Allison Wu
Reflection 1 of 5
97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement
Diversity through Food
Jane Zeigelman’s book, 97 Orchard Street: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, tells the story of how different families from different cultures use food from their origins to shape their lives in NYC. Their use of native food in their new environment ultimately forms the diversity that NYC has today.
During the Age of Migration, multiple families would live in one tenement building together. These buildings, like that of 97 Orchard Street in the Lower East Side, were cramped, but as immigrants, like those that lived in these tenements, coming from foreign countries, those were all they could afford. The Lower East Side became the immigrant community of where immigrants lived, shopped, and worked. In this book, the Glockner family, is one of the five families introduced, who immigrated from Germany, and have made a life for themselves in NYC. Slowly, they have assimilated into this New World and rituals that have been traditionally practiced before “began to slip away, replaced in some cases by new American customs” (502). However, it went the other way as well. “On landing in New York, German immigrants established … a kind of parallel food universe set apart from the city’s existing network of food … the shops and eating places, the sausage stands and sauerkraut vendors, were points of culinary transmission, places where a native-born American could sample his first grilled bratwurst, or pretzel or glass of lager” (1023). Germans brought food that they were familiar with to NYC allowing it to spread to people of other backgrounds. This was supplemented by the many supermarkets that imported German foods for German customers to still be able to cook their native dishes. These dishes “provided them with the comfort of the familiar in an alien environment” (61). Sometimes, food was all they had to connect them to the Old World. This transmission was not only done by the Germans, but by all immigrants, such as the Jews. “While the Ashkenazi cook retained elements of her Italian past, she also adopted local food habits, creating a new hybrid cuisine” (1593). Many Jews were from Italy and brought their pasta dishes to the New World, incorporating the New World’s idea of noodles with the idea of noodles from Italy.
The mix between Old and New was common amongst all the cultures that were introduced to NYC. Because of the different migrations from different places, bringing their own native dishes, NYC has become a place of diversity. Without all the immigrant cultures brought here, NYC would not be a multicultural city, like how it is today. There would not be an Italian restaurant, next to a Mexican supermarket, which is next to a Chinese bakery on the streets of NYC. Shown by this, immigration has shaped the city we live in and has been able to expose New Yorkers to cultures that they are unfamiliar with.
Questions:
- Does NYC being a multicultural city contribute to the continued immigration of people from other countries?
- Besides tradition, what determines whether a certain food is brought to NYC by immigrants?
