Status
Available
Call number
Publication
New York : Smithsonian Books/HarperCollins, 2010.
Description
"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.… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member wearylibrarian
Perhaps a subtitle for this book should be The Book of Lists. The author doesn't seem to want to leave anything out and some of the "lists" seem endless. While the book is about food and the immigrants of the 1800's in New York, it has little to do with the title. The author discusses the five
I was hoping for more information on the five families, their personal voyage to the New World, and their lives at 97 Orchard. There are little real facts and a lot of supposition where the families are concerned.
I finished the book but I had to force myself to get to the end, and I have never been so glad to reach the end of a book! Maybe a chef or someone in the food industry would find this book appealing, but it didn't live up to my expectations.
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immigrant families in passing, and there is little real information on them. Mainly, when the families are mentioned, it is in passing with a comment that perhaps this family ate this, or this family could have bought their meat from this vendor...I was hoping for more information on the five families, their personal voyage to the New World, and their lives at 97 Orchard. There are little real facts and a lot of supposition where the families are concerned.
I finished the book but I had to force myself to get to the end, and I have never been so glad to reach the end of a book! Maybe a chef or someone in the food industry would find this book appealing, but it didn't live up to my expectations.
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LibraryThing member wolves_away
While the premise was misleading--information on the families was minimal--I knew so little about the culinary history of America and am really just beginning to connect to food that I found "97 Orchard" fascinating anyway.
LibraryThing member setornow
I was disappointed in this book after reading the published reviews. The expectation was that it was truly following 5 families as they lived at 97 Orchard Street, but it had very little information about the actual families. Marriages and births, but that was about it. Considering that she found
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that the Irish immigrants had so little cuisine on which to draw, I don't know why she even included them. Not what I expected. Show Less
LibraryThing member AnneliM
A History of Immigration beyond the one tenement building and its inhabitants--should be required reading for all those who are involved in immigrant policies today to remind them that it was ever thus--we were all immigrants once.
LibraryThing member Eliz12
A sometimes interesting enough book, but unfortunatly quite flawed. It is not the story of five immigrant families, but instead about immigrants in general and food. There's actually very little real detail about the individual families.
The information is good, but often repetitive (this needed a
The information is good, but often repetitive (this needed a
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good editor), and there were actually mistakes in the text: was the girl Natalea or Natalie, for example, and it's Reform Judaism, not Reformed Judaism. Show Less
LibraryThing member Sarahfine
A hidden history of the United States, full of fascinating insights to American prejudice. For instance: Italian food used to be regarded as detestable, low-class fare, not the popular standby it is today. Ziegelman, an employee at the NY Tenement Museum, also goes into depth about Ellis Island,
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and all the effort which was required to install kosher restaurants for starving Jewish immigrants. The book is ostensibly a history of 5 immigrant families, but since little can be known about them apart from dry census info, this is really a showcase for the author's extensive knowledge of cross-culture food preparation, stuffed with juicy tidbits about how the lower classes lived in turn-of-the-century America. Show Less
LibraryThing member book58lover
I am throughly enjoying reading this book although it really isn't a "history of five immigrant families". That is just a lynchpin for the real discussion of food and eating history. What I found the most informative is the section on Ellis Island which I consider worth the price of the book. I
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always like it when I learn something that I wouldn't have had an inkling of and this was it. The recipes are priceless as well and I will try to make some of them, although this is not a cookbook. Show Less
LibraryThing member cameling
Through the 19th and 20th century, New York has seen waves of immigrants from various countries. In the 1800s, blocks of apartments known as tenements were developed specifically to house the incoming immigrants. The author concentrates on 5 families that lived at 97 Orchard in New York through the
These families however, appear rather briefly in each chapter and seemed to be incidental to what the author wished to share. The focus of the book really is a sociological study into why these waves of immigrants decided to come to America, how they came over, when Ellis Island was established, the food cultures these immigrants brought with them, how they adapted to the American way of life, the different trades that sprouted because of the different immigrants around the tenements to provide them with the ingredients from their homelands and more interestingly, how some of these immigrant foods have been adopted into the American food culture through the years.
Some old recipes are also provided from each culture in each chapter as were copies of some of the food shopping lists and accounts from each period. The sociological aspects of the book rivaled, in my opinion, the food history, and made this one of the more fascinating books I've read this year.
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1800s and early 1900s, and divides the book according to each family of Germans, German Jews, the Irish, Russian Jews and Italians.These families however, appear rather briefly in each chapter and seemed to be incidental to what the author wished to share. The focus of the book really is a sociological study into why these waves of immigrants decided to come to America, how they came over, when Ellis Island was established, the food cultures these immigrants brought with them, how they adapted to the American way of life, the different trades that sprouted because of the different immigrants around the tenements to provide them with the ingredients from their homelands and more interestingly, how some of these immigrant foods have been adopted into the American food culture through the years.
Some old recipes are also provided from each culture in each chapter as were copies of some of the food shopping lists and accounts from each period. The sociological aspects of the book rivaled, in my opinion, the food history, and made this one of the more fascinating books I've read this year.
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LibraryThing member Krumbs
I could have done without the numerous recipes throughout. I understand the inclusion of them, but they really interrupted the narrative for me.
I also got the feeling that the author really wanted to write about the Ellis Island cafeterias (this was the most energetically written part of the book)
While it was interesting in places, I skimmed quite a bit.
I also got the feeling that the author really wanted to write about the Ellis Island cafeterias (this was the most energetically written part of the book)
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but couldn't figure out how to just focus on that in a full-length book. Instead, there's this, focusing on five families who lived at one address during a span of history. Given that widely varying amounts of information were available about each family, a lot was glossed over at certain points. We also never know why these people moved out of the 97 Orchard address (apart from the first family). While it was interesting in places, I skimmed quite a bit.
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LibraryThing member VioletBramble
97 Orchard is a tenement building on the Lower East Side of NYC that was home to generations of new immigrants from 1850-1935. Ziegelman bases each chapter on a different family that once lived in the building. The chapters aren't actually about that family though. Each family represents the
I enjoyed this one, although I was craving pickles almost the whole time. Great food writing. Recommended.
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members of each group of immigrants - Germans, German Jews, Irish, Italians and Russian Jews. Ziegelman discusses what each group brought to the US in terms of expectations, skills, culture and food. She shows how they survived and then flourished in their new country. The primary focus of each chapter is food and how the once ethnic foods brought to the US by immigrants are now considered basic American foods - hot dogs, spaghetti, coffee. The book includes dozens of recipes. I enjoyed this one, although I was craving pickles almost the whole time. Great food writing. Recommended.
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LibraryThing member PatienceFortitude
Loved this book! So much!
LibraryThing member PatienceFortitude
Loved this book! So much!
LibraryThing member PatienceFortitude
Loved this book! So much!
LibraryThing member RealLifeReading
“A place to cook and to eat, the kitchen was also used as a family workspace, a sweatshop, a laundry room, a place to wash one’s body, a nursery for the babies, and a bedroom for boarders. In this cramped and primitive setting, immigrant cooks brought their formidable ingenuity to the daily
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challenge of feeding their families.”97 Orchard.
A building. A residence. A New York tenement, home to immigrants from Europe.
And in this case, five families who lived there between 1863 and 1935.
In the kitchens of the German Glockners (who owned the building), the Irish Moores, the Gumpertz family (German Jews), the Rogarshevsksy family (Russian-Lithuanian Jews), and the Italian Baldizzi family, we learn how immigrant cooks fed their families, made their living, and introduced many familiar foods to this country, such as:
“German wursts and pretzels, doughtnut-shaped rolls from Eastern Europe known as ‘beygals’, potato pastries referred to as ‘knishes’, and the elongated Italian noodles for which Americans had no name but came to know as spaghetti.”
It was fun to read the various recipes that accompany the stories, such as fish hash and vegetarian chopped liver. And culinary traditions always fascinate, especially ones which seem so odd to us today, such as the apparently common commodity of broken eggs, as well as the fact that goose liver (i.e. foie gras) used to be fed to children as a nutritional supplement. And the occupation of ‘cabbage-shaver’ for sauerkraut.
“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.”
The only quibble I have with this book is its somewhat misleading subtitle. The ‘history’ of these five specific families is hardly that. We get little more than a glimpse of these family’s histories, instead they are used as a starting point to kick off each chapter, and to illustrate how the “culinary revolution” transcended this one neighbourhood, and which continues today “among immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America, who have brought their food traditions to this country and continue to transform the way America eats”
This review was first posted on my blog Olduvai Reads
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LibraryThing member tshrope
Jane Ziegelman does an excellent job of taking the modern reader back to the immigrant tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City, during the late 19th Century. She has done a lot of research not only on the food that immigrants ate and modified to the availability of food stuffs in their
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new environment, but on their culture and eating habits from their native homeland as well. There are lots of little tidbits that she shares, (i.e. did you know Heinz started as a sauerkraut processing factory?) that keeps the reader interested and entertained. While some readers took issue with the fact that the book’s title implies that it should have been more about the families, I was quite happy with the information she provided about them, and read the book more for the cultural food aspect of the immigrant experience rather than an in-depth look at each of the immigrant families. If you look food history I would definitely recommend putting this on your “to read” list. Show Less
LibraryThing member LivelyLady
This the history of five immigrant cultures, food and living conditions in NYC are explored. "97 Orchard" is the address of the Tenement Museum in NYC. Very interesting. Fact filled, dense reading.
LibraryThing member HandelmanLibraryTINR
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
Show More
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. Show Less
LibraryThing member foggidawn
A history of the culinary life of New York City’s Lower East Side, featuring the stories of five families who lived in the tenement located at 97 Orchard Street between the years of 1860-1930. The book takes a broader look at how immigrants of various nationalities affected the city’s foodways,
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from pushcart merchants to delicatessens to urban poultry farmers raising geese in tenement basements. It’s fascinating stuff, especially if you’re interested in culinary history or in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I was hoping to recognize some of my own family food traditions, but nothing struck a particular chord. Still, very interesting reading! Show Less
LibraryThing member laytonwoman3rd
This was a very interesting, informative and yummy read. The author is the director of a culinary program at New York's Tenement Museum (located--you guessed it---at 97 Orchard St. on the Lower East Side). She explores the food cultures of 5 immigrant families--German, German Jewish, Irish, Italian
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and Lithuanian--who came to New York for various reasons between the 1860s and the 1930s. In doing so, she covers a lot of ground both inside and outside the kitchens, including general living conditions in the tenements, pushcart street vendors, the raising of poultry and pigs in courtyards and city streets, religious practices, food prejudices, Americanization of traditional European dishes and the adoption of ethnic foods by native born Americans. Every chapter made me crave something, from oysters to corned beef to strudel to pizza. It was a treat to read. Show Less
Subjects
Awards
IACP Cookbook Award (Finalist — 2011)
Language
Original publication date
2010
Physical description
261 p.; 24 inches
ISBN
0061288500 / 9780061288500
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