97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (31 page)

Much of the produce sold on Mulberry Street was grown on immigrant “truck farms” in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey, a few hours commute from the wholesale markets in Lower Manhattan. A bit farther out from the city, Italians established a vibrant farming community in Vineland, New Jersey, which by 1900 comprised two hundred and sixty immigrant families. The Vineland farmers cultivated fruits and vegetables for the immigrant market using seeds imported from Italy. Their crops included garlic, peppers, cauliflower, cabbage, beets, fennel, cardoons (a relative of artichokes), chestnuts, figs, plums, and ten varieties of grapes.

In the nineteenth century, immigrant Jews carried their goose-farming tradition to America, establishing urban poultry farms in the East Side tenements. Several decades later, Italian immigrants brought their treasured home gardens to urban America, now reconfigured as a tenement window box. In wooden planters made from discarded soapboxes, Italian homemakers grew oregano, basil, mint, peppers, tomatoes, and lettuce. (The more ambitious urban farmers planted their gardens on tenement rooftops.) The tradition of the home garden continues today in Italian neighborhoods like Hoboken, New Jersey, and Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where second-and third-generation immigrants grow basil and plum tomatoes in emptied institutional-size cans of
pomodori pelati
.

Though removed from the soil, transplanted Italian women moved to the rhythm of the agricultural year. Each fall, in New York’s Little Italy, they bought up great loads of peppers and preserved them for the coming winter. The peppers were split and brined in tubs of saltwater or packed in jars filled with vinegar. The women also dried their peppers in the sun, just as they used to in the Old Country. In New York, however, they threaded the peppers onto long strings and suspended them from the fire escapes in great dangling loops. Tomatoes were also dried in the sun, along with eggplant, which the women first cut into strips. Each of these dried vegetables was soaked in water for several hours prior to cooking, then fried in olive oil or added to soup. The eggplant recipe below is from Maria Gentile.

E
GGPLANTS IN THE
O
VEN

Skin five or six eggplants, cut them in round slices, and salt them so that they throw out the water that they contain. After a few hours, dip in flour and frying oil.

Take a fireproof vase or baking tin and place the slices in layers, with grated cheese between each layer, abundantly seasoned with tomato sauce.

Beat one egg with a pinch of salt, a tablespoonful of tomato sauce, a teaspoonful of grated cheese and two of crumbs of bread, and cover the upper layer with this sauce. Put the vase in the oven and when the egg is coagulated, serve hot.
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The contempt for Italian cooking that prevailed in this country a hundred-plus years ago is a buried fact in our culinary history and a surprising one, too, considering how much attitudes have changed. In the United States today, no immigrant cuisine is more embraced by the American cook, her kitchen stocked with tomato paste, canned tomatoes, jarred marinara sauce, olive oil, parmesan cheese, garlic, and above all pasta, mainstay of the American dinner table. And what food, if not pizza, is more beloved by American schoolchildren?

This national love affair unfolded in two overlapping yet disconnected chapters. Chapter one began in the mid-nineteenth century, as immigrants from northern Italy settled in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Boston, and San Francisco. Italians who belonged to this first wave were largely people of culture—artists, musicians, teachers, doctors, and other professionals. Among the early immigrants were restaurant-keepers. In the 1850s and 1860s, as the Italian settlements gathered critical mass, they opened eating places to feed their transplanted countrymen. New York’s first Italian restaurants were clustered near Union Square, close to 14th Street, then the city’s main entertainment thoroughfare and home to the Academy of Music, the nation’s first official opera house. In 1857, an Italian named Stefano Moretti opened a pleasingly shabby second-floor restaurant directly across the street from the Academy, which became New York’s first important Bohemian dining spot. The favorite haunt of Italian opera stars, Moretti’s began to attract native-born musicians, artists, and writers. The avant-garde of their day, they were drawn to Moretti’s by the delightfully foreign atmosphere as well as the food, a five-course dinner for a dollar, a fair price for the time though well beyond the means of the working class. The dishes they encountered were typical of the northern kitchen. Risotto with kidney was a house specialty, along with wild duck and quail, both served with salad. But Signor Moretti was also known for his spaghetti, “tender as first love” and “sweet beyond comparison.” Though nineteenth-century Americans were generally familiar with macaroni, the pipe-stem-shaped pasta used today for mac ’n’ cheese, spaghetti was still utterly alien. American diners were simultaneously baffled, alarmed, and enchanted by these attenuated strands of dough that they discovered in Italian restaurants but still had no name for. If the food itself was bizarre, the complicated procedure of eating it left Americans awestruck. The following description of a New York Italian restaurant circa 1889 captures the air of adventure surrounding this novel food. The second course consisted

of a substance resembling macaroni that has been pulled out until each piece is at least two feet long, while the thickness has proportionally diminished. You are told that it is wholly bad form to cut this reptile-like food; you must eat as the Italians do. Thereupon you suddenly cease to feel hungry, and spend the time in observation. They, to the manner born, lift a mass of this slippery thing upon the fork, give the wrist several expert twists, and then, with lightning rapidity, place it in the mouth. If by misfortune a string escapes, it is gradually recovered in the most nonchalant manner imaginable. It is a fascinating operation, though by no means one to inspire a desire to emulate the operator.
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The only thing more diverting than this queer new food was the foreign crowd, a collection of singers, ballerinas, professors, journalists, and businessmen.

As the city’s theaters migrated from 14th Street to Broadway, the restaurants followed. For New Yorkers out on the town, tired of their native chop houses and oyster saloons, Italian food was a refreshing change of pace, and much cheaper than French, the foreign cuisine favored by elite society. Italian food, by contrast, along with German, was the foreign cuisine of the American middle class. The kind of food New Yorkers could expect to find at the new Broadway restaurants was more attuned to American tastes. For the less adventuresome eater, they offered both chops and oysters. The rest of the menu was still rooted in the more mildly flavored and buttery cuisine of northern Italy. An inventory of recommended dishes that ran in the
New York Sun
advised diners to stick with the cheaper items on the menu, like spaghetti in meat sauce, “a chopped-up soupy compound,” and to skip the more expensive meats in favor of veal, lamb, and giblets:

The leg of veal, usually used for a soup bone, is delicious when it comes on the table as osso buco. The leg is roasted, there is a suggestion of herbs and garlic and a sauce of brown butter over the risotto that accompanies it. Then there is the delicious marrow in the bone that has been opened in order that it may easily be eaten.

The veal cutlets, whether they are served à la Milanaise, with cêpes cut up over them and put into a sauce of butter and cheese, or with herbs, are superior to any that can be eaten at the best of Fifth avenue restaurants.

Arostino,
which means a little roast, is a slice of the veal served with the kidney embedded into it and cooked with thyme and a thick brown sauce covering it and a bed of risotto. Such a cut of veal is unknown to American butchers.

The kidneys
au sauce Medere
are made in accordance with an Italian formula and are remarkable from the fact that only very small kidneys are used and they are served with champignons of about the same size.

It is in such dishes as these that the Italian restaurants excel, and to them they owe their present popularity, for they alone are able to serve them in such excellence in cooking and at such prices.
²²

The Broadway restaurants offered just enough novelty (and garlic) to stimulate the imagination while providing diners with the niceties of New York’s finest eating establishments, including an Italian menu printed in French.

After 1880, an entirely different kind of Italian eating place could be found in New York. These were the basement restaurants on Mulberry and Mott streets that catered to the new wave of Italian immigrants, peasant farmers from the southern half of the country who began to settle in New York’s notorious Five Points neighborhood, moving into the ramshackle tenements once occupied by American blacks and poor Irish. The Italians also took over the low-paying jobs once held by the Irish to become the city’s new street cleaners and ditch diggers. Native-born New Yorkers drew a firm distinction between these new immigrants and the Italians they already knew, “honest,” “industrious,” and “orderly” people. An 1875 editorial that ran in the
New York Times
presented this thumbnail portrait of the new arrivals:

They are extremely ignorant, and have been reared in the belief that brigandage is a manly occupation, and that assassination is the natural sequence of the most trivial quarrel. They are miserably poor, and it is not strange that they resort to theft and robbery. It is, perhaps, hopeless to think of civilizing them.
²³

While the north vs. south distinction was rooted in historical fact (southerners
were
poor and uneducated), it became the foundation for pernicious stereotypes imposed on southern Italians, which Americans returned to again and again, using the immigrants’ birthplace to explain everything about them, from their violent nature to their deplorable eating habits. As a result, several years passed before Americans were able to gather up their courage and sample the fruits of the southerners’ kitchen.

The first restaurants in Little Italy reflected the immigrants’ meager earnings. A visitor to the Italian colony in 1884 counted four neighborhood restaurants where laborers could buy a two-cent plate of macaroni, three cents worth of coffee and bread, or splurge on coffee and mutton chops, the most expensive item on the menu, for a total of six cents. Basement restaurants also provided laborers with a place to gather, to smoke their pipes, play cards, and enjoy the talents of their musical peers. (The neighborhood’s busiest social spots, however, were the stale-beer dives, as they were known, where the house drink was made from the beer dregs collected from a better class of saloons.) The dining rooms attached to boardinghouses and cheap hotels were another eating option for the transplanted Italian. A typical menu consisted of coffee with anisette and hard bread for breakfast, and for supper, minestrone, spaghetti or macaroni, followed by a stew made with garlic and oil.

The early restaurants reflected the strong connections that immigrants felt for their native villages. As they settled in New York, Italians recreated the geography of home, with Neapolitans on Mulberry Street, Calabrians on Mott, Sicilians on Elizabeth, and so on. Within these regional encampments, Italians from a particular town or village tended to cluster on the same city block and sometimes in the same building. At their
festa
, villagers came together to honor their local saint, but also to celebrate their ties with each other. Italians have a word for the special connectedness felt among towns people.
Campanilismo
, from the Italian word for “bell,” describes the bonds of solidarity felt among people who live within hearing distance of the same church bell.

Restaurants preserved these regional loyalties. Some of the first restaurants were hidden within the Italian groceries that began to appear in New York in the 1880s, the provisions lined up on one half of the room, the other half set aside for tables. Like many immigrant restaurants, these were family-run businesses. The store/café occupied the front room of a ground-floor apartment, while the family slept in the back. This was also where the proprietor’s wife cooked for her customers. An 1889 article from
Harper’s
magazine describes the convivial scene inside one of these store/cafés, this one owned by a family of Sicilians:

Notwithstanding the poverty of the place, it is as busy as a beehive. At the long table, a number of men, who probably work at night on the scows of the Street-cleaning Department, are drinking the black coffee, which, despite its cheapness, is palatable enough to the drinkers. A handful of Italian women, whose dresses and shawls are bright with the gaudy colors so dear to them, are chaffering with the proprietor’s wife over a string of garlic or a pound of sausage. The chairs about the room are occupied by friends and customers of the house, who are smoking villainous short pipes and talking so loudly that one ignorant of the language would suspect them to be on the point of a riot.

The air is blue with tobacco smoke, and the place reeks with the conglomeration of stenches that no language can describe, yet all the people appear to enjoy the best of health, and even the children display a robustness and physical vigor that would do credit to those born with silver spoons. The food served in this, as in all places of a similar sort, does not lack nutrition, though the materials gathered would not recommend themselves to the fastidious. The stew, made up of scraps gathered here and there, is spiced until savory to a hungry man, and the macaroni, though manufactured from the cheapest and coarsest flour in some eastside shop, is usually wholesome.
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