97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in

In 97 Orchard, Jane Ziegelman follows European immigrants on a remarkable journey from their first taste of America in the Ellis Island dining hall to cramped tenement kitchens on the Lower East Side in this tantalizing saga of how immigrant food and culture became American food.

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 their foreign-born neighbors. 97 Orchard charts this exciting process of discovery as it lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.

Hardcover: 272 pages

NOTES:
-Every item certified kosher by a leading kosher certifier such as OU, OK, Star K and KofK. Each item is clearly marked with certification.
-From time to time we may need to make substitutions for out-of-stock items. We will always do our best to substitute with item(s) that meet the spirit of the gift and of equal or greater value.