Author Megan J. Elias is also Director of Online Courses at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. She wrote six nonfiction books. She is an assistant professor of history at Queensborough Community College, City University of New York. Her works are consistent, revolving around three topics: food, social studies, and feminism. More often than not, the themes overlap in her writing, as in this piece.
As a “food historian,” Elias argues the importance that simple knowledge of daily meals “help[s] to humanize the absent figures of the past and make tangible the history they lived.” Her scholarly journal garners questions, questions about the labor, resourcefulness, and ways and means of exchanging that historical figures mastered to beat the everyday challenge of satiating their own hunger. Although people today have the ability to see the past through the eyes of today, it will not ease the difficulties found during times of economic crisis. The mindsets and setbacks of these historical actors can also be determined with the root of it all being food. For example, the Great Depression caused Americans to reconsider what poverty and charity was, now that they didn’t know if they would get a next meal. People, as a result, no longer trusted God’s plan but put the blame on the paupers. Their thoughts were that individual worth and the comparison between the “deserving” and “undeserving” overruled community. The belief in “self-determination” also sprung up during the period of no prosperity, no food. Therefore, the lack of food discloses what takes priority. During the 1930s, the Italians of New York refused to give up their tradition of eating meat for all meals. For this group, “the social meaning of food was rigorously preserved even in the face of scarcity.”
Abstract: Although historic homes are increasingly popular sites for exploration of the past, such museums seldom, and for practical reasons, are able to give visitors an actual taste of the past. The desire for just such a taste, however, is part of what brings many people to historic homes. An interest in how people lived in the past often begins with questions of what and how they ate. This article explores ways in which what I term the “food ghosts” can be summoned up in historic house museums. Based on research for the New York Tenement Museum, this study explores methods for making food history powerfully present in public history sites. Key words: Lower East Side Tenement Museum, food ghosts, foodways, Panic of 1873, Great Depression, nutrition, public history Travel in time can arouse one’s hunger. The sight of kettles in huge open fireplaces and the absence of the tools we take for granted—range tops and refrigerators—invite visitors’ hunger, and hunger to know. Many a child has asked aloud and many an adult has wondered, “But Mom, what did they EAT?” Knowing what people ate in historic sites can help to humanize the absent figures of the past and make tangible the history they lived. It also invites further questions, questions about the labor, resourcefulness, and exchange that historical actors brought to the everyday challenge of addressing their own hunger. While it can be illuminating for any place and time, it can make especially immediate the history of hard-pressed people in times of economic crisis.
In an article in the online historical journal, Common Place, historian of early American foodways Trudy Eden remarked that “today is a great time to be a food historian,” because there is an abundance of active research in the field as well as considerable public interest. Although public historians have been folding food into their presentations of the past for some time, increasing interest in food production and consumption has encouraged them to expand food-related programs over the past ten years. The use of blogs to connect the public to historic sites has also enabled connections through food. Archivists at the American Antiquarian Society and the New York Public Library, to take two examples, draw attention to their institutional collections through musings on food. Some programs, like Plimouth Plantation, focus attention on agriculture and husbandry,showcasing heirloom livestock and plant crops. Focusing on culinary consumption, the Wisconsin Historical Society creates historic food experiences for the public with its “Taste Traditions of Wisconsin” series. The series provides lectures and performances complemented by dinners that introduce the public to “the rich culinary history, delicious indigenous ingredients and remarkable foodways of Wisconsin.” Because the public is so interested in food, visitors to historic sites are now more likely than ever to ask questions about it. And more and more resources are available to help both the public and the professional to understand the past through its food. Intensifying interest in concepts of sustainability and rejection of genetically modified agricultural products in favor of older types of plants and animals means that visitors may even be looking to public history sites for leadership as we try to envision the future of agriculture. It was in this spirit of expanding understanding of historic sites through talking about foodways that I was invited in 2009 to talk to the staff of the Tenement House Museum in New York City on the topic of food history. I came to this project as a cultural historian who writes about food, rather than as a person with experience in public history. For me, food helps to answer larger questions about how cultures change over time and how people define their own cultures. The museum’s Director for Education, Anne Polland,specifically asked that I address the issue of food during two periods of severe economic depression experienced by past residents of the building. These two eras are the depression following the Panic of 1873 and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Talking about food in a time when there was none might at first seem difficult, but it is in fact a particularly lively topic. It presents an opportunity to introduce drama and action into the public history site, because periods of food scarcity involve the compelling themes of tradition, loss, and hunger. As I was preparing my talk, Jane Ziegelman published a book about the foodways of the people who had lived in the Lower East Side tenement that is the heart of the museum (97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement. New York: Harper Collins, 2010). Although our research overlapped, our purposes were different. My primary goal in both the talk and this article was not just to tell the stories surrounding this particular site, but to use these stories as case studies exemplifying research methodologies that readers of thisjournal can use in their work at a variety ofsites during their careers as public historians. nuity. Because periods of food scarcity recurthroughout history, most historic houses would lend themselves well to a discussion of “food when there was none,” and the general public, perhaps particularly during the current recession, are interested in how to make do with less. Talking about food scarcity also allows us to use food to talk about class, race, gender roles, and municipal politics, topics which are essential to our understanding of the American past and increasingly engaged by public history sites. Just as Southern plantation museums are starting to include slave quarters in their displays, historic homesin other parts of the country should include discussion of who performed the domestic work, where they lived, and what kinds of contrast they experienced between their own domesticity and that which they managed for wealthy householders. When I agreed to talk at the Tenement Museum, I wanted to give my audience information and a narrative that they could use in their work as educators at the museum. The Tenement Museum is a museum of location above all else.Its founders, administrators, and docents keep constant their dual focus on time and place. I wanted the audience to emerge from my talk able to stand in one apartment or another and to gesture accurately in the direction of the soup kitchen that the apartment’s inhabitants might have visited in the 1930s for free meals. I wanted them to be able to describe the cooking smells that would have emanated from one particular apartment in the 1870s and to be able to direct visitors to the sites beyond the doors of the museum where once stood the kosher butchers and vegetable carts that supplied those kitchens. I wanted to help them summon what I have come to think of as the food ghosts, the long-gone essences within cooking pots, cupboards, and soup bowls that once sustained the building’s inhabitants and that might now bring them back to life for their modern-day visitors. More importantly, what I wanted the food ghosts to do was to bring back the life of the past for visitors, the lived experience that might make each person return to once overlooked spaces in their own communities with a new nose for the past. The goal, ultimately, would be to produce historical thinking about the public and private spaces encountered in everyday life. Although very few places we encounter in the course of our ordinary lives really are imbued with the ghosts of high drama, all are haunted in a more banal but also more meaningful way by the lives lived in them before ours. Even the newly constructed high-rise stands on the invisible grave of some previous structure or cluster of structures, often easily identifiable after an hour in the local archives. And chances are that the newest suburban development stands on the site where earlier inhabitants once pastured their cows, kindled a fire, or foraged their next meal. Here I am going to give the example of how I did my research in order to summon the food ghosts of the Tenement Museum, what I found, and how I presented it. I will conclude with some suggestions about how similar work could be done for other sites. The two families who were the subject of my talk were the Gumpertz family, who lived in an apartment in what is now the Tenement Museum in the 1870s, and the Baldizzi family, who were tenants in another apartment in the building during the 1930s. Having visited the museum several times, I used the rich material that the museum’s staff has been able to collect about these two families and share with the public in guided tours as my background. In order to understand what happened to food supplies for these two families, we have to know a little about the causes of the two depressions and about what had changed in terms of the economic life of the city and responses to depressions between the two crises. This helps us to explore how each depression affected the food supply nationally, locally, and within the building itself. This last plan involved offering my audience a taste of each apartment’s foodways before the depression began so that we could understand what the Gumpertzes and Baldizzis were missing when the larder suddenly became bare.What flavors haunted their memories? In orderto understand the causes of the two economic crises, as with any historical events with broad impact, a college-level textbook or popular history of the era is a fine place to start. In most cases, it will probably not be important to include more than a few sentences about the causes of the crisis unless they involve individuals associated with the site. Once the basic facts have been established, one can begin to look for food customs and food supplies, information that helps to summon up the food ghosts for specific times and places. Some of this food-specific information can be found in good historical surveys such as Donna Gabbacia’s We Are What We Eat, or Harvey Levenstein’s Revolution at the Table, but much more relevant local information is most likely at hand in the archives of area newspapers. The depression of 1873 was caused by a sudden crisis of confidence in investments in railroads as one firm, Jay Cooke & Company, which was heavily invested in the Northern Pacific Railway, went bankrupt. Banks that had been investing in the expansion of railroads began to fail when clients demanded their money back. It was impossible for most firms to refund investors, so many banks simply went bust. Because railroads had seemed like the most predictably successful investment, this shook confidence in the broader market, too, and money for other industries became scarcer. As money for expansion dried up, industrialists cut back on spending and many factory workers lost their jobs. In addition to factory workers, others in industries related to economic expansion, such as construction and transportation, also lost work and wages. Julius Gumpertz, whose family lived at 97 Orchard Street, the current site of the Tenement House Museum, lost steady work during the Panic and, according to research of the museum staff, in 1874 abandoned his family. Without their primary source of income, Gumpertz’s wife and children had to develop new relationships to food. Now those who had shopped for, prepared, and consumed food had to find a way to pay for it. The Great Depression of the 1930s was caused by several factors, including the overextension of credit. Banks began to fail, slowing investment in industry and wiping out savings, impoverishing middle-class people overnight. Factories closed, and eventually the unemployment rate nationwide rose to close to 25 percent. For the Baldizzi family, who lived at 97 Orchard Street during this period, the crisis of the Depression was a continuation of struggles they were already enduring. Although Adolfo Baldizzi came to America with the skills of an artisan woodworker, he was unable to find any steady employment and had to make do with day labor. His wife was able to get a job in a clothing factory, which brought the family much-needed income but also upset traditional gender roles. In Palermo, Sicily, where the Baldizzis came from, women were inextricably associated with their kitchens and the family meal. This traditional connection had begun to fade somewhat for native-born white Americans, especially through the introduction ofso-called convenience foods and household appliances. But the gender role expectations that the Baldizzis brought with them would have been much more closely tied to the practices of their grandparents and great-grandparents. For Rosaria Baldizzi to work outside the home, then, must have created extra complications in her relationship to cooking, even as it provided the means for the family to afford food. When she quit her job so that the family could qualify for “relief,” the term used for public assistance,she regained her expected role in the family’sfoodways, supplying an additional form of “relief” to them. As this reference to public relief suggests, a government-run safety network existed for the Baldizzis. This had not been in place when the Panic of 1873 hit the Gumpertzes’ New York. During the 1870s, the United States government shifted from providing direct relief to needy families to providing funds to charities that provided relief. Where there had once been organized public relief, in the form of food and funds, there was now disorganized, haphazard private relief in many forms. This shift happened because the need was so great and because of a new, somewhat distrustful attitude towards the poor. Ideas of social Darwinism had trickled through society to give Americans a new perspective on poverty. Before the mid-nineteenth century, it had been common to think of the poor as reminders from God that you, too, could fall, and communities strained to support the needy among them. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the explanation of poverty had shifted from “all part of God’s plan” to placing blame on the individual pauper. He or she who asked for help had to justify this request in terms of individual worth and motivation. The distinction between the “deserving” and the “undeserving” poor influenced both public policy and private charity. It became harder for elected politicians to convince voters that the community at large was responsible for the needy in their midst. The very attractive philosophy of self-determination meant that each man wa sresponsible for his own next meal. In 1931, as this system of reliance on private charity began to break down, the federal government started distributing money and food directly to the poor again. This represented a major ideological shift. Building on past experience, in which private charity had come up short, as well as having witnessed American efforts to rebuild Europe after the First World War, Americans began to accept the idea that the government had both a responsibility for the needy and the organizational capacity to provide for them. The rise ofradical ideologiesin America and of fascism in Europe also made many people afraid of what would happen if the needy did not get help. Fear of revolution, or at the very least rioting, made Americans more sympathetic to large-scale government-managed relief. Food productionwas an important part of this newunderstanding of America’s responsibilities. The development of farmland across the United States and of preservation and transportation technologies gave Americans at the dawn of the twentieth century a sense of their nation as bountiful to a degree never before known on earth. With this sense of abundance, hunger and starvation appeared solvable problems which because of the scale both of the demand and the supply, were best solved by government agencies. The second big change between the 1870s and 1930s that is relevant to thinking about food in times of economic crisis was the discovery of nutrition and its development as a science. Vitamins were discovered early in the twentieth century, and nutrition was still a new field in the 1930s. Researchers in state and federal agencies as well as at major universities were beginning to understand the causes and prevention of illnesses such as pellagra that were related to malnutrition. They were also busily studying the cooking and eating habits of millions of Americans and coming up with a portrait of a nation improperly fed despite its agricultural bounty. Because this portrait challenged American identity in a profound way, it had a widespread and long-lasting effect on the public imagination as well as on public policy. There are two excellent sources for information about changing ideas of nutritional health, both open access digital archives: Cornell University’s Home Economics Research Archive and the National Agricultural Library’s Archive. By the 1930s, the federal government was not only providing relief funds, it was also providing direction as to how people ought to spend their food money, whether they were on relief or not. Nutritionists worked hard, though not always successfully, to get people on relief to understand what was the best use of their money to sustain good nutrition in tough times. In particular, government-issued pamphlets and state extension agents encouraged the use of milk, leafy greens, and tomatoes. In some cases they chose the specific groceries that were put into bags given to the needy. By pushing these particular food stuffs, however, nutritionists were often working against traditional foodways of most Americans. Many Americans, for example, were still a little wary of milk, which for so long had offered danger as well as sustenance. In fact, while still suffering the effects of the Panic of 1873, New York experienced a tainted milk crisis in 1874. The first pasteurization law in the United States was passed in Chicago in 1909, and by 1939 most milk in America was pasteurized. As recently as twenty years before the Great Depression began, however, only one third of the milk in the U.S. had been pasteurized. Unpasteurized milk posed serious dangers because tuberculosis could be passed from cows through their milk to human beings. An adult in the 1930s most likely remembered this from her childhood and, despite modern safety measures, might still feel nervous about feeding milk to her children, especially in the large quantities experts recommended. But nutritionists and the dairy industry fought this anxiety, so successfully in fact that milk consumption grew steadily through the 1940s and reached a peak in consumption of forty-five gallons per capita in 1945. With this general background it mind, we can look more closely at how the two depressions affected food supplies in the Gumpertz and Baldizzi family apartments. In order to do this, we need to think about what the pre-crisis foodways were in each family and how these would have been changed by changes in supply.In the Gumpertz home, the dominant foodways were German Jewish. Influences from neighbors and local vendors from other regions of Europe may have provided some new flavors, but for this family, the essential sense of what food was would have come from Jewish Germany. It is easy to determine what these would have been, as the past twenty years have produced a growing number of books about food history. Building on archeological evidence, family lore, letters, and memoirs, it has been possible to reconstruct the diets of most human beings from most eras of our history. The Greenwood Press series contains some good sources for basic information. Several cookbooks from this era can suggest to us what German Jewish cookery was like in America, but we have to be cautious in applying them to the Gumpertz family, as cookbooks were produced for the middle class and, even more specifically, for an assimilated middle class. The typical fare of German Jews in the late nineteenth century included the staples of soup. Bad milk was common over the years, but especially troubling in times of economic stress: “Many thousands of children in this city live for years almost entirely on milk.” Like other central Europeans, they would have eaten dark breads made with rye, whole wheat, and buckwheat flours.White bread made of milled wheat flour was the food of the upper class, because its production was more intensive and thus expensive. Although it had a lower social status, dark bread was nonetheless valued and enjoyed by those who ate it, and when cheap white bread became available in American markets, many European immigrants chose not to use it. The Gumpertz family probably bought their bread from local bakers because the fuel needed to bake bread at home often proved too costly for poor families. The high heat required could also become oppressive in the small spaces that large families inhabited together. The European institution of the bake shop or communal oven, where housekeepers could bring their dough to bake for a small fee, were not a common part of life on the Lower East Side.Bread had to be bought already baked, making it more expensive, and many poor families found that they had to buy stale bread at the end of the day in order to afford what they considered a staple. The cooking smells that emanated from the Gumpertz apartment, then, usually did not include bread. They were probably primarily smells of soup, which would have been thicker or thinner, depending on the family’s income. The smell of chicken soup could mean thatJulius, the family’sfather,was earning good wages. A less rich odor of onion and turnip might mean he had not worked many days during the week. Passersby in the busy tenement hallway could use their noses to discern the family’s fortunes or to confirm what they already knew. It is not yet known whether the Gumpertz family kept kosher. It would certainly have been easy for them to do so, as there were many kosher stores in their neighborhood. By 1899, one historian found that there were “131 Butcher shops that proclaimed their wares inin Hebrew characters”within walking distance of the Gumpertzes’ tenement. 9 Living on Orchard Street, the family would have been surrounded by many others following the same traditions, and this would also have made it comfortable to continue the practice. It would have been much easier for them to keep kosher than for Jewish immigrants to other parts of America where the low numbers of Jews in any community made it difficult for a kosher butcher to find a large enough clientele to make it worth opening a shop. In these farther flung settlements, kosher goods had to be shipped in, raising their prices for the consumer. In the Gumpertz family’s world there was no shortage of rabbis to certify establishments kashrut nor of businessmen ready to serve the large potential audience. Living in the densely populated environment of the Lower East Side could have disadvantages, but it definitely made it easier to keep kosher and thus to keep connected with food traditions. On the other hand, many German Jews did not maintain kosher traditions once they reached America, although they were more likely to do so if living in families. As the main character in The Rise of David Levinsky comments, “The very food I ate had a fatal affect on my religious habits.” Amongst so much variety, and in such a busy and simultaneously anonymous environment, Levinsky and many nonfictional immigrants found it easier and often more financially profitable to forget the rules. In fact, the very first kosher cookbook published in America in 1871 acknowledged that some were drifting from traditions. Author Esther Levy, an American of German Jewish ancestry, wrote that she was offering her book in the hopes of convincing the public that a meal could be both tasty and kosher. She wrote, “Some have, from ignorance, been led to believe that a repast, to be sumptuous, must unavoidably admit of forbidden food.” Tempted by the diversity of American foodways, immigrants might reject the food of their ancestors as lacking excitement. Rather than rain down opprobrium on their renegade heads, however, Levy tried to lure them back to the kosher table with treats that were both modern and observant. Despite class differences, Levy’s book probably reflects the kind of cooking that Nathalie Gumpertz did insofar as it included traditional Jewish recipes, such as those using matzo meal. It is much less likely that Gumpertz, with herlimited resources and limited connectionsto native-born Americans, cooked any thing like the “American” dishes in the book. Levy did, however, include many fish dishes and German-style cutlets in the pages of her book that were probably familiar to Gumpertz, even if out of her usual range. Fish could be bought fresh (or fresh-ish) every day in New York and could easily be stretched, using starches such as breadcrumbs, matzo meal, or potatoes to provide a little protein and lots of flavor for little money. Levy also included American dishes with the understanding that German Jews who had immigrated to America intended to stay and to participate in their new national culture, at least through the simple but powerful exercise of eating like the native-born. To whatever extent the Gumpertz family were upwardly mobile, this assumption would have applied to them. By presenting traditional German Jewish recipes interspersed with American dishes throughout her book, Levy integrated the two foodways in a visible and potentially edible way. In Levy’s book, for example, a recipe for matzo ball soup is printed right after a recipe for gumbo. The combination serves as a sign of the acceptance of American foodways and simultaneously as an attempt to claim a place for kosher cooking within the mainstream culture. Levy’s matzo ball recipe includes flavoring that was distinctly central European, spicing the balls with nutmeg and ginger. Although these spices were too expensive for daily use, the Gumpertz family might have been able to add them on special occasions, making the matzo ball soup of Passover something special. Here again we can imagine the neighbor on the stairway,recognizing through the scented air that the Gumpertz family were celebrating something. Like many other cookbook authors of the time, Levy offered what she claimed were typical menus for the expected three daily meals. Her ideal is clearly far beyond what Mrs. Gumpertz could afford, as Levy included tablecloths, silverware, and servants. The list can nonetheless give us an idea of the social standards of this immigrant group. Breakfast was “eggs, fish, etc.” toast, coffee, and tea. Lunch wasthe remains of cold meat, fish, or poultry, fruit, cutlets, chops, eggs, and cheese, although presumably not cheese and meat at same meal. For dinner, Levywrote that onewould expect fish or a soup course, a roast or stew, or smoked meat for the second course, and an optional third course of sweets or “delicate vegetables dressed in the French style.” French style here means oil and vinegar. Although this kind of eating was beyond the means of the Gumpertz family, it was not extravagant in comparison to other cookbooks of the era that would have insisted on more side dishes at supper and in which the third course was considered standard. 12 In reality, for the Gumpertz family, meals would have been an abbreviated version of Levy’s menus. Breakfast was probably stale bread and coffee, lunch was leftovers, and dinner was probably something light, like a bowl of broth or cold porridge without any following courses of stew or sweets. Meat was probably cooked only once a week, and scraps were used for meals through the week. When meat was too expensive, the family could make do with a version of the pottage that had served European peasants for centuries. 13 When the Panic of 1873 struck, the Gumpertz family meals would have changed quickly. Because it became more expensive for farmers to ship food, food prices rose. And because banks were failing, industries stopped expanding. Many failed with lack of investment, so unemployment rose suddenly. By the winter of 1874, New York City had a twenty-five percent unemployment rate. As we know, Mr. Gumpertz left the family at this point. But even before he left, the larder would have become much barer, as he was unable to find full-time work. Any local grocers that the family had used would have had to begin thinking of cutting off their credit, and push-cart vendors, themselves struggling, would have only taken cash. The main way in which the Gumpertz foodways were affected would have been that there was less of everything, especially meat. They would also have had less coal, which limited the opportunities for cooking. The article noted that the grocery business more than any other was operating on a cash-for-purchase basis, rather than credit, although some businesses were still offering 60 or 90 days credit. Buyers were “at the present only making purchases from hand to mouth as it were.” differently about her meals if she has limited fuel. If fuel is scarce, it is best to make something that will take few resources to make but that will last a long time and can be eaten cold. A pottage of grains and beans would have been a good choice in this situation. In modern times, when our heating and cooking fuels are essentially invisible, it can be easy to forget how much the carrying of fuel was part of daily life before electricity. Public history sites from the pre-electric era give us a good opportunity to remind ourselves that the getting and conserving of energy has always been a human problem. Kitchens offer an obvious way to bring this to public attention, but all rooms have required heat and light of one kind or another. Given that the absence of Julius cut off their main food supply completely, what relief might have been available to the Gumpertz family? I searched local newspapers and magazines from the period for references to charities feeding the hungry in the neighborhood during this period so that I could have a sense of what their options were. Although food was available, it was distributed in ways that did not make it likely that the Gumpertz family would have taken advantage of it. This is because in general, charity was directed at the individual, rather than the family. For an entire family to stand in line for soup, for example,would have been an unthinkable waste of resources in an era when almost no one was too young to earn a little money doing some kind of work. In 1873, several clinics were set up by the New York Diet Kitchen Association, a private association dedicated to providing healthy food for invalids. The closest clinic to the Gumpertz family on Orchard St. was at Centre and White Streets. During the Panic, the Association treated hunger as a disease. Hungry peoplewere seen at clinics by doctorswho diagnosed hunger and gave the patients prescriptions for food. The prescriptions were then filled on the spot with groceries considered appropriate to the case. The food prescribed was what was considered therapeutic at the time: “Milk, beef tea, beef soup, mutton broth,rice, oat-meal, corn starch, farina, and barley.” A quick glance into any cookbook of this era will reveal a section for feeding invalids that includes these foods. Most sick people were cared for at home, so homemakers were also doctors and dietitians, diagnosing and treating with a special diet. The designation of particular foods as therapeutic was based in folk belief and practice, not in knowledge of nutritional or food science, as this had not yet been developed. Those who received a prescription for food from the Diet Kitchen also had to receive a follow-up visit from the Association’s Matrons to assess progress and whether other conditions could be changed to improve the patient’s health. So accepting this charity meant accepting interference on some level. Whether the Gumpertz family would have subjected themselves to the critical eye of an Association Matron for the sake of some beef tea we do not know. Other charitable projects in nearby neighborhoods included a soup kitchen. His kitchen served soup made by the chef at Delminico’s, the most famous American restaurant of the nineteenth century and one that catered proudly to the city’s elite. Bennett’s soup kitchen served two thousand quarts of soup in one day. 16 Extravagant acts of charity like Bennett’s impressed the public at large and temporarily silenced many growling bellies, but they did not provide what we now term “food security” for hungry families like the Gumpertzes. Valiant attempts to provide long-term meaningful aid could prove disastrous, as the local St. John’s Guild discovered. A charity that served the hungry in the Allen Street area, the Guild operated a floating hospital and also took sick women and children by boat to a seashore hospital for recuperation. In February 1876, the New York Times reported that the Guild had 5 thousand families, or approximately 25 thousand men,women, and children to feed and not one dollar left in its treasury. Among the available options for aid, the Gumpertz family might have received help from a Landsmanschaft or mutual aid society. Many immigrants in America formed groups organized around a common connection to a particular place in Europe. By holding onto their European past, these immigrants were able to provide collective support for an American future. The aid that the Gumpertz family would have received was probably in the form of money and perhaps coal, as Landsman chafts generally gave funds rather than food. A group might purchase a large quantity of coal at a discount and share it among members. Coal could be used to heat the Gumpertzes’ small apartment, but more importantly it could be used to cook, making it possible for at least one meal to be cooked each week, even if the leftovers had to be eaten cold until the next gift of coal arrived. During their worst times, then, just after Julius left and before Nathalie was able to establish herself in the garment business, the Gumpertz family’s apartment was probably haunted by the absence of cooking smells most of the week. Neighbors would have known without asking that their fortunes were improving when the smell of soup or even fried fish began again to emanate from behind the Gumpertz apartment door. By the time the Baldizzi family faced food shortages in the same building where the Gumpertzes had once suffered, much had changed in the foodways of the city and the nation as a whole. Whereas the neighborhood had been primarily German and Jewish during the 1870s, it had become more diverse by the 1930s. The American food supply had likewise become more diverse and also more industrialized. When the stock market crashed in 1929, it started a wave of bank failures and industry contraction, but the early 1930s were also great years for agriculture in that farms produced lots of food. The catastrophe of the early 1930s was that there was plenty of food but no way for people to buy it. This was of course devastating for both farmers and consumers. Because there was so much food, prices dropped, but still people couldn’t afford it because their wages had been reduced or had vanished altogether. Government efforts to support farmers by buying surplus while helping the needy by supplying foodstuffs were sometimes awkwardly handled but did result in many empty bellies being filled. In June 1935, the New York Times reported that in the past twelve months, New Yorkers had received 72 million pounds of relief food. Mothers and children had received almost 10 million quarts of fresh milk. Between January 1 and August 31, 1935, nearly 15 thousand quarts of beef broth were distributed in the city. Although the Baldizzi family would have been able to take advantage of this program to keep hunger at bay, theirJewish neighbors were often kept from relief supplies because they were not kosher. Dietary restrictions could be honored, however, through a different form of relief. Starting in 1931, city and state agencies provided food tickets for families that could be redeemed in markets. These programs provided about $8.50 per family per week for groceries in New York City. The tickets became a commodity in themselves, and in 1935,two men who lived on theLower East Side, not far from the Baldizzis, were arrested trying to sell relief tickets. Besides not being restricted by kosher laws, the Baldizzis had another advantage over some of their neighbors when it came to relief supplies; their traditional foodways equipped them in special ways to take advantage of what was offered. Adolfo and Rosaria were Sicilian, which means that they had foodways similar to but also distinct from those of otherItalians. Because Sicily had often been a poor region, Sicilian cooks were familiar with dishes such as bread soup that stretched one ingredient to make the most of it. Their traditional foodways were based in concepts of shortage rather than of plenty. Their cuisine included dishes that, although they used only simple and easily obtained ingredients, were treated as special foods. An example of this kind of dish is the cuccia containing wheat berries and sugar, which was made by Sicilians to celebrate St. Lucia’s day. Another very important advantage that Italian families in general had over others during the food shortages of the 1930s was that state and local relief supplies tended to include canned tomatoes. The nutritionists who advised and often ran relief programs saw canned tomatoes as a good source of vitamin C. Many Americans, however, had no idea what to do with tomatoes aside from making tomato soup, which was one of the few tomato recipes to appear consistently in American cookbooks at the time. This soup required butter, flour, and cream or milk, all ingredients that would be in short supply in a needy family’s kitchen. For Italian families like the Baldizzi’s, tomatoes were a normal and versatile foodstuff. A 1933 study of the diets of low-income families in NY, some on relief and some not, found that Italians tended to consume more tomatoes, more milk, and more leafy vegetables than other groups. This made them heroes to the relief agency nutritionists because these were all things that nutritionists were hoping Americans would add to their diets. It also meant that relief supplies in the city were less disruptive to traditional foodways for families like the Baldizzis than they were for most other families. When Rosario Baldizzi quit her job so that the family could go on relief, she may well have been returning them not only to expected gender roles, as I mentioned previously, but also to expected foodways. While we tend to set aside consideration of foodways when we are talking about relieving hunger, expectations, tastes, and cultural biases do not disappear when the food does. Thus hungry people can suffer a double displacement, first in not having enough and second in not having the right food as they define it. While nutritionists working for the city of New York believed that what they were supplying through relief groceries was nutritionally correct, for many families on relief the supplies added a new problem to already suffering households—how do we eat this stuff ?—and a painful sense of suspension from normalcy. Simply because they happened to be Sicilian, the Baldizzi family was able to avoid this disruption of their foodways. As was the case with the Gumpertz family, the Baldizzi family probably had less to eat because of the economic crisis and would have used age-old tricks to make their food taste like more than it was. A traditional Sicilian meatloaf, for example, which uses rice mixed with veal and pork, might have been made instead with oats and cheap cuts of beef or even beans during the crisis. In New York, relief agencies handed out an interesting new foodstuff, Milkorno, which had been devised by nutritionists at Cornell University. It was a mixture of cornmeal, powdered milk, and salt and was supposed to help needy families get good nutrition very cheaply. One of the recipes distributed with the magic stuff was for Milkorno polenta. Although polenta is a northern Italian food, southerners might have recognized it, too, certainly more than the average non-Italian relief recipient. Although the material displayed in the Baldizzi apartment currently does include coffee cans, it is unlikely that they would have contained coffee during the Depression years. Coffee, once a staple in both American and Italian homes (though prepared very differently in each) became a luxury during the 1930s. Unable to go without at least the ritual of coffee preparation, many took up substitutes for the real thing, drinking brews made from anything roastable and cheap, including barley, wheat, and soup beans. Thus two other food ghosts we might find on the stairs and in the hallways of 97 Orchard Street would be the scents of real coffee being brewed, signaling good times, or that of kidney beans roasting, indicating hardship. Their rural Sicilian roots could also have served the Baldizzis well in providing them with foraging skills. During the Depression many diets were supplemented with (or consisted entirely of) wild plants foraged from vacant lots and public parks. You had to know what to eat, of course, and many second or third or fourth generation city dwellers had no idea. In this case being a recent immigrant might help, although of course plants were different on opposite sides of the ocean. Dandelion greens, chestnuts, wild thyme, and acorns, however, would all have been both recognizable as foodstuff and available in Manhattan green spaces. When foraging, families worked together in a way that replicated the agricultural pasts while reviving what might have seemed outdated knowledge. When they accepted government relief, they joined a modern, urban system that connected them to millions of other Americans. Single people could not get relief in this form, so they had to wait in line at soup kitchens. What had changed since the Panic of 1873 was that there were now systems of relief for both single people and those in families and a blend of private and public services providing a larger support system. Most of the people who were fed in a soup or a bread line were men, because single women were not a large sector in society at the time. Gender expectations kept women connected in one way or another to families, either as mothers or as dependents. Thus women in need were much more likely to be fed as part of family units. Because they received aid as groceries, then, rather than as prepared dishes—soup or simple sandwiches—women retained greater control over their foodways than men did during the crisis. Although relief agencies supplied the specific goods and commonly suggested how to prepare them, recipients were under no obligation to listen. Being able to prepare one’s own food potentially helped to support a sense of continuity with the past. Having food to cook, however little it was and perhaps unfamiliar in its varieties, also gave women a focus on the future that could be lacking as the homeless man left his empty soup bowl behind. In maintaining control over food preparation, women could help their families retain a sense of shared culture that would have been supportive in the disruption of crisis. Despite hard times, for example, it seems that Italians in New York were unwilling to give up traditional foodways. A social worker remembered working with Italian-American families in New York City during the Depression:“Nothing of any consequence could be discussed until at least some token meat was shared.” The social meaning of food was rigorously preserved even in the face of scarcity. When we look around the kitchens of the Gumpertz and the Baldizzi apartments, then, we are in the presence of many food ghosts. There are those that tell us of good fortune, those that smell of hard times, those that suggest a shift in foodways, and those that tell us of preserved traditions. It is not difficult to raise these ghosts, requiring very simple research in the many comprehensive food histories that have been published in the past twenty years as the field has begun to grow. Memoirs are also a rich source for food details and can be especially meaningful if a historic site is associated with a particular person. Reference to specific food memories can help to humanize historical figures. Thus if we know that President X recalled his mother’s pancakes fondly, they should be mentioned in the kitchen of his family’s homestead because they serve to connect the famous person with the local site and also to connect the famous person with visitors to the site who will have their own pancake associations that will be stirred by his. If kitchens or cooking places are part of a historic site, it is easy and important to explain how equipment worked and what it required of the people who used it. Wood stoves, for example, required frequent refilling, meaning that someone had to chop and fetch wood. Cast iron cooking pots imply perhaps unexpected upper body strength in the women who put them on and took them off the stovetop, or put them in and pulled them out of ovens. In plantation homes it is important to remember that kitchen cabinets were generally kept locked and that the handling of the keys reflected power dynamics within the household.If a site is connected to people who performed cooking in the outdoors, then visitors should also be made aware that tending the fire was somebody’s work, usually somebody older, female, or both. Even sites like courthouses that appear to have no connection to food are haunted by food ghosts. Consulting local business directories or newspapers can give a good idea of what kinds of establishments in the close vicinity of a public building might have served the men and women who worked within it. Record books may even show accounts kept at local establishments. Because much of public life involves food, one is likely to find connections to production or consumption in a wide variety of sites. A nineteenth-century firehouse, for example,would have been the site of communal cooking by men but also would have provided emergency response to many fires started in kitchens. This simple fact offers us a chance to explore technological changes in our domestic environment. It has been my experience as a historian that food history interests a general audience and causes them to ask interesting questions about the past. In one case it even inspired some of my audience to action. I recently gave a talk at a historical society based on a cookbook that women from the area had published in 1916. In preparation for my talk, two of the society’s members had attempted to make recipes from the book to serve at the event. Because of changes in taste culture and in our food supply, neither cook was able to replicate the recipe exactly. One declared her attempt a disaster, although we ate it anyway. This gave us an opportunity to talk about how the contents of our food markets and our kitchen knowledge have changed overtime, and we had a lively discussion as well as some tasty snacks. It gave me the idea that organized historical-bake-offs could be an entertaining and interesting way to connect communities to their past, and I was grateful that the two cooks had decided not to let the food ghosts rest but had instead summoned them to the table. Much can be done to connect visitors to food ghosts without resorting to the costly methods of re-enacting old foodways. Recipes can be made part of the material that visitors use to guide their understanding of dining rooms and kitchens. The sites of kitchen gardens can be made clear even if they are not planted. Maps of local food shops and restaurants can be provided to give visitors to historic sites a sense of the edible context in which any particular site existed at different times in the past. And, if community cookbooks or local recipes in any other form exist, the public can be invited to try their hand at cooking up the past for present consumption.
Eat and Learn 