They may not have had a buzzword for it, but turn-of-the-century Jewish immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side were definitely locavores.
“All of the food additives were nonexistent, so they cooked in small quantities,” said Jane Ziegelman, author of “97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.” “It was perfectly typical for a Jewish homemaker to go to market twice a day so fresh food was constantly coming in to the kitchen.”
In “97 Orchard,” Ziegelman explores the culinary life of immigrants who were the heart and soul of New York’s Lower East Side around the turn of the 20th century.
That life, it turns out, bore a resemblance to the American revival of eating fresh, locally grown foods, using homegrown ingredients and adopting local food habits.
Ziegelman will give a presentation about “97 Orchard” at 7 p.m. Aug. 21 at Or Shalom Jewish Community in San Francisco. Her talk, which is free and open to the public, will center on the research process she employed to capture the essence of immigrants assimilating into American life in New York. Food also will be served.
Named for the address of the tenement Ziegelman researched, the historical account traces the food customs of five immigrant families who lived there: German Jews, Russian-Lithuanian Jews, Germans, Italians and Irish.
“I really wanted to make these people and the neighborhood come alive,” Ziegelman, director of the Tenement Museum’s forthcoming culinary center, said from her home in Brooklyn, N.Y. “And tell the immigration story in a way that was tactile and personal.
“If you go to the [Lower East Side] Tenement Museum, where the action is centered, you can feel these people in a strong way. My objective was to translate that into a literary format.”
Yet as Ziegelman, who also wrote “Foie Gras: A Passion,” delved into writing “97 Orchard,” she said she developed an attachment to the food, specifically recipes for old dishes that she wants to re-introduce into mainstream cooking. Several call for the use of shmaltz, or chicken fat, which Ziegelman explained is not the “artery-clogger we thought it was.”
“Shmaltz has roughly half the saturated fat of butter,” she said. “It adds flavor to all kinds of cooking. People have found that funny but very interesting.”
Dispelling myths about immigrant cuisine was at the forefront of Ziegelman’s project, as she explored each family’s lifestyle at the New York tenement. For example, cuts of meat, fish and vegetables weren’t the only staples of their kitchens.
Popular street foods on the Lower East Side included fresh coconut, salted chickpeas, roasted pumpkin seeds and baked apples.
And in the early decades of the 20th century, Jewish homemakers rioted in the streets of the Lower East Side to protest the high cost of kosher meat.
Ziegelman also explained that many non-Jews found the Jewish diet to be “extremely spicy” because of the infusion of spices — garlic, paprika, dried ginger, onions. At the time American food was bland, she said, but it has since caught up, flavor-wise, to what Jewish cuisine once was.
Preparation for a typical Shabbat meal for the Gumpertz family, one of the five profiled in “97 Orchard,” began on Friday morning, with Mrs. Gumpertz standing over a steaming pot of carp.
Ziegelman depicts the preparation as a work of art, as the housewife removes the carp from its pot, slices it crosswise into ovals and lays the pieces on a plate.
“The cooking broth, rich in gelatin from the fish bones, has turned to jelly,” Ziegelman writes. “The onion skin has tinted it gold. Mrs. Gumpertz spoons that up too, dabbing it over the fish in glistening puddles. To a hungry Jew at the end of the workweek, could any sight be more beautiful?”
To paint such detailed pictures about the families, Ziegelman conducted five years of research. She said most of that time was devoted to “digging in the dark and hoping to hit something.” A major source were records housed in the New York Board of Health, which Ziegelman said contained descriptions and accounts of culinary institutions for sanitary purposes.
“That was a great treasure trove of documentation,” she said. “I was surprised by how well newspapers in New York City and around the country covered the Lower East Side. Americans were fascinated by what was going on there.”
Jane Ziegelman will speak about “97 Orchard” at 7 p.m. Aug. 21 at Or Shalom Jewish Community, 1250 Quintara St., S.F. Free and open to the public. Information: (415) 242-9992.
“97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement” by Jane Ziegelman (253 pages, Smithsonian/HarperCollins, $25.99)