"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."---Juan Natran, 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 the 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."---Anna Menebuasun, 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."---Naco Waxman, kitchen Arts & Letters, New York City"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."---Russbli Seorto, author of The Island at the Center of the WorldIn 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, she takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable tour, from impossibly cramped tenement apartments down dimly lit stairwells where children played and neighbors socialized, beyond the front stoops where immigrant housewives found respite and company, 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. While health officials worried that pushcarts were unsanitary and that pickles made immigrants too excitable to be good citizens, a culinary revolution was taking place in the streets of what had been culturally an English city. Along the East River, German immigrants founded breweries, dispensing their beloved lager in the dozens of beer gardens that opened along the Bowery. Russian Jews opened tea parlors serving blintzes and strudel next door to Romanian nightclubs that specialized in goose pastrami. On the streets, Italian peddlers hawked the cheese-and-tomato pies known as pizzarelli, while Jews sold knishes and squares of halvah. Gradually, as Americans began to explore the immigrant ghetto, they uncovered the array of comestible enticements of theirforeign-born neighbors. 97 Orchard charts this exciting process of discovery as it lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage. Read Less