Alongside the krauthobler, a figure who had vanished from New York by the close of the Civil War, the German appetite for pickled cabbage also supported sauerkraut importers, local cabbage farmers, and eventually sauerkraut manufacturers, including Henry J. Heinz, who opened a sauerkraut factory on Long Island in the 1890s. At the height of the busy season, his factory processed a hundred tons of cabbage a day. On the streets, the most visible face of this trade was the “sauerkraut man,” actually a roving peddler who sold cheap meals to hungry East Siders. Here he is in a 1902 article from the New York Evening Post:
The regular and popular visitor to the German inns and taverns of the East Side is the sauerkraut man. He brings his calling with him from the Old Country, and finds a more profitable field in New York than in Berlin or Hamburg. His equipment is quite curious. He wears a blue or white apron running from his neck nearly to the ankles, and from his shoulders is suspended a circular metal box which goes half way around his waist. It has three large compartments, two of which are surrounded by hot water. In one are well-cooked Frankfurter sausages, and in the other thoroughly boiled sauerkraut. In the third compartment is potato salad. He carries in his hand a basket in which are small plates and steel forks. One sausage and a generous spoonful of sauerkraut and potato salad cost 5 cents. All three articles are of good quality, well cooked and seasoned.16
The sauerkraut man worked at night, his shift starting at the close of the normal workday, when customers poured into the saloons for an hour or two of relaxation. Hauling his pewter box (it could hold up to fifty sausages, seven pounds of sauerkraut, and seven of potato salad), the peddler made his rounds stopping at bars, bowling alleys, and meeting halls, wherever hungry Germans gathered.
To round out our look into German sauerkraut traditions, here is a recipe for a simple sauerkraut dish adapted from Henrietta Davidis.
BOILED SAUERKRAUT
Bring to a boil one cup water and one cup white wine. Add the sauerkraut, roughly 3 cups, a few peppercorns and a little salt. Simmer until tender. Shortly before serving, pour off the broth and stir in a few tablespoons butter. Serve as a side dish alongside mashed potatoes.
Nineteenth-century New York was a city of hand-painted signs, many of them wordless. Butchers, for instance, displayed a painted black bull (or sometimes a red cow) over their stalls in the market. Out on the street, passersby could identify a blacksmith’s shop by the image of a painted horse suspended over the doorway. Even more straightforward, New York restaurants often nailed a real tortoise shell to the doorpost: their way of announcing that terrapin was on the menu. In the city’s German wards, a few signs were especially common. Two yellow boots, one larger for a man, the woman’s boot smaller, was the image displayed by German shoemakers. German beer halls hung pictures of King Gambrinus, the Dionysus of beer. In some of the flashier examples, the mythic king was “presented life-size, bearded and crowned and holding in one hand a stupendous beaker of the national beverage, the froth of which bulges from the rim like a prize cauliflower.”17 The description comes from Charles Dawson Shanley, a nineteenth-century poet and journalist who wrote a series of very informative articles on New York street life. On his rambles through Kleindeutschland, Shanley encountered another frequently displayed shop sign, this one rather modest. It was a “dingy little signboard with a sheaf of wheat painted on it”—the image adopted by German bakers.
Just as they lived together in clusters, immigrants tended to work together in the same trades. Many, as it happens, were food-related. Where the Irish were big in the fish and oyster business, Germans worked as dairymen, grocers, and butchers. Immigrant food purveyors sold to their own communities, but also played a role in feeding the larger city. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, most of the city’s bakers were Scottish and Irish, but that began to change in the 1850s, as Germans flowed into New York. By the end of the decade, responsibility for baking the city’s bread had passed into German hands.
The typical German bakery, housed in a tenement cellar, was a low-ceilinged room with a dirt floor and no running water. The “boss baker” often lived upstairs with his family and a handful of employees who shared the apartment as boarders. Many times, though, employees slept in the cellar next to the ovens, a sack of flour for their bed. Some slept in the dough vats. Economic survival for the small-time baker depended on every member of the family. The children worked as apprentices, while the baker’s wife was in charge of the boarders, for whom she cooked and did laundry. On the most densely populated blocks in the German wards, a cellar bakery was found in every third or fourth building.
Prior to the widespread use of steam power beginning in 1882, industry in New York ran on muscle power, most of it supplied by immigrants. In a city of shipbuilders, ironworkers, and stonecutters, the baker’s life was especially harsh. His shift started late in the afternoon and lasted until early morning, which meant a fourteen-hour workday or sometimes more. At the end of the long, hot night (temperatures in the bakery could easily reach one hundred degrees), the bakers hauled their goods up to the street and loaded up the delivery wagons. Now, finally, it was time to rest, just as the sun was coming up over the East River. Faces caked with flour, the bakers slept while the rest of the city went about its business. It was a topsy-turvy existence and a lonely one, too. For all his sweaty work, the journeyman baker earned between eight and eighteen dollars a week, hardly enough to support a family. The consequences were plain. More than any other tradesmen, many New York bakers were consigned to a life of bachelorhood.
Before the appearance of national brands like Pepperidge Farm and Arnold, each city had its own local bakeries and bread-making traditions. The kind of bread produced in New York was surprisingly similar to Wonder Bread, squishy and gummy-textured. Known as the New York split loaf, it was no more substantial than “slightly compressed white smoke” in the words of one critic, and just as tasteless. German-made loaves of rye and pumpernickel fell at the other end of the baked goods spectrum. They were made from whole grains, with a dense, chewy texture and a sour, mildly nutty flavor. When sliced, they made a sturdy platform for the open-faced sandwiches that Germans loved to snack on. When it came to New Yorkers and bread, a “Goldilocks syndrome” seemed to prevail. If the New York split loaf was too puffy and bland, German-style breads were too coarse and heavy for the native-born, with their less vigorous digestive tracts. The only reason to eat them was the price, since ounce for ounce they were cheaper than white bread. A brittle-crusted French baguette was much closer to the nineteenth-century ideal of what bread should be.
A footnote to the German bread story centers around a New York immigrant named Louis Fleischmann, born in Vienna in 1835. His early history had nothing to do with bread or baking. Rather, Fleischmann was a soldier, an officer in the Austrian army. In the 1860s, his two brothers, Max and Charles, emigrated to Missouri, where they set up a business producing the kind of compressed yeast used by Viennese bakers, a product unknown in America. In 1874, Louis decided to follow them. In the centenary year of 1876, Louis and his brothers set up a “model Vienna bakery” at the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. A smashing success, its main product was something called “Vienna bread.” Buttery and delicate, with a glossy brown crust, it was the perfect texture for dunking in coffee. Riding on the success of the model bakery, Louis Fleischmann opened a similar establishment on Tenth Street and Broadway in New York.
The Vienna Bakery arrived on the gastronomic scene like a visiting dignitary. Alongside the actual bakery, Fleischmann opened an elegant café that quickly became a favorite dining spot among German intellectuals and opera stars. It was also popular with New York society women, who flocked to the bakery after a strenuous morning of shopping on the Ladies Mile, the strip of department stores that once ran along Lower Broadway. Of all the dishes on the menu, Vienna bread was the star attraction. When Teddy Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York in the 1890s, he used to walk uptown from his offic
e on Mulberry Street and stop at the bakery for a lunch of Vienna bread and milk. From Fleischmann’s bakery, Vienna bread spread to German bake shops around the city, but the stores most likely to carry it were on the Lower East Side. An 1877 article on the Vienna-bread phenomenon opens with the following observations:
One remarkable result of the Centennial exhibition is the striking and admirable fact that Vienna bread is now to be bought all over New York. Indeed, we are quite sure that the genuine article is now more easily procurable in this city than in the Austrian capital. You will find it in the Bowery, and in the streets crossing that elegant avenue; nay, you shall not enter a little baker’s shop in Mackerelville without finding at least Vienna rolls upon the counter.18
When Louis Fleischmann died in 1904, the Vienna Bakery had already lost its glamour, though it remained in business for several decades. The craze for Vienna bread was also starting to fade. The precise date is hard to pinpoint, but sometime after World War I, when Germans and their food fell out of favor, it began its final descent into obscurity. Even so, Fleischmann’s legacy continues, visible on every packet of Fleischmann’s Instant Yeast, the brand most used by American bakers for over a century.
The greatest contribution made by German bakers to the American kitchen came in the form of yeast-based cakes, which began to appear in East Side bakeries during the second half of the nineteenth century. Though all were made from the same basic dough, they came in an assortment of shapes and with a variety of toppings and fillings. There were round cakes crowned with apple slices, ring-shaped cakes filled with chopped nuts or poppy seeds, pretzel-shaped cakes, and cakes that were rolled up like snails then brushed with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar, and currants. The allure of these buttery confections quickly leapfrogged beyond Kleindeutschland into the wider city. The Germans called them kuchen, but we know them as coffee cake.
In the 1870s, the New York Times ran a food-related column on their women’s page, called “The Household.” Most columns opened with a round-up of what New Yorkers could expect to find at the market that week, which foods were in good supply, which were scarce, and current prices. The market news was followed by a selection of recipes and household tips covering a broad range of very practical topics, like how to make glue or how to stop one’s shoes from squeaking. The column ended with questions and requests from readers, including this one, which ran in 1876: “I would like a receipt for pumpkin pie and German coffee-bread or coffee-cake like you get in the bakeries in New York and which cannot be found in the country.—JEWEL”19 Unfortunately, it seems that Jewel never got a response, but over the next few decades, recipes for German coffee cake began showing up in American newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks. The following recipe for a kind of circular coffee cake called a kranzkuchen is courtesy of a German-American housewife who shared her kuchen-making technique with a New York reporter. It appeared in an 1897 feature under the headline “Toothsome German Dishes, Lessons To Be Learned From The People Who Eat Five Meals A Day.”
KRANZKUCHEN
Take two pounds of flour, a pint and a half of milk, three eggs, a quarter of a pound of butter. Set a sponge with one pint of milk warmed, flour to make a stiff batter, and one cake of compressed yeast. When it has risen sufficiently, add the other ingredients, the butter being worked into the flour; then knead well. The cake should be rolled, or better, pressed out with the fingers very thin for baking…. The dough is…brushed over with melted butter, and upon the thin cake, sugar, cinnamon, chopped almonds, currants, and raisins are laid. The whole is rolled as a jelly cake, and then formed into a ring, Kranz, or double ring, pretzel, as desired, and also baked in a moderate oven. When this is done, a thin frosting of white of egg and sugar is spread over it, and the result is a very delicious cake, which is eaten with an excellent cup of coffee.20
Among the Germans’ most far-reaching gifts to American food ways wasn’t a food at all…. Beginning with the earliest settlements in Dutch New Amsterdam, our European ancestors displayed a keen fascination with the making and drinking of alcohol. There were practical reasons for this taste: drinking water during that era was often polluted. A strong taste for beer among seventeenth-century New Yorkers gave way in the following century to the widespread consumption of locally produced rum, the same throat-scorching drink that played such an important role in the colonial slave trade. (Throughout the eighteenth century, rum was the single most important American export, much of it shipped to Africa and traded for living cargo.) In the years following the revolution, as the American rum industry began to falter, farmers in western states like Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, and Illinois turned their crops into liquor. Corn-based bourbon and grain-based whiskey soon eclipsed rum to become the new national drinks. Through most of this period, Americans continued to gulp down homemade forms of alcohol, including cider, apple jack, and dandelion wine. The one drink they did not have was lager, the crisp German-style beer so familiar to us today.
Before 1840, all beer produced in the United States was English-style ale, full-bodied and slightly fruity-tasting, with a deep caramel color and a high alcohol content. Following British brewing methods, it was made with a type of yeast that floats on the surface of the brew and ferments rather quickly at relatively high temperatures. German immigrant brewers brought to the United States a separate brewing tradition that was based on a different strain of yeast, one that sinks in the vat. Known as bottom yeast, it ferments more slowly and at much lower temperatures, producing a beer that is dryer, paler, and more refreshing than ale.
The first German breweries in New York were small operations employing five or six men. German brewers followed the same basic plan as immigrant bakers: under the watchful eye of a skilled brew master, the brewery workers put in sixteen-hour days of hard labor. In return, they received a small salary (between six and twelve dollars a month) plus room and board, along with all the beer they could drink. Since it took roughly one thousand dollars to open a brewery, the lager entrepreneur—unlike other immigrant businessmen—was a person of means. The great majority were established beer manufacturers who brought to America a lifetime of brewing experience, including their own closely guarded brewing formula. Two of the first to get started in New York were a pair of German brothers, Max and Frederick Schaefer, who opened their Manhattan brewery in 1842. At the time, most of the city’s lager drinkers came from within the German community, but that was soon to change:
When lager was first introduced to New York by the Schaefers, they kept a tavern on Seventh Avenue, between Sixteenth and Seventeenth streets. Americans, hearing the praises of the new beverage and seeing their Teutonic friends roll their eyes and smack their lips in ecstatic contemplation and enjoyment of it, used to make bold essays at its consumption, with the almost universal result of being intensely disgusted by its novel bitter taste. With many contemptuous ejaculations, wry faces, and much sputtering and rinsing of their mouths with the familiar whisky, they would revile and condemn the Deutscher’s delight. The first beer saloon downtown was started on Broadway, just a little below Canal street, where similar experiments and disappointments were long the order of the day. Soon after, lager beer saloons appeared with almost magical rapidity all over the City. New York seemed to have broken out with a rash of them scarcely more than five years later. It was not until about 1855, however, that any great number of Americans took kindly to the German drink. Gradually they began to like the stuff.21
The Schaefers represent only one of the German beer-making dynasties to emerge in nineteenth-century America. The complete list contains some very familiar names, including Frederick Miller, Adolphus Busch, Captain Frederick Pabst, and Joseph Schlitz.
For uptown New Yorkers, a cool glass of lager was the ideal warm-weather drink. For residents of Kleindeutschland, it was a daily staple, a fact which non-Germans marveled over: “They drink it in the morning, at noon, in the evening and late at night, during their labors and their rest, alone and with fri
ends…They take lager as we do oxygen into our lungs—appearing to live and thrive on it.”22 Just about every block in the German wards had at least one beer saloon, establishments where men like Mr. Glockner went to read the daily papers, play cards, talk politics, and conduct their business. The East Side saloons were the working man’s version of a private club:
A German must have time for his libations. He cannot march up to the bar, pour out a drink, dash it down without the possibility of tasting it, toss the money over the counter, and rush out like an ignited sky-rocket, as the majority of Americans do. Tables, chairs, newspapers, cigars or pipes, and friends are not merely comfortable additions, but actual essentials to his enjoyment. Instead of a quarter of a minute he wants at least a quarter of an hour for the proper enjoyment of a drink. Conversation is another essential. However taciturn the German may appear among others, let him sit down at one of these tables and get his glass of lager beer and a listening friend, and if anyone desires to know how much talk a human tongue can reel off in any given period, then is the time to listen.23
Americans consumed their alcohol with a rebellious drink-to-get-drunk attitude. One result of that was the close association between drinking and brawling in American life. The Germans, by contrast, reveled in the communal spirit that developed after a glass or two of lager. They drank methodically, pacing themselves like marathoners to wring out every possible ounce of pleasure. Though Americans adopted beer as their national drink, they never fully acquired the Germans’ flair for savoring it.
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