97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (11 page)

Murphy with his coat on–boiled potato, unpeeled

solid shot–apple dumpling

shipwreck–scrambled eggs

mystery–hash

one–oyster pie
¹⁹

Along with oyster pie, the cheap eating house offered oysters on the half shell, fried oysters, broiled oysters, oyster stew, oyster pan roast, oysters Baltimore-style, and oyster omelet. A dish called oyster patty, a prebaked puff pastry shell filled with oysters in gravy, was created on the spot for waiting customers by the “patty man,” a restaurant worker with a specialized skill. Watching him at work, if he was especially talented, was a form of free entertainment. One New York patty man, an exceptionally nimble Irishman, caught the attention of a local reporter, who deconstructed his manipulations into eight quick, but distinct motions, all performed with consummate grace.

A mid-nineteenth-century New Yorker enjoying freshly shucked oysters from an Irish-owned oyster stand.
“The Oyster Stand, 1840,” Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Francis P. Garvan

The recipe below is from
Jennie June’s American Cookery Book
, published in 1870:

O
YSTER
P
ATTIES

Beard the oysters, and, if large, halve them; put them into a saucepan with a piece of butter rolled in flour, some finely shred lemon rind, and a little white pepper, and milk, and a portion of the liquor from the fish; stir all well together, let it simmer for a few minutes, and put it in your patty pans [resembling shallow cupcake pans], which should already be prepared with puff paste in the usual way. Serve hot or cold.
²⁰

New York was growing in size, volume, and stature, assuming its place as a world-class commercial capital. Eating places like Sweeny’s answered the changing culinary needs of a city in transition. At the same time, it literally fed the engine of change. The great nineteenth-century reporter George Foster sums up the dynamic with his customary flair:

We are inclined to believe that, notwithstanding their steaming-rooms and thin soups, it is to the Eating Houses that New York is in a great measure indebted for that continuous rush of commercial activity around her great business centres, which so strikingly distinguishes her from all other cities…Just think of it—two or three thousand people going up and down the same stairs and dining at the same tables, within three hours! Such a scene cannot be imagined by any but a New Yorker. Nowhere else, either in Europe or America, does anything like it exist. It is the culmination, the consummation, the concentration of Americanism.
²¹

Apparently, Foster was unaware that this quintessentially American institution had its roots in the driving creativity of immigrants.

When Bridget and Joseph landed in New York in the 1860s, the food most closely identified with Irish-Americans was already a gastronomic fixture on this side of the Atlantic. Though corned beef and cabbage traveled to the United States with the first Dutch settlers in the early seventeenth century, many of the groups that followed, including the English, the Germans, and the Jews, emigrated with their own corned beef traditions.

Corned beef belongs to a large family of preserved meats and fish. Many, like smoked salmon, are now considered delicacies, but a century or more ago they were foods of necessity. The invention of modern refrigeration, starting with the icebox in the early nineteenth century, alleviated one of the cook’s most vexing challenges: keeping food relatively fresh and edible. To meet this critical need, women across Europe devised several techniques, each of them based on one, or sometimes two different preserving agents. Those agents were heat, smoke, salt, and acid. So, for example, meats, fish, and fowl were generally smoked, salted, or pickled, while fruits and vegetables were pickled, jarred, or dried.

The term “corned beef” refers to the large grains, or corns, of salt with which the meat was cured. An early account of how this was done appears in a British domestic manual from 1750,
The Country Housewife’s Family Companion
:

After the beef has been sprinkled with salt, and lain to drain out its bloody juice six or seven hours, wipe every piece dry, and rub them all over well with dry hot salt. This done, pack them close in a pot or tub one upon another.
²²

Housewives performed the same basic procedure every year around harvest time, or whenever cattle were slaughtered. In the cities, meanwhile, urban dwellers could buy their beef already salted from local food purveyors. A generous portion of it was produced in Cork, Ireland. Along with butter, bacon, cheese, pickled meats, and preserved fish, Irish food manufacturers exported thousands of barrels of corned beef to countries throughout Europe. Some traveled even farther, crossing the Atlantic to European settlements in the New World. Cork provisioners shipped immense quantities of corned beef, along with other edible goods, to the West Indies, where farmland was reserved for the lucrative business of growing sugar cane. Up until 1776, some of those goods, corned beef included, were exported to the English colonies in North America.

Wherever corned beef was eaten, cooks developed ways of preparing it that harmonized with local food traditions. In Germany, it was thinly sliced and served with black bread. Scottish cooks combined their corned beef with a regional staple, oats. First, they simmered the meat along with carrots, parsnips, potatoes, cress, and cabbage. When the vegetables were tender, they added a scoop of oatmeal to the pot to thicken the stock. English cooks included corned beef in their savory pies. Just across the North Sea, the Irish improvised their own corned beef creations; one was boiled corned beef and cabbage. In 1854, an information-packed article on Dublin street vendors appeared in an English journal called
Ainsworth’s Magazine
. The author, an Irishman named Matthew Lynch, lists the many food peddlers who plied their wares. Oysters, cockles, herrings, turnips, peas, cauliflower, strawberries are some of the foods he mentions. Another common item was cabbage, which, according to Lynch, was scarcely ever eaten unless accompanied by either bacon or corned beef. “A rump of beef and cabbage is a favorite dish with all persons in Ireland—either peers or peasants,” Lynch informs us. Maybe this was true in an idealized Ireland, but in reality corned beef was beyond the means of the average farmer. In fact, many of the poor Irish who arrived in the United States after the 1840s had likely never even tasted it. Much more likely, the traditional Irish pairing of corned beef and cabbage had been carried to the United States by well-off merchants and industrialists, most from the Protestant north of Ireland, who had settled here a century earlier.

Businessmen mingle with street urchins in a downtown lunchroom. Freshly carved corned beef (far left) was a lunchroom staple.
Provided courtesy of HarpWeek., LLC

In nineteenth-century America, corned beef and cabbage developed a split personality. At the cheapest New York lunchrooms, a serving large enough to feed a family of five was ladled into tin buckets (an early version of “takeout”) and sold for 15 cents. Corned beef also gave sustenance to the city’s newsboys, a population of orphaned kids who lived on the streets, supporting themselves by hawking the daily papers. Beginning in the 1850s, newsboys were able to buy a bed for the night at one of the city’s Newsboys’ Lodging Houses, a New York charity that remained active well into the twentieth century. In addition to shelter, the boys received two meals a day. For breakfast, they had coffee, oatmeal, and bread and butter, and for supper, a rotating selection of cost-effective entrées. Here is one typical dinner lineup from 1895: “Sunday, roast beef; Monday, pork and beans; Tuesday, beef stew; Wednesday, corned beef and cabbage; Thursday, pork and beans; Friday, fish balls; and Saturday, pork and beans.”
²³
Inexpensive and easy to cook, corned beef and cabbage was a staple of the institutional kitchen. Along with orphanages and military camps, it also made steady appearances in hospitals and prison mess halls.

But corned beef and cabbage also led a much more exalted existence, featured in some of the nation’s most exclusive dining venues. Contrary to our romantic projections of the nineteenth-century family Christmas, wealthy New Yorkers frequently spent the holiday in a hotel dining room. In anticipation of Christmas Eve, hotel chefs across the city composed the most lavish multicourse dinners imaginable, competing with one another in a kind of unofficial holiday cook-off. On Christmas Day, their menus were published in the local papers. The
New York Times
Christmas dinner roundup for 1880 began:

The discriminating palate of the sybarite was necessary for a full appreciation of yesterday’s Christmas dinners at most of the big hotels in this cosmopolitan town. At the Windsor Hotel, one of several mentioned, the menu was all that a gourmet could ask for.
²⁴

Among the offerings were Maryland terrapin, canvasback duck with currant jelly,
and
corned beef and cabbage. At a New Year’s Day luncheon hosted by the Fifth Avenue Hotel, corned beef and cabbage shared the table with pâté de foie gras, tournedos of beef with sauce béarnaise, and sweetbreads
financière
.

While the well-to-do native New Yorker celebrated with corned beef and cabbage, the Irish had disowned their ancestral food. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, each year on St. Patrick’s Day, Irish-American societies convened for all-male holiday banquets, formal and highly structured events that began with a seven-course meal and ended with a series of very long toasts. The banquet room was customarily decorated with Irish and American flags, portraits of St. Patrick (some executed in sugar paste, others drawn in wax on the mirrors), emblems of harps and shamrocks. The bulk of the menu, however, comprised the same Frenchified foods served at any New York banquet, with perhaps a single symbolically Irish food thrown into the mix as a kind of accent. So, for instance, along with
sole farcie au vin blanc
, and filet of beef, you might find “potatoes served in their jackets,” or Irish bacon with greens. Like other immigrants, New York’s Irish elite faced the tricky task of straddling two cultures, one rooted in their Irish past, the other in their present lives as assimilated citizens. (The same identity-juggling is reflected in the banquet menus of the well-to-do German
vereine
. Gathered in their meeting halls, the banquet room decorated with German and American flags,
vereine
members feasted on Kennebec salmon with sauce Hollandaise, chicken
à la Reine
, and potatoes
Parisienne
, foods that represented the culinary cutting edge. In acknowledgment of their ethnic roots, however, the menu also included a handful of token German specialties, perhaps asparagus with Westphalian ham, or chicken soup with marrow-filled dumplings.)

Through a gradual, haphazard process, second-and third-generation immigrants reclaimed corned beef and cabbage as a quintessentially Irish food. One early instance of this culinary appropriation can be found in a comic strip. “Bringing Up Father,” created by George MacManus in 1913, stars Maggie and Jiggs, an Irish immigrant couple suddenly thrust into high society. How each of them responds to their newfound wealth provides the comic’s basic story line. Maggie is a dedicated social climber, determined to wash away all traces of her working-class roots, while Jiggs is happy to go on carousing with his pals as if nothing has changed. A continuing point of tension between them is Jiggs’s unshakable affection for corned beef and cabbage, the food of his hardscrabble past. Below is one example of their many corned beef–inspired spats: