97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (30 page)

Curbside bread peddler on Mulberry Street, selling her wares from a basket.

Elizabeth Street in the 1930s hosted two groceries, two butcher shops, one fish store, and one candy store, but six bakeries. In New York, the typical Sicilian loaf was a simple round bread sprinkled with sesame seeds, weighing roughly two pounds. On holidays and feast days, however, the baker’s imagination took flight, and the Elizabeth shops offered fantastic bread sculptures, each shape tied to a particular saint. One resembled a curving bowl of flowers, another was shaped like a swirling backward
S
with frilled edges. Though each of these fanciful shapes was created for the saints, the baker hedged his bets by including breads that were braided or knotted, traditional forms of protection from the evil eye.

When they lived on Orchard Street, the Baldizzis relied on bread as a food of survival in much the same way it had been for generations of Sicilian peasants. It was eaten at every meal, and for breakfast it
was
the meal. Stale or hard bread was never thrown away. Instead, Rosaria would rub it with a little water and oil and put it in a warm oven to soften it up. Bread that was too far gone to revive was turned into bread crumbs, the indispensable ally of all Sicilian cooks. Bread crumbs were used to stretch more costly ingredients like meat, and sometimes to replace it entirely. Combined with oil, parsley, and garlic, bread crumbs were used as a stuffing for peppers, zucchini, artichokes, and other vegetables. Bread crumbs, parsley, and eggs were used to make frittata, a standard midday meal for the Italian laborers who dug the New York subway system. Bread crumbs were also toasted in hot oil and sprinkled over pasta or pizza as a replacement for the more expensive grated cheese. Even as their incomes rose, Sicilian-Americans continued to cook with bread crumbs, a former food of necessity. Nothing made a crunchier coating for fried calamari or
arancini
, the creamy, fist-size rice balls filled with ground meat or cheese, sold as street food and prepared in the home for holidays and parties. Today, they appear on the menus of old-time Sicilian restaurants and delicatessens. Below are two bread crumb recipes. The first is for a bread-crumb frittata.

Z
UCCHINI
F
RITTATA

4 large or 6 small zucchini

1 small onion sliced

3 tablespoons olive oil

5 eggs

½ cup grated Romano cheese

1/3 cup bread crumbs

Salt and pepper

Rinse and grate zucchini using the large holes on a hand-held grater. You could also use the shredding disc on a food processor. Place grated zucchini in a colander over the sink. Sprinkle with a teaspoon of salt, toss, and let sit 15 minutes or longer, until the zucchini begins to “weep.” Squeeze out the extra moisture with your hands. Put aside.

Sauté the onion in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil until lightly golden. Add the zucchini. Cook until zucchini is slightly browned in spots and most of the remaining moisture has cooked away. Season with salt and pepper, and remove from the stove. Meanwhile, beat the eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the warm zucchini, along with the grated cheese and bread crumbs. Let the mixture sit a minute or two, so the bread crumbs can drink up some of the egg. Add remaining oil to the frying pan, and let it get hot. Add egg mixture, then turn down the heat. Cook over a low flame until frittata starts to set around the edges. Place under a hot broiler to finish cooking the top. Slide onto a plate. Eat at room temperature.
¹⁵

The pasta recipe below comes to us from Concetta Rizzolo, an immigrant from Avellino, a town east of Naples, who settled in New Jersey in the 1910s. The toasted bread crumbs can be stored in the refrigerator for several weeks.

S
PAGHETTI CON AGLIO E OLIO

½ cup olive oil

6 cloves garlic, minced

½ to 1 tsp red pepper flakes

10 black peppercorns

1 pound spaghetti

½ cup chopped parsley

½ cup toasted bread crumbs

To toast bread crumbs, coat a frying pan with olive oil and heat over a medium flame. When the oil is warm, add 1 cup homemade bread crumbs. Stir bread crumbs to prevent them from burning or sticking. They are ready as soon as they turn a uniform golden-brown.

Boil water for spaghetti. Meanwhile, heat oil over low flame. Add garlic and peppercorns. Cook garlic over a very low flame until it is soft and translucent, but do not allow it to brown. Add pepper flakes and continue to cook for about five minutes.

Drain pasta but reserve about a cup of cooking water. Add to oil and garlic mixture and heat over low flame. Toss with spaghetti and serve immediately with parsley and toasted bread crumbs.
¹⁶

Living on Orchard Street, in the heart of the Jewish East Side, the Baldizzis formed close relationships with their Jewish neighbors, Fannie Rogarshevsky in particular. After her husband died, when Fannie assumed the role of building janitor, Mr. Baldizzi, a trained carpenter, often helped her with repairs. The two became good friends. Sometime in the early 1930s, to alleviate crowding in the Rogarshevsky household, one of Fannie’s grandsons was sent to live with the Baldizzis. Conversely, Fannie regularly fixed school-day lunches for the Baldizzi kids when their mother was at work. (Rosaria Baldizzi worked for a short time during the Depression but had to give up her job or forfeit her check from Home Relief.) The young Josephine, Fannie Rogarshevsky’s designated
shabbos goy
, was fascinated by the way the Jewish homemaker koshered her chickens, scrubbing them at the kitchen sink the way an Italian mother might scrub an especially dirty child. Every evening, Mr. Baldizzi stopped by Schreiber’s Delicatessen on Broome Street for a glass of schnapps, his ritual nightcap. On weekends he took the kids on long walks that carried them over the Manhattan Bridge and back again, stopping along the way for hot potato pancakes, that quintessentially Jewish snack sold by the East Side vendors. Even so, when it was time to shop for groceries, Mrs. Baldizzi found limited use for the pushcart market directly below her window. Instead, the food she depended on could be found a few blocks away, in the Italian pushcart market on Mulberry Street. By the time of the mayor’s pushcart commission in 1906, Mulberry Street was already a full-ser vice open-air market catering to the Italian homemaker. Satellite markets sprang up on Elizabeth and Bleecker streets and along First Avenue below 14th Street. The largest of all, however, extended for nearly a mile from 100th to 119th streets on First Avenue in East Harlem. The pushcart markets were the single most important source of food for immigrant New Yorkers from the 1880s through the late 1930s, when Mayor La Guardia, the son of immigrants himself, finally prevailed in the decades-long battle between the pushcart peddlers and the city government. In anticipation of the upcoming World’s Fair and the multitudes that would soon descend on New York, La Guardia shut down one market after another, consolidating some and moving others into newly built market buildings more befitting a modern city. The Mulberry Street market fell to the mayor’s ax in 1939, the year the fair opened. In the meantime, however, the Mulberry Street pushcarts supplied Italian cooks like Mrs. Baldizzi with foods unknown in the Jewish quarter. The Italian peddlers, for example, did a brisk business in mussels, periwinkles, conch, oysters, and clams. The last two items were sold as street food, the Italian equivalent to the Jewish knish.

Clams on the half-shell, a common street food in Little Italy.
Picture Collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations

In the Old Country, Italian women foraged for snails, a free source of precious protein. In America, the snail peddler became a fixture of the Italian pushcart market. His mode of advertising, unique among street vendors, was an upright board with the snails clinging to it. The bulk of his delicate stock could be found in a crate under the pushcart to keep the snails shaded and cool. Italian cooks soaked their snails in cold water, prompting the animal to inch out of its shell, then fried it with garlic, creating a savory and inexpensive topping for pasta. Other sea creatures sold at the market were squid, octopus, and eels, which the Italian cook stewed with tomatoes.

But the most remarkable feature of the Italian markets was the selection of greens and other vegetables that figured so prominently in the immigrants’ diet. Early accounts of the pushcart markets offer a partial list of the many forms of plant life sold by Italian peddlers. There was cabbage and cauliflower—though no mention of broccoli—cow peas, cucumbers, celery (distinct from American celery), fennel, peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, onion, garlic, chickweed, beet tops, lettuce, and many other forms of leafy greens which the Americans had no names for. As a convenience to the homemaker, beans could be purchased dried or already soaked to hasten the cooking time. The Italian vegetable peddlers, many of them women, were fastidious in the presentation of their goods. As one observer noted, “They clean, cut, and freshen the vegetables, constantly rearranging them so that they appear to the best advantage on the stands.”
¹⁷
The women scrubbed their celery and their fennel until the stalks gleamed; they buffed the peppers and sprinkled the lettuce with water to keep it from wilting. Americans, who still thought of salads as an assemblage of vegetables and meats, often bound with mayonnaise, were struck by the Italians’ more restrained approach to the same dish. “No other people in the world,” one observer remarked,

use so many salads. They never mix tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers as Americans do in their salads. Each is kept separate. For their tomato salad, they clean the tomatoes, but do not peel them, split or slice them, and dress them with oil, but no vinegar. Then they strew over them stems of “regona,” a herb of aromatic taste and smell which comes dried from Italy…Cucumbers they peel and eat with both oil and vinegar, regona, and garlic. The heart of the lettuce, which they call “lattuga,” is a prime favorite, dressed with olive oil and Italian vinegar.
¹⁸

The Italian’s devotion to these simple preparations was also noteworthy. “The Italian invariably has a salad for dinner if he can afford it,” our observer adds, “and it seems often to supply the place of meat to him.” To the American, the Italian salad habit was a source of puzzlement. How could a plate of lettuce, they wondered, take the place of a good roast? More curious still, how could a diet so lacking in substance provide the nourishment required to sustain human life?

Come spring, immigrants scoured the vacant lots of Brooklyn and the Bronx for wild dandelions, a food they had once gathered in the fields around their native villages. In New York, dandelions were a source of income for Italian women who collected the greens, cleaned them, and sold them at the pushcart markets, a washtub’s worth for a nickel. Italian cooks used the wild green for dandelion soup, or fried them in olive oil with tomatoes and pepper. When boiled for several hours, the filtered cooking liquid,
“acqua di cicorie”
was used as a tonic for “dyspepsia and general weakness.”
¹⁹
An Italian summer delicacy was
cucuzza
, an extremely long squash with smooth, pale green skin and a hook at one end like an umbrella handle. Peddlers displayed the
cucuzze
by looping the hooked ends over a horizontal pole so they hung like stockings on a wash line. The leaves of the plant, sold as a separate vegetable, were heaped in crates on the pushcart below.
Cucuzza
was especially popular with Sicilian cooks, who added it to soups or fried it with garlic and tomatoes. Sicilian confectioners, meanwhile, chopped the squash into small pieces or shaved it into ribbons, then boiled it in sugar syrup until the opaque white interior had turned deep gold and was almost transparent.