97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (24 page)

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the “delicatessen habit” moved up the economic ladder and caught on among the middle class. With this development, a new tradition was born: the Sunday delicatessen supper, a meal composed of cooked foods, hot and ready to serve. Not only in New York, but across urban America, the delicatessen was now so thoroughly entrenched that it sparked an anti-delicatessen backlash. Domestic scientists, among other concerned Americans, blamed the delicatessen for an array of social maladies. A few links of sausage, a loaf of white bread, and a bottle of ketchup, the standard delicatessen meal, drives the workingman straight to the nearest saloon, these women argued. Along with intemperance—a source of growing apprehension in pre–World War I America—delicatessens were thought responsible for the nation’s climbing divorce rate. “If fewer women depended on the delicatessen store,” one expert argued, “there would be fewer broken homes.”
¹⁷
Disgruntled husbands could be made manageable if their wives would only take the trouble to cook for them.

The history of the Jewish delicatessen follows a separate but roughly parallel track. The country’s first Jewish delicatessens opened for business on the Lower East Side early in the 1850s. Established by German Jews, they specialized in smoked, brined, and spiced meats, much like their Gentile counterparts. They also carried myriad forms of herring, pumpernickel, and the standard assortment of German salads. The two stores even looked alike. The delicatessen’s main staging area was a white marble counter, where the meats were displayed and sliced for the customer. The salads were arrayed in a row of stoneware crocks. What set the Jewish delicatessen apart was the total absence of any product derived from pigs. In its place, German Jews turned to geese. The following description is taken from an 1897 story that ran in the
New York Tribune
:

There are delicatessen shops in New York where roast fowl and sliced ham are unknown, where pigs’ feet would not be tolerated, and where an order of venison would be given in vain. The Kosher delicatessen places of the crowded East Side, although in name like those in Sixth-ave., carry a stock of goods unlike those of any other place. There, in season, may be bought the various dainties made from goose meat. Among these are
Gansekleines, Gansegruben,
and fattened goose liver.
Gansekleines
is the name given to the small pieces of the dressed goose, like wings, feet, and neck, and
Gansegruben
are the pieces of the brown crackling from which the fat has been extracted. In some of these places they also prepare what is known as
Gesetztes Essen.
This consists of a mixture of barley and dried peas, which is prepared on Friday for consumption on Saturday when the pious Jews do no cooking.
¹⁸

Without a doubt, the Sabbath stew glistened with goose schmaltz.

Beyond these goose-based dainties, Jewish delicatessens sold kosher wursts and frankfurters, corned beef and corned tongue. In the early days, the cured meats were shipped over from Germany, but as the Jewish community settled in, it became more self-sufficient. During the 1870s, kosher sausage factories sprang up on the Lower East Side to supply the quickly multiplying number of Jewish delicatessens in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and smaller cities as well. In 1872, a German butcher named Isaac Gellis produced some of America’s first domestic kosher frankfurters in his sausage factory at 37 Essex Street. As the company was passed down from father to son to grandson, it grew into an empire, with delicatessen restaurants selling nothing but the Gellis brand scattered through Manhattan. One of them, Fine & Schapiro, can still be found on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Moses Zimmerman, also from Germany, was another early sausage-maker. His factory on East Houston Street opened in 1877, producing bolognas, frankfurters, wienerwursts, corned beef, and corned tongue, along with kosher cooking fat.

In the 1880s, as migration patterns shifted and large numbers of Eastern European Jews sailed for America, they discovered the delicatessen in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago. The great majority had never seen one before. Older immigrants looked on the delicatessen with suspicion (it was “too spicy” and “too fancy”), while their children were intoxicated by its distinct perfume, a blend of boiled beef, garlic, pepper, and vinegar. Mondays through Fridays, they rushed from school to the local deli for a lunch of pickles and halvah. On Saturdays, the delicatessen was closed for the Sabbath, but it opened again Saturday evenings at sundown. This was a moment that ghetto kids looked forward to with crazed anticipation, famously captured by Alfred Kazin in his food-rich memoir,
A Walker in the City.
Saturdays at twilight, Kazin writes, neighborhood kids haunted the local delicatessen, waiting for it to reopen. As soon as it did, the kids raced in, “panting for the hot dogs sizzling on the gas plate just inside the window. The look of that blackened empty gas plate had driven us wild all through the wearisome Sabbath day. And now, as the electric sign blazed up again, lighting up the words Jewish National Delicatessen, it was as if we had entered our rightful heritage.”
¹⁹

The irony here is that the delicatessen was not, in fact, a pillar of Jewish food culture, at least not for the Russians, or the Poles, or the Litvaks, but the Jews declared it one all the same. If their mothers disapproved—and most mothers did—for Jewish kids, the delicatessen was like a second home, part lunchroom, part urban clubhouse, and at night, an after-hours meeting place for ghetto sweethearts. With their limited pocket money, East Side kids were confined to the cheapest items on the delicatessen menu: a frankfurter with yellow mustard or a salami sandwich. The big-ticket item was a plate of sliced deli meat served with a tub of pickles. The most aristocratic option of all was the “mixed plate”: a combination of pastrami, corned beef, and tongue.

Inch by inch, their kids leading the way, the new Jewish immigrants developed a taste for the cured meats of their German brothers and sisters. Those with an entrepreneurial bent looked to the delicatessen as a business opportunity and opened stores of their own. Samuel Chotzinoff, a Russian immigrant and future concert pianist, remembers exactly what that entailed. The Chotzinoff family arrived in New York in the late 1890s when Samuel was around eight years old. A few years later, when his mother decided to open a delicatessen, she paid a visit to one of the local sausage manufacturers. In keeping with East Side custom, the Mandelbaum Sausage factory offered her a kind of delicatessen start-up package. It included fixtures for the store (paid for on an installment plan) and three months of credit toward supplies. The sausage people even taught her how to cut meat into the thinnest possible slices, the delicatessen’s key to financial success. A seltzer company lent Mrs. Chotzinoff a soda-water fountain for making syrup drinks. The store kitchen was a backroom with a three-burner stove, where she cooked her own corned beef in a tin clothes boiler. The entire operation cost her only $150 upfront, money that she borrowed from a well-off landsman.

Looking beyond the delicatessen, the Jewish East Side was home to a staggering variety of eating places. Neighborhood restaurants catered to every nameable niche and subniche of the local population—geographic, economic, professional, and even political—attracting a highly specialized clientele of like-minded diners. Every national group had its corresponding restaurant. The more modest establishments were located in tenement apartments temporarily converted into public eating spaces. Blurring the line between home and business, the private restaurant offered diners a truly Old World eating experience: a home-cooked meal prepared in the style of a particular region or city back in Europe. A visitor to the East Side in 1919, who discovered these private restaurants, explains how they worked:

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-Kipferl
²²

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.