97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (4 page)

As they settled on the Lower East Side, Germans tended to form village-like clusters, a settlement pattern repeated again and again with successive immigrant groups. It was a precarious life, especially at first, so Germans from the same town or city banded together to form
landsmanschaften
, clubs that offered a crude but important form of life insurance. To join, the immigrant paid an initiation fee of two or three dollars, then monthly fees of a quarter or less. In return, members were invited to picnics and dances, but more important, the pooled money went to help members in distress, people who were sick or who couldn’t work for one reason or another. But the
landsmanschaften
’s true raison d’être was death. When a member died, the club paid for the burial—it also supplied the burial plot—and ensured a good turnout at the funeral.

Beginning in the 1850s, the Lower East Side saw a steady flow of outside visitors, among them city officials and social reformers who came to investigate tenement living conditions. Journalists flocked to the tenements in search of human-interest stories, which they found in great supply. Each of these groups set down their observations, leaving us with a large body of descriptive writing. A number of themes snake through this literature. A few of the most persistent are overcrowding in the tenements, the absence of sunlight, and the absence of fresh air, the three evils which outsiders identified as the crux of “the tenement problem.” (Visitors were much less interested in the low wages and high rents that made crowding necessary.) Closely related to evil number three were the smells of the tenement, a topic that captivated uptown visitors, who prowled the East Side wards with handkerchiefs held before their noses. The following account, taken from an 1865 article in the
New York Times
, describes an interview with an East Side woman who lived in Fisher’s Alley, a particularly fragrant strip in the old fourth ward:

We were greeted courteously by an old woman with a short garment and a pipe not much longer, and by her we were entertained with a vivid description of life in Fisher’s alley. Fights, rows, scrambles for supremacy, sickness, death, much misery, but, on the whole, not so bad as it might be. Dirt in every shape, filth of every name, smells in every degree, from the faintest suggestion of fat-boiling, through the inter-mediate gradings of close, heated rooms, unswept floors, perspiratory and unwashed babies, unchanged beds, damp walls, and decayed matter, to the full-blown stench which arose from the liquid ooze from the privy—these combined failed to impress the speaker or, indeed, any of the slightly-clad women who joined us in the passage, as anything to feel annoyed about, and we left her with the conviction that, however wretched and offensive she was, she had at least the consolation of not knowing it.
¹⁴

The gulf between tenement dwellers and their uptown observers was so wide that the
Times
’s reporter felt perfectly free to share his disgust for the courteous old woman and her pungent suroundings, confident that his readers would feel the same.

Reporters generally gravitated to the worst buildings in the poorest sections, but even in a well-kept tenement the air was thick with competing odors. Especially in winter, when doors and windows were closed to shut out the cold, the tenement became a kind of hothouse in which smells bloomed, instead of flowers. In the German wards, however, one especially potent smell overwhelmed the rest: the sulfury, penetrating tang of sauerkraut.

In the patchwork that made up
Kleindeutschland
, sauerkraut was everywhere. It cut across ethnic boundaries and economic ones, too, consumed by rich and poor alike. Between late October and early December, tenement housewives (and saloon keepers as well) turned their energies to sauerkraut-making, producing enough in those few weeks to last through most of the year. In a pre-Cuisinart world, the chopping of that much cabbage was a daunting project, so women enlisted the help of an itinerant tradesman known as a
krauthobler
or “cabbage-shaver.” With a tool designed specifically for the task—it worked like a French mandolin, the blades set into a wooden board—the
krauthobler
went door to door, literally shaving cabbages into thread-like strands. The cost was a penny a head.

Once the cabbage was shaved, the housewife took over. She scoured an empty liquor or vinegar barrel and lined it with whole cabbage leaves. Next came the shredded cabbage, which she salted and pounded, layer by layer, until the barrel was nearly full. Now she covered the cabbage with a cloth, then a piece of wood cut to the size of the opening, weighing it down with a stone. Left on its own, the salted cabbage began to weep, creating its own pickling brine. Once a week, the housewife tended to her barrel, rinsing the cloth to prevent contamination and skimming the brine.

Sauerkraut-making in the tenements was a harvest ritual, a celebration of the autumn bounty. Like all seasonal rites, it marked the passage of time. Its power came through repetition. The scrubbing of the barrel, the arrival of the cabbage-shaver, the salting and pounding, were all steps in a familiar routine that the immigrant housewife carried with her from Germany. Seasonal food traditions, like sauerkraut-making, supplied an uprooted community with a sense of order. At Christmas, the Germans baked squares of
lebkuchen
, or honey cake; loaves of stollen, a sweetbread studded with raisins, and trays of
pfeffernusse
, peppery spice cookies coated in sugar syrup. In spring, for just a few weeks, German saloons served up mugs of dark bock beer. Summer in
Kleindeutschland
arrived on Pentecost Sunday, which the Germans marked with an all-day picnic. Each of these food-based rites, carried over from Germany, was reenacted in a completely new context by the immigrants who settled in New York and other cities throughout the United States. Over the decades, as Germans assimilated into the wider culture, the need for the old rituals began to slip away, replaced in some cases by new American customs. But assimilation moved in the opposite direction as well. Many German food traditions were adopted by the wider culture, so baking stollen became a Christmas tradition in non-German families along with decorating the Christmas tree, another German contribution to American home life.

If fall was the season for sauerkraut-making, the payoff came in the first days of winter, when the cabbage was fully ripe and ready to be eaten. It was a moment the Germans looked forward to expectantly and enjoyed completely: “The look of pleasure on the bibulous German as he steps out of his favorite lager-beer saloon these cold days tells the passer-by as plainly as do the words that hang outside the door that the day of sauerkraut lunch is here.”
¹⁵
This happy vignette is taken from a Philadelphia newspaper, another city with a large German community, but could just as easily describe the saloon-goers of Chicago, Milwaukee, or New York.

Alongside the
krauthobler
, a figure who had vanished from New York by the close of the Civil War, the German appetite for pickled cabbage also supported sauerkraut importers, local cabbage farmers, and eventually sauerkraut manufacturers, including Henry J. Heinz, who opened a sauerkraut factory on Long Island in the 1890s. At the height of the busy season, his factory processed a hundred tons of cabbage a day. On the streets, the most visible face of this trade was the “sauerkraut man,” actually a roving peddler who sold cheap meals to hungry East Siders. Here he is in a 1902 article from the
New York Evening Post
:

The regular and popular visitor to the German inns and taverns of the East Side is the sauerkraut man. He brings his calling with him from the Old Country, and finds a more profitable field in New York than in Berlin or Hamburg. His equipment is quite curious. He wears a blue or white apron running from his neck nearly to the ankles, and from his shoulders is suspended a circular metal box which goes half way around his waist. It has three large compartments, two of which are surrounded by hot water. In one are well-cooked Frankfurter sausages, and in the other thoroughly boiled sauerkraut. In the third compartment is potato salad. He carries in his hand a basket in which are small plates and steel forks. One sausage and a generous spoonful of sauerkraut and potato salad cost 5 cents. All three articles are of good quality, well cooked and seasoned.
¹⁶

The sauerkraut man worked at night, his shift starting at the close of the normal workday, when customers poured into the saloons for an hour or two of relaxation. Hauling his pewter box (it could hold up to fifty sausages, seven pounds of sauerkraut, and seven of potato salad), the peddler made his rounds stopping at bars, bowling alleys, and meeting halls, wherever hungry Germans gathered.

To round out our look into German sauerkraut traditions, here is a recipe for a simple sauerkraut dish adapted from Henrietta Davidis.

B
OILED
S
AUERKRAUT

Bring to a boil one cup water and one cup white wine. Add the sauerkraut, roughly 3 cups, a few peppercorns and a little salt. Simmer until tender. Shortly before serving, pour off the broth and stir in a few tablespoons butter. Serve as a side dish alongside mashed potatoes.

Nineteenth-century New York was a city of hand-painted signs, many of them wordless. Butchers, for instance, displayed a painted black bull (or sometimes a red cow) over their stalls in the market. Out on the street, passersby could identify a blacksmith’s shop by the image of a painted horse suspended over the doorway. Even more straightforward, New York restaurants often nailed a real tortoise shell to the doorpost: their way of announcing that terrapin was on the menu. In the city’s German wards, a few signs were especially common. Two yellow boots, one larger for a man, the woman’s boot smaller, was the image displayed by German shoemakers. German beer halls hung pictures of King Gambrinus, the Dionysus of beer. In some of the flashier examples, the mythic king was “presented life-size, bearded and crowned and holding in one hand a stupendous beaker of the national beverage, the froth of which bulges from the rim like a prize cauliflower.”
¹⁷
The description comes from Charles Dawson Shanley, a nineteenth-century poet and journalist who wrote a series of very informative articles on New York street life. On his rambles through
Kleindeutschland
, Shanley encountered another frequently displayed shop sign, this one rather modest. It was a “dingy little signboard with a sheaf of wheat painted on it”—the image adopted by German bakers.

Just as they lived together in clusters, immigrants tended to work together in the same trades. Many, as it happens, were food-related. Where the Irish were big in the fish and oyster business, Germans worked as dairymen, grocers, and butchers. Immigrant food purveyors sold to their own communities, but also played a role in feeding the larger city. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the city’s bakers were Scottish and Irish, but that began to change in the 1850s, as Germans flowed into New York. By the end of the decade, responsibility for baking the city’s bread had passed into German hands.

The typical German bakery, housed in a tenement cellar, was a low-ceilinged room with a dirt floor and no running water. The “boss baker” often lived upstairs with his family and a handful of employees who shared the apartment as boarders. Many times, though, employees slept in the cellar next to the ovens, a sack of flour for their bed. Some slept in the dough vats. Economic survival for the small-time baker depended on every member of the family. The children worked as apprentices, while the baker’s wife was in charge of the boarders, for whom she cooked and did laundry. On the most densely populated blocks in the German wards, a cellar bakery was found in every third or fourth building.

Prior to the widespread use of steam power beginning in 1882, industry in New York ran on muscle power, most of it supplied by immigrants. In a city of shipbuilders, ironworkers, and stonecutters, the baker’s life was especially harsh. His shift started late in the afternoon and lasted until early morning, which meant a fourteen-hour workday or sometimes more. At the end of the long, hot night (temperatures in the bakery could easily reach one hundred degrees), the bakers hauled their goods up to the street and loaded up the delivery wagons. Now, finally, it was time to rest, just as the sun was coming up over the East River. Faces caked with flour, the bakers slept while the rest of the city went about its business. It was a topsy-turvy existence and a lonely one, too. For all his sweaty work, the journeyman baker earned between eight and eighteen dollars a week, hardly enough to support a family. The consequences were plain. More than any other tradesmen, many New York bakers were consigned to a life of bachelorhood.

Before the appearance of national brands like Pepperidge Farm and Arnold, each city had its own local bakeries and bread-making traditions. The kind of bread produced in New York was surprisingly similar to Wonder Bread, squishy and gummy-textured. Known as the New York split loaf, it was no more substantial than “slightly compressed white smoke” in the words of one critic, and just as tasteless. German-made loaves of rye and pumpernickel fell at the other end of the baked goods spectrum. They were made from whole grains, with a dense, chewy texture and a sour, mildly nutty flavor. When sliced, they made a sturdy platform for the open-faced sandwiches that Germans loved to snack on. When it came to New Yorkers and bread, a “Goldilocks syndrome” seemed to prevail. If the New York split loaf was too puffy and bland, German-style breads were too coarse and heavy for the native-born, with their less vigorous digestive tracts. The only reason to eat them was the price, since ounce for ounce they were cheaper than white bread. A brittle-crusted French baguette was much closer to the nineteenth-century ideal of what bread should be.

A footnote to the German bread story centers around a New York immigrant named Louis Fleischmann, born in Vienna in 1835. His early history had nothing to do with bread or baking. Rather, Fleischmann was a soldier, an officer in the Austrian army. In the 1860s, his two brothers, Max and Charles, emigrated to Missouri, where they set up a business producing the kind of compressed yeast used by Viennese bakers, a product unknown in America. In 1874, Louis decided to follow them. In the centenary year of 1876, Louis and his brothers set up a “model Vienna bakery” at the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. A smashing success, its main product was something called “Vienna bread.” Buttery and delicate, with a glossy brown crust, it was the perfect texture for dunking in coffee. Riding on the success of the model bakery, Louis Fleischmann opened a similar establishment on Tenth Street and Broadway in New York.