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97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement Paperback – Illustrated, May 31, 2011
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“Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round.” — Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World
97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits—shopping, cooking, and eating—of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. With 40 recipes included, 97 Orchard is perfect for fans of Rachel Ray’s Hometown Eats; anyone interested in the history of how immigrant food became American food; and “foodies” of every stripe.
- Print length253 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 31, 2011
- Dimensions5.31 x 0.61 x 8 inches
- ISBN-100061288519
- ISBN-13978-0061288517
- Lexile measure1280L
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round. — A.J. Jacobs, New York Times bestselling author of The Know-It-All
“An engaging and delicious slice of life on the Lower East Side. And the recipes found in this book, though originating from various cultures, all have the air of comfort foods and home.” — Joan Nathan, author of Jewish Cooking in America
“What do just-arrived immigrants see as they gaze around a new land, and what do their native-born neighbors see as they newcomers make their presence felt? More practically: How do people begin the work of putting food on their tables amid unfamiliar streets and languages? These questions couldn’t be more timely. Nor could Jane Ziegelman’s penetrating exploration of them. You will come away with a renewed sense of what it means to be an American.” — Anne Mendelson, author of Milk and Stand Facing the Stove
“A truly fine idea. It not only opens a window to view the ways in which our nation’s immigrants cooked and ate, it broadens and enriches our understanding of the entire immigrant experience. This book is an impressive contribution to American cultural history.” — Nach Waxman, Kitchen Arts & Letters, New York City
“Jane Ziegelman brings us into the kitchens of five women whose home cooking not only fed their families and their neighborhoods but became part of the culinary DNA of America itself. Drawing on wonderfully evocative primary sources, Ziegelman describes how they contributed to the complexities of ethnic identity, class, and religion in a tumultuous city. Beautifully written and full of insights, 97 Orchard makes it clear that the story of New York is overwhelmingly a story about buying, selling, cooking, eating, and sharing food.” — Laura Shapiro, author of Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century
“In this compelling foray into forensic gastronomy, Ziegelman pulls the facade off the titular 97 Orchard Street tenement. The result is a living dollhouse that invites us to gaze in from the sidewalk.With minds open and mouths agape, we witness the comings and goings of the building’s inhabitants in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. By focusing on the culinary lives of individuals from a variety of ethnic groups, Ziegelman pieces together a thorough sketch of Manhattan’s Lower East Side at a time when these immigrants were at the forefront of a rapidly changing urban life. The food facts she uncovers are sure to interest and astound even those outside the culinary community, and guarantee that the reader will never look at a kosher dill pickle, a wrapped hard candy, or even the delectable foie gras the same way again. Ziegelman cleverly takes this opportunity to show us that in learning about food, we’re actually learning about history—and when it comes to the sometimes surprising journey some of our favorite meals have taken to get here, it’s fascinating stuff.” — Booklist
“This whole book is a celebration of food, language, and of the mutual aid and comfort that these brave pioneers shared with their tenement neighbors and the citizens who took them in.” — Julie Wittes Schlack, The Boston Globe
“Blending history, sociology, anthropology and economics, spiced with recipes, Ziegelman offers a looks at the Lower East Side and the immigrants who made it legendary.” — Chicago Jewish Star
“It is an eye-opening exploration of the social and economic history of those who thrived and survived, in spite of significant odds, on New York’s Lower East Side. VERDICT Recommended for those seeking up-close and personal—as well as edible—insights into the daily lives of late 19th- and early 20th-century ‘new Americans.’” — Library Journal
“A welcome addition to the canon inspired by the Tenement Museum on the Lower East Side. . . . [Ziegelman] dishes delectable morsels of ethnic gastronomy.” — New York Times
“Ziegelman puts a historical spin to the notion that you are what you eat. . . . Ziegelman vividly renders a proud, diverse community learning to be American. Through food, the author records the immigrants’ struggle to reinterpret themselves in an American context and their reciprocal impact on American culture at large.” — Publishers Weekly
“Highly entertaining and deceptively ambitious.” — New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
In 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman explores the culinary life that was the heart and soul of New York's Lower East Side around the turn of the twentieth century—a city within a city, where Germans, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews attempted to forge a new life. Through the experiences of five families, all of them residents of 97 Orchard Street, Ziegelman takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable tour, from impossibly cramped tenement apartments, down dimly lit stairwells, beyond the front stoops where housewives congregated, and out into the hubbub of the dirty, teeming streets. Ziegelman shows how immigrant cooks brought their ingenuity to the daily task of feeding their families, preserving traditions from home but always ready to improvise. 97 Orchard lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.
About the Author
Jane Ziegelman is the director of the Tenement Museum's culinary center and the founder and director of Kids Cook!, a multiethnic cooking program for children. Her writing on food has appeared in numerous publications, and she is the coauthor of Foie Gras: A Passion. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Product details
- Publisher : Harper Paperbacks; Illustrated edition (May 31, 2011)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 253 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0061288519
- ISBN-13 : 978-0061288517
- Lexile measure : 1280L
- Item Weight : 7.7 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.31 x 0.61 x 8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #250,415 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #275 in Food Science (Books)
- #305 in Gastronomy History (Books)
- #3,041 in U.S. State & Local History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

I was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, but now I live in Brooklyn Heights with my husband, Andy, who also writes about food, and my two kids, Smacky and Buster.
I studied history in college, then spent some time in publishing before attending the NYU graduate program in urban anthropology, and that's when I became interested in the culinary history of New York. When my first kid was a year old, I started a cooking program for children called Kids Cook!
I spend most of my time cooking, eating, reading about food, and talking about food. The best place to eat in this city, at the moment, is the Chinatown in Flushing, Queens, a place we visit every weekend. If you're interested in recommendations for places to go, drop me a line.
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While growing up, I ate many of the same or similar foods that my parents ate as children, but to me, they were all jumbled up. I thought I knew the derivation of corned beef and cabbage, lasagna, fresh green salad, garlic dill pickles, rye bread and all the other foods put before me on the dining table. However, this book has been a real eye opener; an informative, nostalgic, and entertaining trip to my "roots".
Jane Ziegelman, the author of 97 Orchard, has written what is called "An Edible History" and it is just that. If one were to construct an immigrant-style recipe for this book one would perhaps say: "take a cup of history, a tablespoon each of sociology and anthropology, a pinch of original recipes, mix well, edit and print".
Five fascinating and interweaving chapters present the culinary history of five different immigrant families who resided in 97 Orchard Street over the course of a 70 year period. First the Glockner family from Germany, then the Moore's from Ireland, the German Jewish Gumpertz family, the Russian Jewish Rogarshevskys, and the Baldizzis from Italy each lived in the crowded tenement, and each contributed their culinary traditions to what we Americans eat today.
One cannot underestimate the complexity and arduousness of the life of an immigrant woman trying to feed her family while living in a fifth floor tenement walk-up with no indoor plumbing or running water! Tubs of water (and everything else) had to be hauled up and down flights of stairs. This premium on water affected the way one cooked. Soups and one pot dishes were the most efficient methods of feeding large families nutritious and budget conscious meals. All ingredients were purchased fresh from the pushcart vendor or public market for the meal at hand. There was no refrigeration, no food storage. If the recipe called for three eggs you bought three eggs. Life was immediate and nothing was wasted.
How our lives have changed (thank goodness for that!) but our food traditions have endured.
I found the book highly entertaining and informative.
PS.I will be attempting the Eggplants in the Oven recipe soon.
I particularly loved the chapter about the Irish immigrant couple, which goes into significant detail about why the potato famine was as devastating as it was to a whole generation of Irish and how British land and export policies caused the tragedy in the first place. It's a not often told story and not well known. I thought it very interesting that the Irish immigration was largely an immigration of teenagers and young adults, rather than families, and included more young women than men.
The other favorite chapter was the one about the Polish-Russian Jews because that is my personal heritage. When I was a child in the 50s and 60s, my own immigrant parents from Poland fed us in pretty much the same way as the Jewish mother back at the turn of the 20th century. It was all very familiar to me.
The reason I have given 97 Orchard 4 instead of 5 stars is that I wanted the author to provide a concluding chapter that brought all the threads together, discussing the legacy of immigrant foodways to our eating habits today. The book seemed to to end with a "plop!" rather than tying the themes together. Maybe in a later addition the author could remedy this lack.
Five languages, five cuisines, three religions. No one could plausibly deny that the Lower East Side of the Big Apple was and is the iconic American 'melting pot'. But the metaphor isn't entirely apt or realistic; America is better understood as a mixing bowl or a baling press. Each of the five immigrant families at 97 Orchard retained much of its ethnic identity, along with its cookery, and bequeathed its core values to its American descendants.
North America has ALWAYS been multi-cultural. The pre-Colombian peoples were astoundingly diverse in languages and life-technologies. The earliest European colonists lived by necessity in constant interchange with indigenous peoples. The colonies that eventually became the USA were not all "English" at birth; there were Spanish, French, Swedish, Dutch, and Sephardic Americans scattered from 'New Mexico' to 'Maine' by the middle of the 17th Century. Despite the wishful mythology of such ideologically extreme 'nativists' as Thomas Woods, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Thirteen Colonies that declared independence from England in 1776 were a rainbow of diversity. In the first census of 1790, only 60% of the white/European population of three million was English in ancestry, in addition to which there were 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of surviving 'Indian' people living within the territory already controlled by the new nation. That's according to the authentic historian Gordon S. Wood, in his book "Empire of Liberty". But even the colonists from the island of Great Britain were distinctly multi-cultural, as documented by dependable historian David Hackett Fischer in his brilliant "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America". The Britons brought their diverse dialects, their concepts of land usage and ownership, their religious sects, and their social hierarchies to America; the notion that Europeans left "Europe" behind them when they crossed the Atlantic is spurious, nothing more than chauvinistic 'American Exceptionalism'.
The pros and cons of "multi-culturalism" have been a hot topic in America since the pre-revolutionary conflicts in Pennsylvania, between the unassimilated Germans and the majority Anglos, who were themselves fiercely diverse in religion. The Germans, in fact, remained stubbornly unassimilated from the mid-17th C to the mid-20th, and they were by far the largest and steadiest flow of immigrants through the long haul of American history, so that approximately one of every six Americans today claims German ancestry. The Germans kept their language throughout the 19th C, had their own newspapers, schools, and cultural institutions, and sent their own representatives into government at all levels. The recent waves of immigrants from Mexico, the Caribbean, or India have 'assimilated' far more rapidly and willingly than the Germans did in the centuries before the World Wars made 'German identity' awkward in the USA.
The horrible slaughter of innocents in Norway this year, wrought by a right wing extremist, has been perceived as a reaction to 'multi-culturalism' as a social policy. Honestly, I can grasp a certain legitimacy in the notion that a distinctive culture has a proper right to preserve its integrity. A widely-supported social policy of exclusion of immigration and/or mandatory assimilation might be reasonable in Norway ... in Yemen, Gabon, Bhutan, Bali ... though 'hospitality' would always be more admirable. But no class or coterie of 'citizens' in the USA has any cultural or historical grounds for declaring itself to be the "100% Americans". Ethnic/religious/culinary diversity, and the wholesome appreciation thereof, is the defining virtue of real Americanism. That's the message of "97 Orchard". As a certain folksinger said so eloquently: "I'm eatin' bagels, I'm eatin' pizza ..."
Oh, by the way, the recipes in "97 Orchard" include some treasures: German Veal Stew with Dried Pears, Irish Oyster Patties, Sicilian Baccala (codfish), Lithuanian Cranberry Strudel (the cranberries obviously a New World substitute for Lingon), and (would you believe?) a 19th C 'Vegetarian Chopped Liver'. Ziegelman isn't the most systematic historian or the most consistent sytlist, but I'm pretty sure she's a fine cook.








