97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement

This is an intensely personal book for me. My father was born in 95 Orchard Street, directly next door to what is today the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side of New York City. The fourth child of immigrant parents, he was the first born in the US. A physician, a scientist, a bon vivant, my father was immensely proud of his heritage and of his Orchard Street-Lower East Side beginnings.While growing up, I ate many of the same or similar foods that my parents ate as children, but to me, they were all jumbled up. I thought I knew the derivation of corned beef and cabbage, lasagna, fresh green salad, garlic dill pickles, rye bread and all the other foods put before me on the dining table. However, this book has been a real eye opener; an informative, nostalgic, and entertaining trip to my "roots".Jane Ziegelman, the author of 97 Orchard, has written what is called "An Edible History" and it is just that. If one were to construct an immigrant-style recipe for this book one would perhaps say: "take a cup of history, a tablespoon each of sociology and anthropology, a pinch of original recipes, mix well, edit and print".Five fascinating and interweaving chapters present the culinary history of five different immigrant families who resided in 97 Orchard Street over the course of a 70 year period. First the Glockner family from Germany, then the Moore's from Ireland, the German Jewish Gumpertz family, the Russian Jewish Rogarshevskys, and the Baldizzis from Italy each lived in the crowded tenement, and each contributed their culinary traditions to what we Americans eat today.One cannot underestimate the complexity and arduousness of the life of an immigrant woman trying to feed her family while living in a fifth floor tenement walk-up with no indoor plumbing or running water! Tubs of water (and everything else) had to be hauled up and down flights of stairs. This premium on water affected the way one cooked. Soups and one pot dishes were the most efficient methods of feeding large families nutritious and budget conscious meals. All ingredients were purchased fresh from the pushcart vendor or public market for the meal at hand. There was no refrigeration, no food storage. If the recipe called for three eggs you bought three eggs. Life was immediate and nothing was wasted.How our lives have changed (thank goodness for that!) but our food traditions have endured.I found the book highly entertaining and informative.PS.I will be attempting the Eggplants in the Oven recipe soon.

The book is fascinating and well written. The history of the various immigrant groups, and what they brought to this country in terms of cuisine and culture is very interesting. I wish there could have been more information about the five families in the title, but I'm not sure that would have been possible.Still, a great read, filled with facts you want to share.

I heard the author of this book on NPR and wanted to know more about the topic. I found this book fascinating. It shared many insights into life in the tenements of New York in the late-19th and early-20th centuries, most especially about the foodways of the immigrants. It was fascinating to read about the different groups and the "exotic" foods that they ate--some of which have become staples of our modern American diets. One small complaint was that I felt the book ended a bit abruptly. I think even a short conclusion or epilogue would have added to the book's closing.If you do read this book, I'd also recommend looking up the website of the Tenement Museum in New York, which now occupies 97 Orchard Street. You can see addtional photographs and additional details about the lives of the families profiled in the book.The Kindle formatting was good. The pictures mainly seemed to translate well, although some were small. But judging by a reviewer of the hardcover, this was also the case in the paper book.The price was a bit high for a Kindle book, but I decided it was worth it for such a fascinating glimpse into the lives of our ancestors.

And readable cultural history, also, if you aren't too picky about literary matters! Jane Ziegelman is the director of the culinary center of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, housed in the Lower East Side Tenement National Historic Site at 97 Orchard Street in New York City. Her book is an omnibus tour of American society as seen and smelled from the kitchens of five immigrant families that resided at one time or another in the tenement built, occupied, and rented out by Lucas Glockner, a German immigrant of the mid-19th Century. Among Glockner's early tenants was an extended family of refugees from the Irish potato famine, the Moores. Two families that occupied rooms at 97 Orchard were Jewish, but less monocultural than their religion might imply; the Gumpertzes were German Jews, while the late-comer Rogarshevsky family arrived via Ellis island from Lithuania at the turn of the 20th Century, when the Lower East Side was one of the most densely populated spots on the planet, with at least 111 people dwelling in the twenty apartments at 97 Orchard! By the 1920s, immigration had been severely impeded, yet the Lower East Side was still swarming with 'greenhorns', among them the Sicilian Baldizzis. Author/chef Ziegelman recounts the financial and cultural fates of these five families, spicing her anecdotes with authentic 'ethnic' recipes taken from sources available to the immigrant generations.Five languages, five cuisines, three religions. No one could plausibly deny that the Lower East Side of the Big Apple was and is the iconic American 'melting pot'. But the metaphor isn't entirely apt or realistic; America is better understood as a mixing bowl or a baling press. Each of the five immigrant families at 97 Orchard retained much of its ethnic identity, along with its cookery, and bequeathed its core values to its American descendants.North America has ALWAYS been multi-cultural. The pre-Colombian peoples were astoundingly diverse in languages and life-technologies. The earliest European colonists lived by necessity in constant interchange with indigenous peoples. The colonies that eventually became the USA were not all "English" at birth; there were Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch, and Sephardic Americans scattered from 'New Mexico' to 'Maine' by the middle of the 17th Century. Despite the wishful mythology of such ideologically extreme 'nativists' as Thomas Woods, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Thirteen Colonies that declared independence from England in 1776 were a rainbow of diversity. In the first census of 1790, only 60% of the white/European population of three million was English in ancestry, in addition to which there were 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of surviving 'Indian' people living within the territory already controlled by the new nation. That's according to the authentic historian Gordon S. Wood, in his book "Empire of Liberty". But even the colonists from the island of Great Britain were distinctly multi-cultural, as documented by dependable historian David Hackett Fischer in his brilliant "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America". The Britons brought their diverse dialects, their concepts of land usage and ownership, their religious sects, and their social hierarchies to America; the notion that Europeans left "Europe" behind them when they crossed the Atlantic is spurious, nothing more than chauvinistic 'American Exceptionalism'.The pros and cons of "multi-culturalism" have been a hot topic in America since the pre-revolutionary conflicts in Pennsylvania, between the unassimilated Germans and the majority Anglos, who were themselves fiercely diverse in religion. The Germans, in fact, remained stubbornly unassimilated from the mid-17th C to the mid-20th, and they were by far the largest and steadiest flow of immigrants through the long haul of American history, so that approximately one of every six Americans today claims German ancestry. The Germans kept their language throughout the 19th C, had their own newspapers, schools, and cultural institutions, and sent their own representatives into government at all levels. The recent waves of immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, or India have 'assimilated' far more rapidly and willingly than the Germans did in the centuries before the World Wars made 'German identity' awkward in the USA.The horrible slaughter of innocents in Norway this year, wrought by a right wing extremist, has been perceived as a reaction to 'multi-culturalism' as a social policy. Honestly, I can grasp a certain legitimacy in the notion that a distinctive culture has a proper right to preserve its integrity. A widely-supported social policy of exclusion of immigration and/or mandatory assimilation might be reasonable in Norway ... in Yemen, Gabon, Bhutan, Bali ... though 'hospitality' would always be more admirable. But no class or coterie of 'citizens' in the USA has any cultural or historical grounds for declaring itself to be the "100% Americans". Ethnic/religious/culinary diversity, and the wholesome appreciation thereof, is the defining virtue of real Americanism. That's the message of "97 Orchard". As a certain folksinger said so eloquently: "I'm eatin' bagels, I'm eatin' pizza ..."Oh, by the way, the recipes in "97 Orchard" include some treasures: German Veal Stew with Dried Pears, Irish Oyster Patties, Sicilian Baccala (codfish), Lithuanian Cranberry Strudel (the cranberries obviously a New World substitute for Lingon), and (would you believe?) a 19th C 'Vegetarian Chopped Liver'. Ziegelman isn't the most systematic historian or the most consistent sytlist, but I'm pretty sure she's a fine cook.

The book starts out really good and interesting and then about halfway through it seems to get scattered and not as detailed about the peoples lives and a little to Monday and

Very interesting history of waves of immigration and their contributions to what we eat in the USA

Arrived within stated time & good price, and condition.. Thank-you.

Tenement Museumへ行く人、行った人は、この本を読むと、展示ツァーがよりよく理解できるので、おすすめ。

I just enjoyed it.

Loved it. Great book.