97 Orchard

by Jane Ziegelman

  Rosaria’s move to New York in 1924 meant the end of a reasonably privileged and protected life. Her first glimpse of Elizabeth Street, center of Sicilian New York, was a sobering experience for the young immigrant. To her consternation, the shoppers who overflowed the sidewalk onto the cobblestoned street were oblivious to the garbage under their feet, a carpet of moldering cabbage leaves and orange rinds. Every window ledge and door lintel was veiled in soot, like a dusting of black snow. But most disturbing of all were the Elizabeth Street stables. The young Mrs. Baldizzi was shocked to find that New Yorkers, presumably civilized people, lived side by side with horses.

  The couple’s first home was a single room in a two-room apartment. To supplement her husband’s earnings, Rosaria took in laundry, a common source of income for immigrant women. Whenever the couple fell behind in rent, they simply packed up and moved. The two Baldizzi children, Josephine and John, were born on Elizabeth Street, but in 1928, when John was still in his swaddling clothes, the family left Little Italy for 97 Orchard Street, a leap across cultures that brought the Baldizzis into the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side. Living on Orchard Street, they encountered the challenges typical of an immigrant family. These were eclipsed, however, by the calamitous events of 1929 and their aftermath. The “land of opportunity” they had expected to find evaporated before their eyes, leaving Mr. Baldizzi with a wife, two toddlers, and little hope of finding work.

  The Baldizzis remained on Orchard Street through the grimmest years of the Depression. For most of that time, Adolfo was unemployed, though he still earned a few dollars a week as a neighborhood handy-man. New clothes or toys for the children were out of the question. When the soles on Josephine’s shoes sprouted holes, they were fortified with a cardboard insert. The family food budget was concentrated on a few indispensible staples: bread, pasta, beans, lentils, and olive oil. Once a week, the family received free groceries from Home Relief, the assistance program created by Franklin Roosevelt in 1931 when he was still governor of New York. For many foreign-born Americans, Home Relief introduced the immigrant to foods like oatmeal, butter, American cheese, and, for the children, cod liver oil. It also furnished them with milk, potatoes, vegetables, flour, eggs, meat, and fish. For the Baldizzi parents, the weekly trip to the neighborhood food bank (it was actually the children’s school) was a public walk of shame. The food, however, was necessary, and they accepted it gratefully.

  Breakfast for the Baldizzi children was hot cereal, courtesy of Home Relief, or day-old bread that Mrs. Baldizzi tore into pieces and soaked in hot milk, with a little butter and sugar. The resulting dish, a kind of breakfast pudding, was a favorite of the children. Josephine Baldizzi, who was always thought too skinny by her parents, was given raw eggs to help fatten her up. The eggs were eaten two ways. Mrs. Baldizzi would poke a hole in one end of the egg, instructing her daughter to suck out the nutritious insides. She also prepared a drink for Josephine made of raw egg and milk whipped together with sugar and a splash of Marsala wine. Breakfast for the parents was hard bread dipped in coffee that Mrs. Baldizzi boiled in a pot. Coffee grinds, like tea bags, were reused two or three times before being consigned to the trash. The Baldizzi children returned home for a lunch of fried eggs and potato, or vegetable frittata. A typical evening meal was pasta and lentils or vegetable soup, which Mr. Baldizzi referred to as “belly wash.” On Saturday evenings, he made the family scrambled egg sandwiches with American ketchup.

  Though America’s bounty eluded the Baldizzis, Rosaria understood the power of food over the human psyche and used it—what little she had—as an antidote to the daily humiliations of poverty. Dinner in the Baldizzi household was a formal event, the table set with the good Italian linen that Rosaria had brought over from Sicily, the napkins ironed and starched so they stood up on their own. If the menu was limited, the food was expertly cooked and regally presented. On occasion, as a treat for the children, Rosaria would arrange their dinners on individual trays and present it to them as edible gifts. One of Josephine’s clearest childhood memories is of her mother standing in front of the black stove at 97 Orchard, holding a tray of “pizza”—a large round loaf of Sicilian bread, sliced crosswise like a hamburger bun, rubbed with olive oil, sprinkled with cheese, and baked in the oven. “You see,” Rosaria says, “you are somebody!” Such was the power of food in the immigrant kitchen: to confer dignity on a skinny tenement kid with cardboard soles in her shoes.

  On birthdays and holidays, edible gift–giving rose to the level of ritual. For All Souls Day, when ancestral spirits deigned to visit the living, Mrs. Baldizzi gave the kids a tray piled with the candied almonds known as confetti, torrone, Indian nuts, and Josephine’s personal favorite, one-cent Hooten Bars. That night, the children would slip the tray under the bed, in case the spirits should arrive hungry. The next day, after the ancestors had presumably helped themselves, it was the children’s turn. On Easter, each child received a marzipan representation of the Paschal lamb. Candy was also part of the Nativity scene displayed each December on the Baldizzis’ kitchen table, the manger strewn with confetti and American-style peppermint drops.

  Much of the candy sold in New York in the early twentieth century—Italian and otherwise—was produced locally in factories scattered through the city. In fact, by the turn of the century, New York was the center of the American candy trade, employing more people than any other food-related industry aside from bread. New York candy-makers were tied to another local industry with deep historical roots: the sugar trade. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ships carrying raw sugar from the Caribbean delivered their cargo to the refineries or “sugar houses” that were clustered near Wall Street, converting the coarse brown crystals into loaves of white table sugar. Candy factories began to appear in Lower Manhattan in the early 1800s, before migrating uptown to Astor Place, then to midtown and Brooklyn.

  By the late nineteenth century, immigrants were important players in the candy business. Some owned factories specializing in their native sweets, but many, many more worked as candy laborers. In New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, all major candy-making cities, foreign-born women, chiefly Italians and Poles, worked the assembly lines, dipping, wrapping, and boxing. Italian Women in Industry, a study published in 1919 that looked specifically at New York, reported that 94 percent of all Italian working women in 1900 were engaged in some form of manufacturing. While the overwhelming majority worked in the needle trades, about 6 percent were candy workers, a job that required no prior training or skills. The dirtiest, most onerous jobs—peeling coconuts, cracking almonds, and sorting peanuts—went to the older women who spoke no English. For their labor, they were paid roughly $4.50 for a sixty-five-hour workweek. (Women who worked in the needle trades generally earned $8 a week, while sewing machine operators, the most skilled garment workers, brought in $12 weekly or more.) The long hours and filthy conditions in the factories made candy work one of the least desirable jobs for Italian women. Mothers who worked in the candy factories for most of their adult lives prayed that daughters “would never go into it, unless they were forced to.”

  Another class of candy workers could be found in the tenements. Candy outworkers were immigrant women hired by the factories, who brought their work home to their tenement apartments, completing specific tasks within the larger manufacturing process. This two-tiered arrangement of factory workers and home workers was widespread on the Lower East Side and used by several of the most important local industries. The largest and best-documented was the garment industry, in which factory hands were responsible for the more critical jobs of cutting, sewing, and pressing, while home workers did “finishing work”: small, repetitive tasks, like sewing on buttons, stitching buttonholes, and pulling out basting threads, a job that often fell to children. In the candy trade, finishing work meant wrapping candies and boxing them. It also included nut-picking: carefully separating the meat from the nutshell with the help of an improvised tool, like a hairp
in or a nail. These were jobs often performed as a family activity, by an Italian mother and her kids, sitting at the kitchen table with a fifty-pound bag of licorice drops lugged home from the factory that morning, a small mountain of boxes at their feet.

  Unlike her sisters in the factories, the home worker fell beyond the reach of protective labor laws that regulated the length of her workday along with her minimum wage. Her children were also unprotected. In the Old Country, children worked side by side with their fathers in the fields. In cities like New York, the moment they returned from school they went to work shelling hazelnuts or walnuts until deep into the night. During the rush seasons just before Christmas and Easter, they were kept home from school entirely.

  In the eyes of middle-class America, the candy home worker was an ambiguous figure, equal parts victim and villain. Bullied and abused by greedy factory owners, she attracted support from social reformers like the National Consumer League, which advocated on her behalf. At the same time, the outworker was a threat to public safety, the foods that touched her hands contaminated by the same germs that flourished in her tenement home. Pasta, wine, matzoh, and pickles were also produced in the tenements, foods made by immigrants for immigrants. Candy, however, was different. While made by foreigners, it was destined for the wider public, available in the most exclusive uptown stores.

  As middle-class Americans became aware of tenement candy workers, panic set in. Tenement-made candy, they surmised, was the perfect vehicle for transporting working-class diseases like cholera and tuberculosis from the downtown slums to the more pristine neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan. “Table Tidbits Prepared Under Revolting Conditions,” a story that ran in the New York Tribune in 1913, sounded the alarm:

  Foodstuffs prepared in tenement houses? For whom? For you, fastidious reader and for everybody! A pleasant subject this for meditation. Slum squalor has been reaching uptown in many insidious ways. It was bad enough to think that the clothing one wore had been handled in stuffy rooms, where sanitary conditions and ventilation were deplorable…When it is learned, however, that many of the things actually eaten or put to the lips have been prepared by some poor slattern in indifferent or bad health and by more or less dirty tots of the slums amid surroundings that would cause humanity to hold its nose, a brilliant future looms up for some of the scourges scientists are busily endeavoring to stamp out.10

  An immigrant family shelling nuts at their kitchen table. This photo was used to demonstrate the unsanitary conditions that prevailed among tenement home workers.

  Library of Congress

  Stories like this one, brimming over in lurid details, enumerated the many sanitary breaches committed by the home worker. She was known, for example, to crack nuts with her teeth and pick them with her fingernails. At mealtime, picked nuts were swept to the side of the table, or removed to the floor or the bed. But most alarming of all, home workers performed their tasks in rooms shared by tuberculosis sufferers or children sick with measles. In some cases, the home worker was sick herself, like the consumptive woman who was too weak to leave her bed but somehow managed to go on with her work as a cigarette maker. The one detail consistently absent from these stories was mention of any documented illness linked to tenement-made goods. They may have occurred, but the looming threat posed by the home worker was more compelling than the actual risk.

  While immigrant candy workers fed the national sweet tooth, in their own communities, Italian confectioners made sweets for their fellow countrymen. The more prosperous owned their own shops, or bottege di confetti, preparing the candy in large copper pots at the back of the store. Marzipan, torrone (a nougat-like candy made with egg whites and honey), and panforte, a dense cake made of honey, nuts, and fruit, were specialties of the confectioner’s art. The confetti shops also sold pastries like cannoli and cassata, an ornate Sicilian cake made with ricotta, candied fruit, sponge cake, and marzipan. In the months leading up to Easter, store owners created window displays of their gaudiest, most eye-catching sweets. Herds of marzipan lambs grazed in one corner of the window, beside a field of cannoli. Pyramids of marzipan fruits and vegetables, each crafted in fine detail, loomed in the background. Most eye-catching of all, however, were candy statues representing the main actors in the Passion story: a weeping Virgin Mary in her blue cloak; Christ in his loincloth staggering under the weight of the cross; Mary Magdalene; and even the heartless Roman soldiers brandishing their spears, all cast from molten sugar.

  The Easter celebration was a family event centered on the home. More conspicuous occasions for candy consumption were the religious festivals held through the year in the streets of Little Italy. The feste were open-air celebrations in honor of a particular saint, each one connected with a town or village back home. Sponsored by fellow towns people, they combined religious observance in the form of a solemn procession with brass bands, fireworks, and public feasting, the exact nature of food determined by the immigrants’ birthplace. A Sicilian festival, for example, would include torrone, but not the kind made with egg whites. Sicilian torrone was a glossy nut brittle made with almonds or hazelnuts, a confection brought to Sicily by the Arabs. There was also cubbaita, or sesame brittle, another Arab sweet, and insolde, a Sicilian version of panforte. Below is a description of the foods, candy included, available at a 1903 festival held in Harlem, the uptown Little Italy, honoring Our Lady of Mount Carmel:

  Nut peddler at an Italian street festival.

  Library of Congress

  The crowd is chiefly buying things to eat from street vendors. Men push through the masses of people on the sidewalks, carrying trays full of brick ice cream of brilliant hues and yelling “Gelati Italiani”—Italian ices. “Lupini,” the “ginney beans” of the New York Arab; “ciceretti,” the little roasted peas and squash seeds are favorite refreshments. Great ropes of Brazil nuts soaked in water and threaded on a string, or roasted chestnuts, strung in the same way, lie around the vendor’s neck. Boys carry long sticks strung with rings of bread. All manner of “biscuitini,” small Italian cakes, are for sale, frosted in gorgeous hues, chiefly a bright magenta cheerful to look upon but rather ghastly to contemplate as an article of food.

  Boys at the door of bakeshops vociferate “Pizzarelli caldi”—hot pizzarelli. The pizzarello is a little flat cake of fried dough, probably the Neapolitan equivalent of a doughnut. They sell for a penny a piece. Sometimes the cook makes them as big as the frying pan, putting in tomato and cheese—a mixture beloved of all Italians. These big ones cost 15 cents, but there is enough for a taste all around the family. The bakers are frying them hot all through the feast. A certain cake made with molasses, and full of peanuts or almonds, baked in a long slab and cut in little squares, four or five for a cent, is much eaten. So is “coppetta,” a thick, hard white candy full of nuts; and the children all carry bags of “confetti,” little bright-colored candies with nuts inside. Here and there the sun flashes on great bunches of bright, new tin pails, heaped on the back and shoulders of the vendor: and the new pail bought and filled with lemonade passes impartially from lip to lip of the family parties lunching on the benches in Thomas Jefferson Park.11

  Below is a recipe for croccante, or almond brittle. It is adapted from The Italian Cook Book by Maria Gentile, published in 1919, among the earliest Italian cookbooks published in the United States.

  CROCCANTE

  3 cups blanched sliced almonds

  2 cups sugar

  1–2 tablespoons mildly flavored vegetable oil

  1 lemon cut in half

  Preheat to 400ºF. Liberally grease a baking tray with the vegetable oil and put aside. Spread almonds on a separate tray and toast in hot oven until golden, about 5 minutes. Heat sugar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook until sugar has completely melted. Add almonds and stir. Pour hot mixture onto greased baking tray, using the cut side of the lemon to spread evenly. Allow to cool and break into pieces.12

  In the descriptive names that immigrants invented for the United Sta
tes is a measure of what they expected to find. To Eastern European Jews, America was the Goldene Medina, or “Golden Land,” a place of extravagant wealth. For the Chinese immigrants who settled on the West Coast, America was “the gold mountain,” a reference to the California hills that would make them rich. Sicilians, by contrast, referred to America as “the land of bread and work,” an image of grim survival, comparatively speaking. To the Sicilian, however, bread was its own form of wealth. More than other Italians, Sicilians felt a special closeness to this elemental food, a “God-bequeathed friend,” in the words of Jerre Mangione, “who would keep bodies and souls together when nothing else would.”13 The Sicilian respect for bread was rooted in a long history. From the sixteenth century forward, bread formed the axis of the peasant diet, sustaining—though just barely—generations of Sicilian field workers. The typical Sicilian loaf was made from a locally cultivated strain of wheat, triticum durum, which Arab settlers had brought to Sicily, along with almonds, lemons, oranges, and sugar, back in the ninth century. The wheat grew on giant estates called latifundi, and by the Middle Ages it covered most of Sicily’s arable land. Durum was a particularly hardy strain with a high protein content, producing a dense, chewy bread with a powerful crust. When mixed with water, it could be stretched into thin sheets that resisted tearing, making it ideal for pasta, too.