the nation’s most strenuous jobs. The family meal was an occasion to share the fruits of that labor, and for the Italian, attendance was mandatory. On weekdays, Italian kids often returned home for lunch as well, though they could eat for free in the school cafeteria.
As Italians found their way into the American economy, the family supper took on another layer of meaning. Edible proof of the immigrant’s success, the evening meal was a nightly celebration of the triumph over hunger. The price of that victory was not lost on the immigrants, especially the older ones, who still remembered the fourteen-hour work-days. The bounty before him was the Italian’s belated reward for building America’s subways, her skyscrapers and bridges—in other words, for bringing America into the twentieth century.
Each night, the family dinner table became a stage for all the tempting foods that the immigrant had once dreamed about but couldn’t afford. At the center of that dream, there was meat. For early immigrants, meat was used as a seasoning, an ingredient added to soup or sauce to give it body and richness. By the 1920s, a midweek dinner in a working-class Italian kitchen included soup, then pasta, followed by meat and a salad. At the end of the week, Italian families sat down to a banquet of stunning extravagance. Sunday supper began in the early afternoon with an antipasto of cheese, salami, ham, and anchovies. Appetites now fully awake, the family moved through multiple courses, leading them to the heart of the feast. If the family were Sicilian, that might include a ragu made from marrow bones, chicken, pork sausage, and meatballs, stewed veal and peppers, and braciole, a thin filet of pounded beef or pork wrapped around a stuffing of cheese, bread crumbs, parsley, pine nuts, and raisins.
The Italian writer Jerre Mangione, who grew up in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s, remembers the parade of courses: first, there was soup; then pasta, perhaps ziti in sugo; followed by two kinds of chicken, one boiled, and one roasted; roasted veal; roasted lamb; and brusciuluna—“a combination of Roman cheese, salami, and moon-shaped slivers of hardboiled egg encased in rolls of beef.” When the meat was cleared, there was fennel and celery to cleanse the palate, followed by homemade pastries, nuts, fruit, and vermouth. These Sunday suppers, prepared by the author’s father, were more extravagant than the family could realistically afford, and the senior Mangione often had to borrow money to pay for them.8 Moderation had no place at the Sunday table. The gathered crowd, encouraged by their fellow diners, went back for multiple helpings with not a jot of self-consciousness. Quite the contrary, any guest who refused another helping was given a mild rebuke.
The meatballs, ragus, and roasts that were (and remain) a centerpiece of the Italian-American kitchen had never figured in the peasant diet. Rather, they belonged to the kitchens of Italian landowners, merchants, and clergy, who, on important feast days like Easter and Christmas, distributed meat to the poor.9 In America, immigrant cooks reinterpreted these feast-day foods and, in another expression of American bounty, made them a regular part of the Sunday table. The American larder was so immense that it could literally feed the working class on a diet once reserved for Italian nobility.
One effect of the quota laws of the 1920s was to create a shadow wave of uncounted immigrants, men and women from Russia, Poland, Italy, and other restricted nations, who evaded the authorities and entered the country illegally. The Baldizzis belonged to that wave. Adolfo Baldizzi was born in Palermo in 1896 and was orphaned as a young boy. His professional training as a cabinetmaker began at age five, but the outbreak of World War I put his career temporarily on hold. A wartime portrait of Adolfo shows a young soldier with thick black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Rosaria Baldizzi (her family name was Mutolo) was born in 1906, also in Palermo, to a family of trades people and civil servants. The Baldizzis were married in 1922, the same year Rosaria turned sixteen. A year later, the couple decided to emigrate. To evade the 1921 immigrant quota laws, Adolfo came to America as a stowaway aboard a French vessel. As the ship pulled into New York Harbor, he climbed from his hiding place, jumped over the railing, and swam to shore. Rosaria made the same trip in 1924, with a doctored passport.
Adolfo Baldizzi
in his soldier’s uniform, circa 1914.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
Wedding portrait of sixteen-year-old Rosaria Mutolo Baldizzi, two years before she emigrated.
Courtesy of the Tenement Museum
For Rosaria Mutolo Baldizzi, the move to America was a step down in life. Born to a middle-class family, Rosaria spent her childhood in a good-size house with a stone courtyard where her mother grew geraniums and raised chickens, selling the eggs to neighbors. Rosaria’s father was confined to a wheelchair by the time she was a young girl, but in his youth had owned or worked in a bakery. Her two older brothers were both policemen; her sister was a dressmaker. On Sunday afternoons, still in their church clothes, the family took leisurely strolls, stopping at a local café for coffee and granita. Rosaria’s marriage to a cabinetmaker at age sixteen was considered a good match. In her 1921 wedding portrait, she is posed at the foot of an ornate staircase, dressed in a tailored skirt and matching jacket, both trimmed in a wide panel of hand-woven lace. A flapper-style cloche hat, jauntily cocked, with a long, trailing sash, completes the ensemble.