97 Orchard Part 4

One measure of wealth among East Side Jews was how much meat a person could afford. Because they came from a meat-scarce society, its sudden availability in America represented the unlimited bounty of their adopted home, and Jews aspired to eat as much of it as possible. This fixation on meat helps explain the exalted place of the delicatessen in the life of the ghetto. But shortly after the turn of the century, a new type of eating place appeared on the East Side, which served no meat at all: the dairy restaurant. Here, with the exception of fish, the kitchen was strictly vegetarian, concentrating on foods made from grain, vegetables, milk, and eggs. On the face of it, the dairy restaurant was a natural outgrowth of the Jewish dietary law that forbids the mixing of meat and milk. On closer inspection, however, its appearance in New York around 1900 was a product of culinary forces that extended beyond the ghetto.

First, the East Side dairy restaurant was part of a growing interest in vegetarian dining that had recently taken hold of New York. The city's first vegetarian restaurant opened in 1895 and more followed, providing patrons with a meatless menu of salads, nut-b.u.t.ter sandwiches, omelets, vegetable cutlets, and dairy dishes like berries and cream. American vegetarians came to their dietary views by way of religion. One early proponent was the Reverend Sylvester Graham (advocate for whole-grain bread) who helped found the American Vegetarian Society in 1850. Another was John Harvey Kellogg, a Seventh-Day Adventist and culinary inventor responsible for the creation of corn flakes. At his sanatorium in Battle Creek, Michigan, Kellogg also experimented with faux meat compounds made primarily from gluten and nuts, which became a staple of the East Side dairy menu.

The appearance of the first Jewish dairy restaurants coincided with a culinary crisis on the Lower East Side, which centered on the high cost of kosher meat. In the spring of 1902, a sudden jump in the price of kosher beef uncorked the pent-up outrage of East Side housewives. The women organized a neighborhood-wide boycott for the morning of May 15, with picketers stationed in front of every neighborhood butcher shop. Patrons who crossed the picket line had their purchases seized and doused with kerosene. At eleven a.m., a group of women and boys marched down Orchard Street and smashed the windows of every butcher en route, including the bas.e.m.e.nt shop at number 97. Police who tried to stop the women became the target of their anger. The demonstrators pounced on the officers and wrestled them to the ground or pelted them with garbage. That night, five hundred women a.s.sembled at an East Side meeting hall. As the surrounding streets filled with angry supporters, tensions escalated between the crowd and the police. The inevitable fight broke out, and within the hour the neighborhood was engulfed in violence. The rioting subsided by the following afternoon, but the meat troubles continued for another decade, sparking boycotts and protests, though nothing on the scale of 1902.

The East Side's first dairy restaurants, born in the midst of the kosher-meat crisis, were shoestring operations, the menu limited to a handful of traditional dishes like blintzes, kasha, and herring. By the 1940s, however, this working person's lunchroom had evolved into a more ambitious enterprise. The most ambitious of all was Ratner's, which had originally opened in 1905 in a cramped storefront on Pitt Street. In 1918, the restaurant moved to its new home on Delancey Street, right next door to the Loew's Delancey, then a neighborhood vaudeville theater. In 1928, the Loew's Delancey became the Loew's Commodore, one of the new and fantastically ornate movie palaces that had begun to appear in the city. That same year, Ratner's received its own renovation at a cost of $150,000, transforming the old-time lunchroom into the "East Side's premier dining place." In its more elegant guise, its menu blossomed, and by 1940 covered a vast gastronomic territory ranging from the traditional herring salad to asparagus on toast to caviar sandwiches, among the most expensive items on the menu. But the most creative dishes to emerge from the dairy restaurant were their counterfeit meats. In place of actual beef or chicken or lamb, the dairy restaurants served meat subst.i.tutes that craftily mimicked the original. There was vegetarian stuffed turkey neck, chicken giblet frica.s.see, or chopped liver, all traditional Jewish foods. Diners with more a.s.similated taste could have vegetarian lamb chops or meatless veal cutlet. All of these foods were grouped under a section of the menu labeled "Roasts." Under the same heading was a selection of the faux meat products manufactured by Kellogg at his Michigan plant. The most popular was Protose steak, which the dairy restaurants served with fried onions or mushroom gravy. Here's a cla.s.sic recipe for vegetarian chopped liver, with the "livery" taste surprisingly coming from the canned peas: LILLIAN C CHa.n.a.lES'S V VEGETARIAN C CHOPPED L LIVER3 medium-sized onions, chopped3 tablespoons vegetable oil1 large can sweet peas, drained1 cups chopped walnuts2 hard-boiled eggs, choppedSaute the onions in the oil until they are soft and golden. Mash peas with the back of a fork. Combine onion and peas with remaining ingredients and chop by hand until you have the desired consistency. If you like, you can use a food processor, but be careful not to over-process. Season with salt and a generous dose of freshly ground black pepper.25 The East Side's vast network of food purveyors satisfied the diverse culinary needs of the local population with a thoroughness that was unmatched in most other neighborhoods. People like the Rogarshevskys had no reason to cross 14th Street to buy their horseradish or kosher meat or to find a congenial cafe or a restaurant that met their religious standards. As East Siders began to disperse, the food merchants followed. Kosher butcher shops opened in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and along upper Broadway, in addition to Jewish bakeries and delicatessens. Dairy restaurants began to appear in midtown to feed the Jewish garment workers, and more opened on the Upper West Side. But still, former East Siders returned to the old neighborhood to shop from the downtown merchants and patronize the restaurants. Immigrants who had moved to Brooklyn or the Bronx or Upper Manhattan made Sunday trips to the Lower East Side to flex their bargaining muscles at the pushcart market and buy a smoked whitefish at Russ & Daughters, the appetizing store on Houston Street. Before the holidays, they converged on the East Side to buy their matzoh, kosher wine, and dried fruit. When the shopping was done, they went for lunch at Ratner's or Rappaport's, another of the East Side's dairy restaurants.

Accounts of these food-inspired trips to the Lower East Side appear regularly in immigrant memoirs and immigrant fiction as well. A Fannie Hurst story called "In Memoriam" follows the tribulations of Mrs. Meyerberg, a lonely Fifth Avenue matron who returns-by chauffeured limousine-to her former tenement kitchen. Flooded with memories, Mrs. Meyerberg is moved by a sudden impulse to a.s.sume her place behind the tenement stove, and she does, but the experience proves too much for her. In typical Fannie Hurst fashion, the matron literally dies of joy. Anzia Yezierska's East Side heroine, Hannah Brieneh, makes a similar voyage. Now an old woman, residing in relative splendor on Riverside Drive, Hannah Brieneh is bereft, a living soul trapped in a mausoleum. The answer to her existential crisis is a trip to the pushcart market. "In a fit of rebellion," she rides downtown, buys a new marketing basket, and heads for the fish stand. The downtown foray is like a splash of cold water for the withering Hannah Brieneh, who returns in triumph, filling the lifeless apartment with the homey smells of garlic and herring.

The subway ride from the tenements to uptown New York proved more disruptive to immigrant food ways than the initial journey to America. Comfortably middle-cla.s.s, the uptown Jew could eat like royalty, meat three times a day, unlimited quant.i.ties of soft white bread, pastry and tea to fill the gap between lunch and dinner. But uptown living came with unexpected constraints. Uptown Jews were plagued by a new and irksome self-consciousness that complicated mealtimes. Americanized children badgered their immigrant parents to give up the foods they had always relished. If the uptown Jew had a craving for brisket and sauerkraut, the aromas of these dishes cooking on the stove wafted through the apartment building and neighbors complained. The once-beloved organ meats became tokens of poverty, and uptown homemakers had to sneak them into the kitchen like contraband on the servant's day off. What a pleasure, then, to escape to an East Side restaurant for a plate of chopped herring and a basket of onion rolls.

CHAPTER FIVE.

The Baldizzi Family.

"Whoever forsakes the old way for the new knows what he is losing but not what he will find."-SICILIAN PROVERB At the start of the twentieth century, 97 Orchard Street stood on the most densely populated square block of urban America, with 2,223 people, most of them Russian Jews, packed into roughly two acres. One hundred and eleven of them resided in the twenty apartments at 97 Orchard, the oldest building on the block.

By the 1930s, the same East Side neighborhood was a shadow of its former self. Many of the older tenements had been abandoned by their owners, who could no longer afford to pay the property taxes, and were now vacant sh.e.l.ls. Others had been demolished or consumed by fire and never rebuilt. As a result, a neighborhood once defined by its extreme architectural density was now littered with empty lots. The tenements that survived the 1920s were languishing too, the victims of changing demographics. Immigration had slowed dramatically by the middle of the decade; old-time East Siders, those who had settled in the neighborhood before the war, had dispersed to the outer boroughs. The number of people living at 97 Orchard, for example, had shrunk from one hundred and eleven to roughly twenty-five, leaving one-third of the building's apartments completely empty. The East Side tenant shortage meant that neighborhood landlords-even the most conscientious-could no longer afford to maintain their properties, and many buildings fell into disrepair.

Built during the Civil War, years before New York had formulated a body of housing laws, 97 Orchard embodied a laissez-faire approach toward lodging for the working cla.s.s. As the building pa.s.sed from one owner to the next, it was gradually modernized. In 1905, 97 Orchard was equipped with indoor plumbing. A system of cast-iron pipes now branched into every apartment and connected to the kitchen sink, supplying tenants with cold running water. The same system allowed for indoor water closets. A second major overhaul came in the early 1920s, when the building was wired for electricity. Despite these efforts, 97 Orchard remained an architectural relic. As late as 1935, the four apartments on each floor were served by two communal toilets. None had bathtubs or any form of heat apart from the kitchen stove. Only one room in three had proper windows.

In the years following World War I, 97 Orchard was home to a mix of Irish, Romanians, Russians, Lithuanians, and Italians. Included in this last group were the Baldizzis, a family of Sicilian immigrants that had come to New York to share in the unlimited possibilities of the American economy. Their plans, however, were derailed by the stock market crash of 1929 and the resulting disappearance of millions of jobs.

For most of the nineteenth century, as Germans and then Irish streamed into the United States, the Italian population stayed at microscopic levels. The 1860 census counted only twelve thousand Italian-born immigrants in the entire country, a demographic speck. The great majority of these early settlers were Northern Italians from Genoa, the surrounding province of Liguria, and from Piedmont just to the north. The numbers began to climb in the boom decades after the Civil War as America turned to the work of rebuilding. The rush of postwar construction activity created more jobs than the country could fill with its own citizens. So, America turned to her neighbors overseas. With the encouragement of the United States government, work-hungry Italians-among other immigrant groups-stepped in to alleviate a desperate labor shortage. During the 1880s, fifty-five thousand Italians arrived in the United States, and just over three hundred thousand in the decade following. By the end of the century, more Italians were landing at Ellis Island than any other immigrant group, and the trend continued into the 1900s. The immigrants who belonged to this second wave were overwhelmingly from the southern provinces of Basilicata, Calabria, and Sicily.

Two features of the Italian migration distinguished it from other groups. First was the lopsided ratio of men to women from Italy. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, that ratio was four to one, with men leading the way. Though the numbers balanced out some over time, they never reached an even fifty-fifty. Lone Italian men came to the United States to work in railroad construction, to build dams, dig ca.n.a.ls, lay sewer systems, and pave the nation's roads, "pick and shovel" jobs. The Italian laborer was typically a man in the prime of his working life. Many had wives and children back in Italy, to whom they planned to return once they had saved enough of their American wages to go back home and purchase a farm or maybe start a business. The average length of the Italian's sojourn in America was seven years. Some Italians became long-distance commuters. They worked in America during the busy summer season and returned home for the slow winter months, when construction was put on hold.

The success of this international labor pool hinged on a figure known as the padrone, an immigrant himself who wore many hats. Part employment agent, part interpreter, part boardinghouse keeper, and part personal banker, the padrone supplied the new immigrant with much-needed ser vices while robbing him of half his wages, and sometimes more. The padrone's headquarters were in America but his work began in Italy, scouring the countryside for prospective clients-dissatisfied field workers, in good health, who were willing to travel. This work was often delegated to an Italian-based partner, who worked on commission. The padrone also formed relationships with American employers who kept him apprised of their labor needs, so when an immigrant landed, the padrone knew where to send him. In the cities, he kept boardinghouses where his clients were compelled to lodge, charging extortionist rates for a patch of floor to sleep on. Italians who were sent afield to lay railroad tracks or dig reservoirs in the American hinterland were beholden to the padrone for all their basic needs. Other men who worked on these grand-scale building projects-Slavs, Hungarians, and even the occasional American-lived in camps established by their employer. They slept in the company bunkhouse and ate together in the company mess hall. The one group missing from this international community was the Italians, who followed their padrones to all-Italian camps complete with bunkhouses, a commissary for buying supplies, and a kitchen where the men ate. These boardinghouses in the wilderness, catering to a captive and hungry clientele, were another money-maker for the padrone. At the same time, they answered one very important requirement for the laborer: to eat like an Italian.

Where other groups consumed whatever stews, breads, and puddings they were given, the Italian demanded foods from the homeland. Over the course of one month, the typical laborer consumed: Bread 34.1 lbsMacaroni 19.3 lbsRice .24 lbsMeat (sausage, corned beef, & codfish) 2.31 lbsSardines 25 boxesBeans, peas and lentils 2.06 lbsFatback (lard subst.i.tute) 5.13 lbsTomatoes 2.13 cansSugar 2.8 poundsCoffee .43 lbs1 The men purchased their supplies at the commissary or shanty store, a grocery run by the padrone, where everything on the shelves was triple its normal price. The men took turns behind the camp stove, a group of three or four preparing meals for the entire crew. Some camps ran their own bakeries, using commissary flour. Out west, a similar arrangement could be found among Chinese railroad workers. In their separate camps, faced with the unappetizing prospect of the company mess hall, the Chinese workers a.s.sumed the job of feeding themselves, the only possible way to procure food that they considered edible. For both groups of men, Chinese and Italian, cooking became a New World survival skill.

Many of the foods that issued from the communal pot would be familiar today. Various forms of lentil soup, macaroni and tomatoes, beans and macaroni, beans and salt pork, and beans with sausage. Next to the familiar were more uncommon preparations. One ingenious food was a kind of homemade bouillon cube, prepared by Italian workers in Newark, New Jersey, circa 1900. Using a beer vat as their mixing vessel, the men first pounded a large quant.i.ty of tomatoes. Next, they poured some cornmeal and flour into the vat and stirred until the stuff became a dough. The next step was to throw this on what bakers would call a molding trough and knead it, adding enough flour to make it a stiff pulp. The less said about the state of their hands the better, but that is a trivial matter. The mixture was molded into little pats about the same size of fishcake. These were placed on boards and taken to various roofs to dry.2 Come winter, when fresh tomatoes were no longer available, the cakes were dissolved in boiling water, each cake producing enough soup for six men.

A second defining feature of the Italian migration was poverty. After 1865, the great majority of Italian immigrants were poor southern fieldworkers. They arrived at Ellis Island, illiterate and unskilled, with, in 1901, an average life-savings of $8.79. Despite their farming background, most Italians settled in the large industrial cities. Here they found work as street cleaners, pavers, and ditch-and tunnel-diggers-the dirtiest, most dangerous jobs. Immigration officials bluntly referred to the Southern Italian as America's "worst immigrants," a judgment echoed in the daily papers. "Lazy," "ignorant," and "clannish" were just a few of the adjectives most commonly linked with Italians by the popular press. "Violent" was another oft-mentioned Italian characteristic. American newspapers kept a running tally of crimes committed by the Black Hand, an early name for Italian organized crime, paying special attention to any case that involved explosives. (Bombs were a fairly common means of extortion among gangsters of the period.) America's fascination with Italian gangsters helped reinforce the argument that Italians were violent by nature. Following this circular logic, Americans were convinced that "no foreigners with whom we have to deal, stab and murder on so slight provocation," a judgment offered by the New York Times New York Times.3 Among the lowest of this low-grade stock were the men and women who rejected honest work in favor of more shiftless occupations. One character was the Italian organ-grinder, a roving street performer with a hand organ suspended from a strap around his neck. The hand organ worked like an oversized music box, with a rotating cylinder inside it that turned by means of a crank. The more prosperous worked with an a.s.sistant, a trained monkey in a red vest and matching fez. The animal perched on his master's shoulder while the music played and collected pennies at the end of the number. The organ grinder's main patrons were the city's children.

Another dubious line of work was rag-picking, an urban occupation dominated by foreigners, beginning with the Germans in the 1850s. The Irish also turned to rag-picking, but in smaller numbers. By the 1880s, the industry had been pa.s.sed down to the Italians, the country's newest immigrants. America's first career recyclers, rag-pickers made their livelihood by sifting through the city's garbage for reusable resources. The tools of the rag-picker's trade were a long pole with a hook at one end and a large sack slung across her chest. Her workday began before the city was fully awake, when the streets were still quiet. She made her rounds, moving from one trash barrel to the next, examining its contents with the help of her pole, and plucking from it whatever she found of value. Her most fruitful hunting grounds were the cities' wealthier neighborhoods, where the garbage was rife with discarded treasure-old shoes and boots, battered cooking pans, gla.s.s bottles, and the rags themselves, cream of the trash barrel. Once home, she emptied her sack onto the floor to survey the day's gleanings. Each type of article was sorted into its own box, one for paper, one for leather goods, one for metal, one for gla.s.s, and so on. The bones were put into a large kettle and boiled clean. The rags were rinsed and hung up to dry.

The next stop for the sorted garbage was the junk dealer, a refuse middleman who paid the rag-picker a set sum by weight for each material, then turned around and sold it, at a profit, to a.s.sorted manufacturers. Old shoes and boots were retooled to look like new or shredded to a pulp, an ingredient used in the manufacture of waterproof tarps. Paper was sold to local publishers, who turned it into newsprint for the morning papers. Bottles were reused or melted. Bones from the family dinner table were turned into umbrella handles, snuff boxes, b.u.t.tons, and toothbrushes. Rags, which fetched more per pound than any other item, went to make the era's finest writing paper.

Middle-cla.s.s America declared the rag-picker too lazy for "real work," or accused her of ulterior motives. All of that innocent rummaging was, they believed, a cover for her real purpose-casing the best homes in the city for future burglaries. The organ grinder was likewise seen as a threat to public welfare, a nuisance at best, but at worst a common street thug, his stiletto tucked in his boot. Bootblacks, chestnut vendors, and fruit peddlers all belonged to the same itinerant cla.s.s and all were suspect.

Non-Italians found proof of these immigrants' lowly character in the foods they ate: stale bread, macaroni with oil, and, if they were lucky, a handful of common garden weeds. No other immigrant diet was as meager. For his nourishment, the Italian fruit peddler relied on the bruised and moldy fruit that was too far gone to sell, even by East Side standards. Organ grinders, because of their aversion to work, subsisted on a diet "so scanty that had they not been accustomed to the severest deprivation from infancy, their system would refuse to be nourished by food that an Irish navvy would shrink from with abhorrence."4 Their spare diet acted as an impediment that kept the immigrant from rising in the world. A typical lunch for the Italian laborer, a piece of bread and cup of water, was no meal for a working man. American employers, who could choose from an international pool of workers, came to regard the Italian as second-rate. "They are active, but not hardy or strong as the average man"-a rung below the Hungarian or the Slav. The main reason: "they eat too little." Their spare diet acted as an impediment that kept the immigrant from rising in the world. A typical lunch for the Italian laborer, a piece of bread and cup of water, was no meal for a working man. American employers, who could choose from an international pool of workers, came to regard the Italian as second-rate. "They are active, but not hardy or strong as the average man"-a rung below the Hungarian or the Slav. The main reason: "they eat too little."5 But no diet was more reviled than the rag-picker's-a hodgepodge of bread crusts, vegetable tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs, bones, and meat sc.r.a.ps plucked from middle-cla.s.s trash bins. One particularly desperate cla.s.s of rag-pickers scavenged only for food, eating some of what they gathered and selling the rest for profit. Italian women from Mulberry, Baxter, and Crosby streets, the food scavengers targeted the city's markets, grocers, fruit stands, butchers, and fishmongers. An 1883 newspaper story from the New York Times New York Times describes how they operated: describes how they operated: Partially decayed potatoes, onions, carrots, apples, oranges, bananas, and pineapples are the princ.i.p.al finds in the mess of garbage that is overhauled. The greatest prize to the garbage-searching old hag is a mess of the outside leaves of cabbage that are torn off before the odorous vegetable is displayed for sale on the stands. The rescued stuff-cabbage leaves, onions, bananas, oranges, &c.-is dumped into a filthy bit of sacking, and the whole carted, as soon as a day's labor is concluded, to the miserable quarters which the old hag is forced to call home. Here a sorting process is gone through with. If the husband or son is sufficiently endowed with this world's goods to be the proprietor of a fruit-stand, everything that may possibly be sold for no matter how small a sum is transferred to him. The remainder is subdivided. The cabbage leaves which are fresh are sold for use in the cheap restaurants to be served with corned beef. Such as will not serve for that purpose is stripped of decayed portions and used as the body of the poor Italian's favorite dish-cabbage soup. In the composition of this dish, often for days at a time the only food save stale bread, which a family has to dine upon, are mixed the portions of the potatoes, carrots, and other vegetables which are not absolutely rotten. The tomatoes are used in making a gravy for the macaroni, this delicacy being secured in exchange for decayed fruits and vegetables at the groceries or restaurants of the Italian quarter. This process of exchange is carried on quite extensively as the store-keepers prefer it, and find an addition to their meager profits in the system of barter.6 Despite the revulsion of middle-cla.s.s America, the rag-picker's harvest provided her and her family with a windfall of edible wealth. American queasiness over "rescued food" was a luxury that the struggling immigrant could easily overlook. The heaps of discarded food, some of it perfectly good, which materialized each day in city trash bins, must have left the rag-picker gaping in wonderment. On the one hand, the rag-picker's lack of skills, education, and English left her consigned to the outer fringes of American society. Still, she was able to make a living off America's leftovers. American abundance was so staggering that the garbage that acc.u.mulated daily in cities like New York could support a shadow system of food distribution operated largely by immigrants. The rag-picker was a key player in this shadow economy, redistributing her daily harvest to peddlers, restaurants, and neighborhood groceries. In her own kitchen, the rag-picker's culinary gleanings formed the basis of a limited but nourishing diet. (Sanitary inspectors were often surprised by the rag-picker's good health.) Even more surprising, the rag-picker cook was determined to both nourish and delight, bartering for macaroni-a luxury food in the immigrant diet-while turning her rescued fruit into jellies and marmalade.

Expressions of anti-Italian bias continued until the start of World War I, when the nation shifted focus to fighting the Germans. German-Americans, once regarded as model immigrants, were now considered a threat to national security. Suspected of loyalty to the Fatherland, they were declared "enemy aliens" by President Woodrow Wilson and subject to a string of government restrictions. Thousands were arrested or interned. In the anxious years after the war, animosity directed at the Germans spread to other foreigners, placing immigrants and immigration at the center of a national debate. Though many of the old fears persisted, the new nativists turned to the faux science of race studies, a potent blend of anthropology, biology, and eugenics. American prosperity, they argued, rested on the superior mental traits of the Anglo-Saxon, attributes that were pa.s.sed down from parent to offspring in much the same way as eye color. Alarmed by the recent influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans, the nativists claimed that decades of unchecked immigration had compromised the greatness of America, and the danger would continue as long as the gates stayed open. If they did, the outcome was a.s.sured: race suicide. By this reckoning, the settlement workers and schoolteachers who had worked so hard to Americanize the foreign-born were hopelessly misguided. American greatness could not be taught. It was literally in "the blood."

Among the leading voices of the new nativists was a New Yorker named Madison Grant, a lawyer and amateur zoologist who helped found the Bronx Zoo. Alongside his interest in wildlife, Grant developed a taste for politics, chiefly in the field of immigration policy. He encountered like-minded thinkers in such organizations as the Immigration Restriction League and the American Defense Society, a group originally founded to protect America from German aggression. Once the armistice was signed, the group shifted focus to a new enemy, the immigrant. Grant published his manifesto, The Pa.s.sing of a Great Race The Pa.s.sing of a Great Race, in 1916. The book never sold very well, but the ideas laid down by Grant filtered into Washington. Here, they became the quasi-scientific basis for a series of anti-immigration laws culminating in the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act, the most stringent immigrant quota system in United States history. After 1924, the total number of immigrants allowed to enter the United States each year became one hundred and fifty thousand, a minuscule number compared to earlier times. What's more, Johnson-Reed was specific about who those immigrants could be. America was now prepared to admit two percent of each foreign population living in the United States as of 1890, a year strategically chosen to make room for Western Europeans while shutting out less desirable types-Eastern Europeans, Italians, and Jews.

More than other groups, Italians arrived in this country with the firm knowledge that they were unwanted. In the workplace, Italians were paid less than other ethnicities, or denied jobs entirely. Landlords with a no-Italians policy denied them housing. The fact that few spoke English offered little protection against ethnic slurs, sources of the deepest humiliation for the transplanted Italian. The immigrant soon discovered that words like dago dago and and ginny ginny were accepted features of American speech, and not only in the streets and the schoolyards. "The Rights of the Dago" and "Big Dago Riot at Castle Gate" were the kinds of headlines Americans could expect to find in their morning paper. The quota laws effectively made anti-Italian discrimination the official policy of the United States government. were accepted features of American speech, and not only in the streets and the schoolyards. "The Rights of the Dago" and "Big Dago Riot at Castle Gate" were the kinds of headlines Americans could expect to find in their morning paper. The quota laws effectively made anti-Italian discrimination the official policy of the United States government.

In the hostile environment first encountered by Italians, food took on new meanings and new powers. The many forms of discrimination leveled at Italians encouraged immigrants to seal themselves off, culturally speaking, from the rest of America. This circling of the wagons, a response typical of many persecuted people, was interpreted by Americans as Italian "clannishness," an unwelcome trait in any immigrant but especially so for an already suspect group-poor, uneducated, and Catholic. The metaphorical walls built up by Italian-Americans served a double purpose. On the one hand, they protected the immigrant from outside menace, both real and invented. On the other, they carved out a s.p.a.ce where Italians could carry on with their native traditions in relative peace, away from American disapproval. As it happens, the traditions they seemed most devoted to were those connected with food. Certainly, culinary continuity was important to other foreign groups, but Italian-Americans were bonded to their gastronomic heritage with an intensity unknown to Russians, Germans, or Irish, and went to great lengths to protect it. The Jews had their religion; the Germans had their poets, their composers, and their beer; and the Irish had their politics. The Italians arrived with a strong musical tradition; they also had their faith. But food was their cultural touchstone, their way of defying the critics, of tolerating the slurs and all of the other injustices. It was their way of being Italian.

Harsh critics of Italian eating habits, Americans tried through various means to reform the immigrant cook. The Italians were unmoved. Despite the cooking cla.s.ses and public school lectures, and despite the persistent advice of visiting nurses and settlement workers, the immigrants' belief in the superiority of their native foods was unwavering. Respect for the skills of the Italian cook, the goodness that she could extract from her raw materials, was one thing, but the immigrants were equally devoted to the materials themselves. For them, good Italian cooking was made from foods that grew from the Italian soil, and they used imported ingredients whenever possible. Olives and olive oil, anchovies, jarred peppers, dried mushrooms, artichokes cured in salt, canned tomatoes and tomato paste, vinegar, oregano, garlic, a variety of cured meats and cheeses, and, above all, pasta, were some of the products found in the Italian groceries that served America's many Little Italys. Here, Italian homemakers, working women of limited means, could stock their pantries with native foods, despite the daunting cost of imported goods. The financial sacrifice was proof of the Italian's dedication. A 1903 newspaper story describing the Italian grocery for readers who had never seen one took note of the Italians' food priorities: No people are more devoted to their native foods than the Italians, and Italian groceries filled with imported edibles flourish in all the different colonies of the city. The price of the imported good is a drain on the purses of the patrons and they wearily try to get the same satisfaction out of American-made subst.i.tutes, which have the same names and the same appearance, but never, never, the same taste.7 To the immigrant palate, Italian-style hams made in America were cured too quickly; American-made caciocavallo caciocavallo, the cheese beloved by Sicilians, was lacking in b.u.t.terfat and quickly spoiled; American garlic was tasteless; and American vinegar was the wrong color. But the saddest disappointment was American pasta, much of it produced on Elizabeth Street in Sicilian-owned pasta factories. Made from standard white flour-not semolina-it was pale and, once cooked, it went soft. Domestic pasta was half the price of imported, but Italians were loath to buy it and literally saved their pennies for the genuine article.

Back home in Italy, peasant families had managed to survive another kind of hostile environment. Oppressive landowners, unfairly high taxes, and periodic crop failures meant a precarious life for the contadini contadini, the field workers of southern Italy. Even in good times, when the peasant had enough to eat, starvation remained a looming possibility, always one crop failure away. If nothing else was guaranteed to the peasant-and nothing was-the unshakable bond of family was his bedrock. The family patriarch was an unchallenged authority who demanded absolute obedience from his wife and children, his helpers in the fields. The needs of the family came before those of the individual, and loyalty among family was unwavering. In America, as Italians adapted to a new way of life, the old values of family solidarity were put to the test. For the first time, children left their parents' side to attend school. Here they were exposed to a world of people and ideas apart from their family. Italian girls, no longer under the constant surveillance of their elders, were now free-though not entirely-to make their own friends, and eventually to find their own husbands. As Italian women left their homes to work in American factories, they too developed lives separate from the family, discovering a level of independence they had never known in the Old Country.

Despite all these changes, the old values lived on in the nightly ritual of the evening meal, a tangible expression of family solidarity, loyalty, and love. To borrow a phrase from Blood of My Blood Blood of My Blood, Richard Gambino's wonderful book about Brooklyn Sicilians, the evening meal was "a communion of the family." Sicilians, and southern Italians in general, arrived in America with a deep reverence for the preciousness of food. They knew full well the human labor required to coax it from the earth, and how, on occasion, the earth would refuse them. In America, though now removed from the soil, the Italian still labored for his food, working for relatively low wages in the nation's most strenuous jobs. The family meal was an occasion to share the fruits of that labor, and for the Italian, attendance was mandatory. On weekdays, Italian kids often returned home for lunch as well, though they could eat for free in the school cafeteria.

As Italians found their way into the American economy, the family supper took on another layer of meaning. Edible proof of the immigrant's success, the evening meal was a nightly celebration of the triumph over hunger. The price of that victory was not lost on the immigrants, especially the older ones, who still remembered the fourteen-hour work-days. The bounty before him was the Italian's belated reward for building America's subways, her skysc.r.a.pers and bridges-in other words, for bringing America into the twentieth century.

Each night, the family dinner table became a stage for all the tempting foods that the immigrant had once dreamed about but couldn't afford. At the center of that dream, there was meat. For early immigrants, meat was used as a seasoning, an ingredient added to soup or sauce to give it body and richness. By the 1920s, a midweek dinner in a working-cla.s.s Italian kitchen included soup, then pasta, followed by meat and a salad. At the end of the week, Italian families sat down to a banquet of stunning extravagance. Sunday supper began in the early afternoon with an antipasto of cheese, salami, ham, and anchovies. Appet.i.tes now fully awake, the family moved through multiple courses, leading them to the heart of the feast. If the family were Sicilian, that might include a ragu ragu made from marrow bones, chicken, pork sausage, and meatb.a.l.l.s, stewed veal and peppers, and braciole, a thin filet of pounded beef or pork wrapped around a stuffing of cheese, bread crumbs, parsley, pine nuts, and raisins. made from marrow bones, chicken, pork sausage, and meatb.a.l.l.s, stewed veal and peppers, and braciole, a thin filet of pounded beef or pork wrapped around a stuffing of cheese, bread crumbs, parsley, pine nuts, and raisins.

The Italian writer Jerre Mangione, who grew up in Rochester, New York, in the 1920s, remembers the parade of courses: first, there was soup; then pasta, perhaps ziti in sugo sugo; followed by two kinds of chicken, one boiled, and one roasted; roasted veal; roasted lamb; and brusciuluna brusciuluna-"a combination of Roman cheese, salami, and moon-shaped slivers of hardboiled egg encased in rolls of beef." When the meat was cleared, there was fennel and celery to cleanse the palate, followed by homemade pastries, nuts, fruit, and vermouth. These Sunday suppers, prepared by the author's father, were more extravagant than the family could realistically afford, and the senior Mangione often had to borrow money to pay for them.8 Moderation had no place at the Sunday table. The gathered crowd, encouraged by their fellow diners, went back for multiple helpings with not a jot of self-consciousness. Quite the contrary, any guest who refused another helping was given a mild rebuke. Moderation had no place at the Sunday table. The gathered crowd, encouraged by their fellow diners, went back for multiple helpings with not a jot of self-consciousness. Quite the contrary, any guest who refused another helping was given a mild rebuke.

The meatb.a.l.l.s, ragu ragus, and roasts that were (and remain) a centerpiece of the Italian-American kitchen had never figured in the peasant diet. Rather, they belonged to the kitchens of Italian landowners, merchants, and clergy, who, on important feast days like Easter and Christmas, distributed meat to the poor.9 In America, immigrant cooks reinterpreted these feast-day foods and, in another expression of American bounty, made them a regular part of the Sunday table. The American larder was so immense that it could literally feed the working cla.s.s on a diet once reserved for Italian n.o.bility. In America, immigrant cooks reinterpreted these feast-day foods and, in another expression of American bounty, made them a regular part of the Sunday table. The American larder was so immense that it could literally feed the working cla.s.s on a diet once reserved for Italian n.o.bility.

One effect of the quota laws of the 1920s was to create a shadow wave of uncounted immigrants, men and women from Russia, Poland, Italy, and other restricted nations, who evaded the authorities and entered the country illegally. The Baldizzis belonged to that wave. Adolfo Baldizzi was born in Palermo in 1896 and was orphaned as a young boy. His professional training as a cabinetmaker began at age five, but the outbreak of World War I put his career temporarily on hold. A wartime portrait of Adolfo shows a young soldier with thick black hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. Rosaria Baldizzi (her family name was Mutolo) was born in 1906, also in Palermo, to a family of trades people and civil servants. The Baldizzis were married in 1922, the same year Rosaria turned sixteen. A year later, the couple decided to emigrate. To evade the 1921 immigrant quota laws, Adolfo came to America as a stowaway aboard a French vessel. As the ship pulled into New York Harbor, he climbed from his hiding place, jumped over the railing, and swam to sh.o.r.e. Rosaria made the same trip in 1924, with a doctored pa.s.sport.

Adolfo Baldizzi in his soldier's uniform, circa 1914.

Courtesy of the Tenement Museum

Wedding portrait of sixteen-year-old Rosaria Mutolo Baldizzi, two years before she emigrated.

Courtesy of the Tenement Museum For Rosaria Mutolo Baldizzi, the move to America was a step down in life. Born to a middle-cla.s.s family, Rosaria spent her childhood in a good-size house with a stone courtyard where her mother grew geraniums and raised chickens, selling the eggs to neighbors. Rosaria's father was confined to a wheelchair by the time she was a young girl, but in his youth had owned or worked in a bakery. Her two older brothers were both policemen; her sister was a dressmaker. On Sunday afternoons, still in their church clothes, the family took leisurely strolls, stopping at a local cafe for coffee and granita. Rosaria's marriage to a cabinetmaker at age sixteen was considered a good match. In her 1921 wedding portrait, she is posed at the foot of an ornate staircase, dressed in a tailored skirt and matching jacket, both trimmed in a wide panel of hand-woven lace. A flapper-style cloche hat, jauntily c.o.c.ked, with a long, trailing sash, completes the ensemble.

Rosaria's move to New York in 1924 meant the end of a reasonably privileged and protected life. Her first glimpse of Elizabeth Street, center of Sicilian New York, was a sobering experience for the young immigrant. To her consternation, the shoppers who overflowed the sidewalk onto the cobblestoned street were oblivious to the garbage under their feet, a carpet of moldering cabbage leaves and orange rinds. Every window ledge and door lintel was veiled in soot, like a dusting of black snow. But most disturbing of all were the Elizabeth Street stables. The young Mrs. Baldizzi was shocked to find that New Yorkers, presumably civilized people, lived side by side with horses.

The couple's first home was a single room in a two-room apartment. To supplement her husband's earnings, Rosaria took in laundry, a common source of income for immigrant women. Whenever the couple fell behind in rent, they simply packed up and moved. The two Baldizzi children, Josephine and John, were born on Elizabeth Street, but in 1928, when John was still in his swaddling clothes, the family left Little Italy for 97 Orchard Street, a leap across cultures that brought the Baldizzis into the heart of the Jewish Lower East Side. Living on Orchard Street, they encountered the challenges typical of an immigrant family. These were eclipsed, however, by the calamitous events of 1929 and their aftermath. The "land of opportunity" they had expected to find evaporated before their eyes, leaving Mr. Baldizzi with a wife, two toddlers, and little hope of finding work.

The Baldizzis remained on Orchard Street through the grimmest years of the Depression. For most of that time, Adolfo was unemployed, though he still earned a few dollars a week as a neighborhood handy-man. New clothes or toys for the children were out of the question. When the soles on Josephine's shoes sprouted holes, they were fortified with a cardboard insert. The family food budget was concentrated on a few indispensible staples: bread, pasta, beans, lentils, and olive oil. Once a week, the family received free groceries from Home Relief, the a.s.sistance program created by Franklin Roosevelt in 1931 when he was still governor of New York. For many foreign-born Americans, Home Relief introduced the immigrant to foods like oatmeal, b.u.t.ter, American cheese, and, for the children, cod liver oil. It also furnished them with milk, potatoes, vegetables, flour, eggs, meat, and fish. For the Baldizzi parents, the weekly trip to the neighborhood food bank (it was actually the children's school) was a public walk of shame. The food, however, was necessary, and they accepted it gratefully.

Breakfast for the Baldizzi children was hot cereal, courtesy of Home Relief, or day-old bread that Mrs. Baldizzi tore into pieces and soaked in hot milk, with a little b.u.t.ter and sugar. The resulting dish, a kind of breakfast pudding, was a favorite of the children. Josephine Baldizzi, who was always thought too skinny by her parents, was given raw eggs to help fatten her up. The eggs were eaten two ways. Mrs. Baldizzi would poke a hole in one end of the egg, instructing her daughter to suck out the nutritious insides. She also prepared a drink for Josephine made of raw egg and milk whipped together with sugar and a splash of Marsala wine. Breakfast for the parents was hard bread dipped in coffee that Mrs. Baldizzi boiled in a pot. Coffee grinds, like tea bags, were reused two or three times before being consigned to the trash. The Baldizzi children returned home for a lunch of fried eggs and potato, or vegetable frittata. A typical evening meal was pasta and lentils or vegetable soup, which Mr. Baldizzi referred to as "belly wash." On Sat.u.r.day evenings, he made the family scrambled egg sandwiches with American ketchup.

Though America's bounty eluded the Baldizzis, Rosaria understood the power of food over the human psyche and used it-what little she had-as an antidote to the daily humiliations of poverty. Dinner in the Baldizzi household was a formal event, the table set with the good Italian linen that Rosaria had brought over from Sicily, the napkins ironed and starched so they stood up on their own. If the menu was limited, the food was expertly cooked and regally presented. On occasion, as a treat for the children, Rosaria would arrange their dinners on individual trays and present it to them as edible gifts. One of Josephine's clearest childhood memories is of her mother standing in front of the black stove at 97 Orchard, holding a tray of "pizza"-a large round loaf of Sicilian bread, sliced crosswise like a hamburger bun, rubbed with olive oil, sprinkled with cheese, and baked in the oven. "You see," Rosaria says, "you are are somebody!" Such was the power of food in the immigrant kitchen: to confer dignity on a skinny tenement kid with cardboard soles in her shoes. somebody!" Such was the power of food in the immigrant kitchen: to confer dignity on a skinny tenement kid with cardboard soles in her shoes.

On birthdays and holidays, edible giftgiving rose to the level of ritual. For All Souls Day, when ancestral spirits deigned to visit the living, Mrs. Baldizzi gave the kids a tray piled with the candied almonds known as confetti confetti, torrone torrone, Indian nuts, and Josephine's personal favorite, one-cent Hooten Bars. That night, the children would slip the tray under the bed, in case the spirits should arrive hungry. The next day, after the ancestors had presumably helped themselves, it was the children's turn. On Easter, each child received a marzipan representation of the Paschal lamb. Candy was also part of the Nativity scene displayed each December on the Baldizzis' kitchen table, the manger strewn with confetti confetti and American-style peppermint drops. and American-style peppermint drops.

Much of the candy sold in New York in the early twentieth century-Italian and otherwise-was produced locally in factories scattered through the city. In fact, by the turn of the century, New York was the center of the American candy trade, employing more people than any other food-related industry aside from bread. New York candy-makers were tied to another local industry with deep historical roots: the sugar trade. All through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ships carrying raw sugar from the Caribbean delivered their cargo to the refineries or "sugar houses" that were cl.u.s.tered near Wall Street, converting the coa.r.s.e brown crystals into loaves of white table sugar. Candy factories began to appear in Lower Manhattan in the early 1800s, before migrating uptown to Astor Place, then to midtown and Brooklyn.

By the late nineteenth century, immigrants were important players in the candy business. Some owned factories specializing in their native sweets, but many, many more worked as candy laborers. In New York, Chicago, Boston, and Philadelphia, all major candy-making cities, foreign-born women, chiefly Italians and Poles, worked the a.s.sembly lines, dipping, wrapping, and boxing. Italian Women in Industry Italian Women in Industry, a study published in 1919 that looked specifically at New York, reported that 94 percent of all Italian working women in 1900 were engaged in some form of manufacturing. While the overwhelming majority worked in the needle trades, about 6 percent were candy workers, a job that required no prior training or skills. The dirtiest, most onerous jobs-peeling coconuts, cracking almonds, and sorting peanuts-went to the older women who spoke no English. For their labor, they were paid roughly $4.50 for a sixty-five-hour workweek. (Women who worked in the needle trades generally earned $8 a week, while sewing machine operators, the most skilled garment workers, brought in $12 weekly or more.) The long hours and filthy conditions in the factories made candy work one of the least desirable jobs for Italian women. Mothers who worked in the candy factories for most of their adult lives prayed that daughters "would never go into it, unless they were forced to."

Another cla.s.s of candy workers could be found in the tenements. Candy outworkers were immigrant women hired by the factories, who brought their work home to their tenement apartments, completing specific tasks within the larger manufacturing process. This two-tiered arrangement of factory workers and home workers was widespread on the Lower East Side and used by several of the most important local industries. The largest and best-doc.u.mented was the garment industry, in which factory hands were responsible for the more critical jobs of cutting, sewing, and pressing, while home workers did "finishing work": small, repet.i.tive tasks, like sewing on b.u.t.tons, st.i.tching b.u.t.tonholes, and pulling out basting threads, a job that often fell to children. In the candy trade, finishing work meant wrapping candies and boxing them. It also included nut-picking: carefully separating the meat from the nutsh.e.l.l with the help of an improvised tool, like a hairpin or a nail. These were jobs often performed as a family activity, by an Italian mother and her kids, sitting at the kitchen table with a fifty-pound bag of licorice drops lugged home from the factory that morning, a small mountain of boxes at their feet.

Unlike her sisters in the factories, the home worker fell beyond the reach of protective labor laws that regulated the length of her workday along with her minimum wage. Her children were also unprotected. In the Old Country, children worked side by side with their fathers in the fields. In cities like New York, the moment they returned from school they went to work sh.e.l.ling hazelnuts or walnuts until deep into the night. During the rush seasons just before Christmas and Easter, they were kept home from school entirely.

In the eyes of middle-cla.s.s America, the candy home worker was an ambiguous figure, equal parts victim and villain. Bullied and abused by greedy factory owners, she attracted support from social reformers like the National Consumer League, which advocated on her behalf. At the same time, the outworker was a threat to public safety, the foods that touched her hands contaminated by the same germs that flourished in her tenement home. Pasta, wine, matzoh, and pickles were also produced in the tenements, foods made by immigrants for immigrants. Candy, however, was different. While made by foreigners, it was destined for the wider public, available in the most exclusive uptown stores.

As middle-cla.s.s Americans became aware of tenement candy workers, panic set in. Tenement-made candy, they surmised, was the perfect vehicle for transporting working-cla.s.s diseases like cholera and tuberculosis from the downtown slums to the more pristine neighborhoods in Upper Manhattan. "Table Tidbits Prepared Under Revolting Conditions," a story that ran in the New York Tribune New York Tribune in 1913, sounded the alarm: in 1913, sounded the alarm: Foodstuffs prepared in tenement houses? For whom? For you, fastidious reader and for everybody! A pleasant subject this for meditation. Slum squalor has been reaching uptown in many insidious ways. It was bad enough to think that the clothing one wore had been handled in stuffy rooms, where sanitary conditions and ventilation were deplorable...When it is learned, however, that many of the things actually eaten or put to the lips have been prepared by some poor slattern in indifferent or bad health and by more or less dirty tots of the slums amid surroundings that would cause humanity to hold its nose, a brilliant future looms up for some of the scourges scientists are busily endeavoring to stamp out.10

An immigrant family sh.e.l.ling nuts at their kitchen table. This photo was used to demonstrate the unsanitary conditions that prevailed among tenement home workers.

Library of Congress Stories like this one, br.i.m.m.i.n.g over in lurid details, enumerated the many sanitary breaches committed by the home worker. She was known, for example, to crack nuts with her teeth and pick them with her fingernails. At mealtime, picked nuts were swept to the side of the table, or removed to the floor or the bed. But most alarming of all, home workers performed their tasks in rooms shared by tuberculosis sufferers or children sick with measles. In some cases, the home worker was sick herself, like the consumptive woman who was too weak to leave her bed but somehow managed to go on with her work as a cigarette maker. The one detail consistently absent from these stories was mention of any doc.u.mented illness linked to tenement-made goods. They may have occurred, but the looming threat posed by the home worker was more compelling than the actual risk.

While immigrant candy workers fed the national sweet tooth, in their own communities, Italian confectioners made sweets for their fellow countrymen. The more prosperous owned their own shops, or bottege di confetti bottege di confetti, preparing the candy in large copper pots at the back of the store. Marzipan, torrone torrone (a nougat-like candy made with egg whites and honey), and (a nougat-like candy made with egg whites and honey), and panforte panforte, a dense cake made of honey, nuts, and fruit, were specialties of the confectioner's art. The confetti confetti shops also sold pastries like cannoli and shops also sold pastries like cannoli and ca.s.sata ca.s.sata, an ornate Sicilian cake made with ricotta, candied fruit, sponge cake, and marzipan. In the months leading up to Easter, store owners created window displays of their gaudiest, most eye-catching sweets. Herds of marzipan lambs grazed in one corner of the window, beside a field of cannoli. Pyramids of marzipan fruits and vegetables, each crafted in fine detail, loomed in the background. Most eye-catching of all, however, were candy statues representing the main actors in the Pa.s.sion story: a weeping Virgin Mary in her blue cloak; Christ in his loincloth staggering under the weight of the cross; Mary Magdalene; and even the heartless Roman soldiers brandishing their spears, all cast from molten sugar.

The Easter celebration was a family event centered on the home. More conspicuous occasions for candy consumption were the religious festivals held through the year in the streets of Little Italy. The feste feste were open-air celebrations in honor of a particular saint, each one connected with a town or village back home. Sponsored by fellow towns people, they combined religious observance in the form of a solemn procession with bra.s.s bands, fireworks, and public feasting, the exact nature of food determined by the immigrants' birthplace. A Sicilian festival, for example, would include were open-air celebrations in honor of a particular saint, each one connected with a town or village back home. Sponsored by fellow towns people, they combined religious observance in the form of a solemn procession with bra.s.s bands, fireworks, and public feasting, the exact nature of food determined by the immigrants' birthplace. A Sicilian festival, for example, would include torrone torrone, but not the kind made with egg whites. Sicilian torrone torrone was a glossy nut brittle made with almonds or hazelnuts, a confection brought to Sicily by the Arabs. There was also was a glossy nut brittle made with almonds or hazelnuts, a confection brought to Sicily by the Arabs. There was also cubbaita cubbaita, or sesame brittle, another Arab sweet, and insolde insolde, a Sicilian version of panforte panforte. Below is a description of the foods, candy included, available at a 1903 festival held in Harlem, the uptown Little Italy, honoring Our Lady of Mount Carmel:

Nut peddler at an Italian street festival.

Library of CongressThe crowd is chiefly buying things to eat from street vendors. Men push through the ma.s.ses of people on the sidewalks, carrying trays full of brick ice cream of brilliant hues and yelling "Gelati Italiani"-Italian ices. "Lupini," the "ginney beans" of the New York Arab; "ciceretti," the little roasted peas and squash seeds are favorite refreshments. Great ropes of Brazil nuts soaked in water and threaded on a string, or roasted chestnuts, strung in the same way, lie around the vendor's neck. Boys carry long sticks strung with rings of bread. All manner of "biscuitini," small Italian cakes, are for sale, frosted in gorgeous hues, chiefly a bright magenta cheerful to look upon but rather ghastly to contemplate as an article of food.Boys at the door of bakeshops vociferate "Pizzarelli caldi"-hot pizzarelli. The pizzarello is a little flat cake of fried dough, probably the Neapolitan equivalent of a doughnut. They sell for a penny a piece. Sometimes the cook makes them as big as the frying pan, putting in tomato and cheese-a mixture beloved of all Italians. These big ones cost 15 cents, but there is enough for a taste all around the family. The bakers are frying them hot all through the feast. A certain cake made with mola.s.ses, and full of peanuts or almonds, baked in a long slab and cut in little squares, four or five for a cent, is much eaten. So is "coppetta," a thick, hard white candy full of nuts; and the children all carry bags of "confetti," little bright-colored candies with nuts inside. Here and there the sun flashes on great bunches of bright, new tin pails, heaped on the back and shoulders of the vendor: and the new pail bought and filled with lemonade pa.s.ses impartially from lip to lip of the family parties lunching on the benches in Thomas Jefferson Park.11 Below is a recipe for croccante croccante, or almond brittle. It is adapted from The Italian Cook Book The Italian Cook Book by Maria Gentile, published in 1919, among the earliest Italian cookbooks published in the United States. by Maria Gentile, published in 1919, among the earliest Italian cookbooks published in the United States.

CROCCANTE3 cups blanched sliced almonds2 cups sugar12 tablespoons mildly flavored vegetable oil1 lemon cut in halfPreheat to 400F. Liberally grease a baking tray with the vegetable oil and put aside. Spread almonds on a separate tray and toast in hot oven until golden, about 5 minutes. Heat sugar in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and cook until sugar has completely melted. Add almonds and stir. Pour hot mixture onto greased baking tray, using the cut side of the lemon to spread evenly. Allow to cool and break into pieces.12 In the descriptive names that immigrants invented for the United States is a measure of what they expected to find. To Eastern European Jews, America was the Goldene Medina Goldene Medina, or "Golden Land," a place of extravagant wealth. For the Chinese immigrants who settled on the West Coast, America was "the gold mountain," a reference to the California hills that would make them rich. Sicilians, by contrast, referred to America as "the land of bread and work," an image of grim survival, comparatively speaking. To the Sicilian, however, bread was its own form of wealth. More than other Italians, Sicilians felt a special closeness to this elemental food, a "G.o.d-bequeathed friend," in the words of Jerre Mangione, "who would keep bodies and souls together when nothing else would."13 The Sicilian respect for bread was rooted in a long history. From the sixteenth century forward, bread formed the axis of the peasant diet, sustaining-though just barely-generations of Sicilian field workers. The typical Sicilian loaf was made from a locally cultivated strain of wheat, The Sicilian respect for bread was rooted in a long history. From the sixteenth century forward, bread formed the axis of the peasant diet, sustaining-though just barely-generations of Sicilian field workers. The typical Sicilian loaf was made from a locally cultivated strain of wheat, tritic.u.m durum tritic.u.m durum, which Arab settlers had brought to Sicily, along with almonds, lemons, oranges, and sugar, back in the ninth century. The wheat grew on giant estates called latifundi latifundi, and by the Middle Ages it covered most of Sicily's arable land. Durum was a particularly hardy strain with a high protein content, producing a dense, chewy bread with a powerful crust. When mixed with water, it could be stretched into thin sheets that resisted tearing, making it ideal for pasta, too.

Peasants who worked all day in the field packed a hunk of bread and maybe an onion for their lunch. For dinner, there was bean soup, and yet more bread. As minimal as this sounds, the Sicilian pantry became even more spare during periods of famine, which in Sicily amounted to "a time without bread." A Sicilian proverb recounted by Mary Taylor Simeti in Pomp and Sustenance Pomp and Sustenance sums it up beautifully: sums it up beautifully: If I had a saucepan, water, and salt,I'd make a bread stew-if I had bread.

A loaf of bread for Sicilians embodied the basic goodness of life. Where we might say a person is "as good as gold," a Sicilian says "as good as bread." A piece of bread that fell to the ground was kissed, like a child with a sc.r.a.ped knee.

When Sicilians described America as the land of bread and work, they imagined a country without hunger, which, in their experience, was just