Jewish immigrants landing at Castle Garden, 1880.
Provided courtesy of HarpWeek., LLC
Twenty-two-year-old Natalie Reinsberg emigrated to New York from Ortelsburg, Prussia, in 1858. Her betrothed, Julius Gumpertz, another German Jew, had arrived a year earlier. Their wedding date is unknown, but their first child, Rosa Gumpertz, was born in New York in 1867. A second daughter, Natalea, known to the family as Nannie, was born in 1869, then Olga in 1871. The couple also had a son named Isaac, born in 1873, but he did not survive childhood. The family moved to 97 Orchard Street in 1870, when most of the building’s residents were German-born Catholics or Protestants, and remained on Orchard Street for the next fifteen years, as the neighborhood around them gradually shifted from Gentile to Jewish.
For Jews like the Gumpertzes, the Friday evening meal was reserved for fish, a tradition carried over from Europe. On the Lower East Side, the Sabbath fish tradition brought a stream of basket-wielding shoppers to the intersection of Hester and Norfolk streets, center of the Jewish fish trade in the 1890s. By this time, Hester Street was a full-blown pushcart market open every day except Saturday. The real action, however, began Thursday afternoon and peaked Friday morning, when Jewish women did their Sabbath marketing. This was prime time for the East Side pushcart vendor. Nineteenth-century New Yorkers who ventured downtown from the better neighborhoods above Fourteenth Street were flabbergasted by the scene awaiting them on market day: “There is hardly a foot of Hester Street that is not covered with people during the day. The whole place seems to be in a state of perpetual motion and the occasional visitor is apt to have a feeling of giddiness.”1 At the corner of Norfolk Street, the shoppers reached maximum density, a solid throng of housewives sorting through wagons of perch, whitefish, and carp for the freshest, clearest-eyed specimens. But now we’re jumping ahead, beyond the scope of our present story…. Back in the 1870s, when the Gumpertz family moved to Orchard Street, East Side women bought their provisions from the public market on Essex Street or, perhaps, from one of the roving peddlers—some with baskets, others with wagons or carts—who patrolled the streets of Manhattan.
An illustration from Harper’s Weekly depicting the Hester Street pushcart market, 1884.
Provided courtesy of HarpWeek., LLC
The Friday evening fish recipe was determined by where exactly the immigrant was born. If she came from Bavaria, for example, the housewife stewed the fish in vinegar, sugar, a splash of dark beer, and a handful of raisins, the sauce thickened by a sprinkling of crumbled ginger snaps. This was the famous sweet-and-sour dish known on Gentile menus as carp, Jewish-style. Another possibility was carp in aspic. Here, the whole fish was cut into steaks, simmered with onion and bay leaf, then allowed to cool with its cooking broth. The choicest portion was the head, appropriately reserved for the head of the household. Or perhaps, if she had an expanded food budget, the German cook might prepare an aromatic stewed fish, the sauce enriched with egg yolk. Such recipes were memorialized in The Fair Cook Book, a collection of German-Jewish recipes published in 1888 by the women of Congregation Emanuel in Denver, Colorado. The Fair Cook Book is the first known Jewish charity cookbook published in America (the queen of the genre, The Settlement Cook Book, has sold over two million copies to date). The following recipe, contributed by Mrs. L. E. Shoenberg, a nineteenth-century Denver homemaker, combines the sweetness of ginger and mace, the creaminess of egg yolk and the piquancy of lemon:
STEWED FISH
Cut a three-pound fish in thick slices and put on to boil, with one large onion sliced; salt, ginger, and mace to taste; cold water enough to cover fish, let boil about twenty minutes; take the yolks of three eggs, beat light, juice of two lemons, chopped parsley, beat well together. When fish is done pour off nearly all the water, return to fire and pour over your eggs and lemon, moving fish briskly back and forth for five minutes so that the egg does not coagulate.2
But if the cook was a native of Posen in eastern Prussia, the Friday night fish might resemble Mrs. Gumpertz’s carp. It is the dish we know today, though in an altered form, as gefilte fish. The name “gefilte fish” comes from the German word gefülte, meaning stuffed or filled, since the original version was exactly that, a whole stuffed fish. Writing on the provenance of gefilte fish in the 1940s, the Jewish cooking authority Leah Leonard posed several possibilities:
Gefilte Fish may have originated in Germany or Holland sometime after the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Or it may have been invented in Russia or Poland. Or, perhaps, it was only the culinary ingenuity of a housefrau-on-a-budget in need of a food stretcher. One thing is certain, Gefilte Fish is Jewish.3
Across Central and Eastern Europe, one could find some version of gefilte fish wherever Jews had settled, prepared, like clockwork, Friday mornings, and served that evening with grated horseradish. Aside from matzoh or challah, few Jewish foods were as ubiquitous. Here was a food of towering stature in the Jewish imagination. Over the centuries, a body of mystical thinking had grown up around gefilte fish, explaining its perfection as a Sabbath delicacy. Because of its intricacy, the dish was also a perfect measure of the Jewish housewife’s culinary skill. No other food in the Jewish kitchen required as much time or finesse. Along with the Sabbath candlesticks, the oblong gefilte fish pot, a vessel dedicated to that one food, was among a handful of objects that the Jewish housewife carried with her to America.
Despite its Jewish resume, gefilte fish did not originate with the Jews. Rather, it was a culinary convert, a food taken from the Gentile kitchen and adapted by the Jewish cook sometime in the distant past. In this respect, it reflects a larger pattern true of many foods typically consumed by Jews, among the world’s most avid culinary borrowers. Where most cuisines are anchored to a place, Jewish cooking transcends geography. Spatially unmoored, it is the product of a landless people continuously acquiring new foods and adapting them as they move from place to place, settling for a time, then moving again.
Coming from Prussia, Mrs. Gumpertz was an Ashkenazi, a very elastic label that takes in the Jews of northern France, Germany, Austria, Romania, Poland, all of the Baltic countries, and Russia. Its original meaning, however, was more narrowly defined. Sometime in the tenth century, large Jewish families from southern France and Italy began to migrate north, forming settlements along the Rhine River. These were the original Ashkenazim, a term derived from the medieval Hebrew word for Germany. The early Rhineland communities were made up largely of rabbis and merchants. Both figures, it turns out, played major roles in shaping Ashkenazi food traditions. In the great centers of Jewish learning that sprang up in the Rhine Valley, rabbinic scholars directed their intellectual energies toward food-based issues, including the finer points of kashruth, Jewish dietary law. As interpreters of kashruth (which is ever-evolving), they decided which foods were fit for Jewish consumption, how they should be cooked, who was allowed to cook them, and when they should be eaten. Jewish traders, meanwhile, acted as culinary conduits, shuttling foods and food traditions from one side of the globe to the other. As the preeminent travelers of their day, they introduced medieval Europe to the exotic foods of the East: nuts, spices, marzipan, and, most important of all, sugar. On a smaller geographic scale, they carried foods from town to town and country to country, spreading localized food traditions within Europe and creating regional cuisines.
The flow of Jews from southern Europe (most were from Italy, where Jews had been living since the days of the Roman Empire) continued through the twelfth century. By this time, a distinct Jewish culture had evolved in the Rhineland and taken root, but only temporarily. The ever-shifting political environment kept the Jews moving. The period of the Crusades, which began at the end of the eleventh century and lasted for another two hundred years, was a particularly difficult period for the Ashkenazim. On their way to the holy land, crusading soldiers, in a fit of religious zeal, would stop to torture Jews, in some cases wiping out entire towns.
Jewish hatred stirred up by
the Crusades set the tone for the next several centuries. State-sponsored expulsions, massacres, and anti-Jewish riots pushed the Jews farther east and north into Poland, Lithuania, and beyond. At the same time, more subtle forms of persecution prevented Jews from staying too long in any one place. Within German-speaking Europe, locally enforced laws restricting the Jews’ right to own property, to work in certain occupations, to live where they chose, and even when they could marry left the Jews both rootless and poor. Many worked as itinerant peddlers, traveling by foot and selling assorted dry goods, pots and pans, needles, thread, and fabric. The truly destitute lived as wandering beggars. For the most part, the Jewish migrations flowed eastward, but if the political situation in Poland or Russia became too inhospitable, Jews circled back into Germany.
The history of Ashkenazi cooking tells the story of a people in motion. Since they came from Italy, it shouldn’t surprise us that many early dishes show a strong Italian influence. The most obvious is pasta, or noodles, which the Jews called vermslich, or grimslich, words derived from the Italian “vermicelli.” In one medieval noodle dish, a favorite among twelfth-century rabbis, the dough was cut into strips, baked, and drizzled with honey, an early ancestor of noodle kugel. Boiled noodles arrived in Germany roughly three centuries later, another food carried north, this time by traders, many of whom were Jews. In his book Eat and Be Satisfied, John Cooper describes a dish called pastide, an enormous meat pie of Italian origin, typically filled with organ meats. Too large to finish in a single sitting, the pie was baked in its own edible storage container: a thick whole-grain crust that was chipped away at each successive meal. Like noodles, pastide was generally eaten on Friday evenings, a Sabbath tradition that lasted through the eighteenth century.4
While the Ashkenazi cook retained elements of her Italian past, she also adopted local food habits, creating a new hybrid cuisine. Like her Gentile neighbors, she relied on dried peas and beans, porridge made from millet and rye, black bread, cabbage, turnips, dried and pickled fish, and, eventually, potatoes, a nineteenth-century addition to the Jewish diet. A shared dependence on local resources created broad similarities between the two kitchens, Jewish and Gentile. More interesting, however, is the cross-over of specific dishes, a process helped along by the Jewish merchant, a crucial point of contact between the two cultures. Among the dishes that made that journey are two Jewish staples. Before the Jews adopted it, the braided bread we know as challah was the special Sunday loaf of German Gentiles. German Jews adopted the braided bread, which was originally made from sour dough, and renamed it berches, a term derived from the Hebrew word for “blessing.” On the Sabbath table, the berches symbolized the offerings of bread once made to the Kohanim, the priests who served in the ancient temple. When a piece of bread was torn from the loaf and dipped in salt, it referred back to the sacrifices of salted meat at the temple altar.
Even the poorest Jews celebrated the Sabbath with challah, the traditional braided loaf. Here, an immigrant prepares for the Sabbath in a Ludlow Street coal cellar, 1900.
Library of Congress: 209 “Ludlow St. Hebrew making ready for the Sabbath Eve in his coal cellar—2 loaves on his table, c. 1890,” Museum of the City of New York, The Jacob A. Riis Collection
Challah offers just one example of how borrowed foods could be reborn, their former lives erased from memory. Gefilte fish followed a similar path. The idea of a reassembled fish comes straight from the imagination of the medieval court cook, a master of visual trickery. Descriptions of medieval banquets are brimming with all manner of reassembled animals, from deer to peacock, brought to the table in their original skins. Following in that same tradition, gefilte fish was a creation of the court cook intended for the aristocratic diner. Here, for example, is a recipe from a sixteenth-century cookbook by the German court cook, Marx Rumpolt:
STUFFED PIKE
Scale the fish and remove the skin from head to tail; cut the meat off from the bone and chop it fine with a bit of onion; add a bit of pepper, ginger, and saffron, also fresh, un-melted butter and black raisins, egg yolk, and a bit of salt. Fill the pike with this mixture, replace the skin, sprinkle on some salt, place it in a pan and roast it. Make a sweet or sour broth under it and serve either warm or cold.5
Recipes very similar to Rumpolt’s can be found in German-Jewish cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century. As it traveled from one culture to another, gefilte fish, much like challah, was invested with a new iconography. But where challah looked to the Biblical past, gefilte fish became a symbol of the messianic banquet awaiting the Jews in paradise where, according to the Torah, the righteous shall dine on the flesh of the Leviathan. On the Sabbath table, gefilte fish was the Leviathan, that giant sea creature, a taste of paradise on earth.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, East Side Jews like Mrs. Gumpertz continued the gefilte fish tradition, preparing it in the old style, much like Rumpolt had four centuries earlier. A few decades later, a folksier version of gefilte fish seems to have taken its place. Prepared by cooks from Poland, Lithuania, and Russia, the chopped fish mixture was simply rolled into balls, simmered, then served cold with horseradish, the all-purpose Jewish condiment. With Jews from disparate countries all gathered in one neighborhood, subtle regional variations suddenly took on significance. Polish Jews, for example, seasoned their gefilte fish with sugar, where Lithuanians favored pepper. East Side Jews saw the sugar/pepper divide as a token of larger cultural differences between the Galiciana (Polish Jews) and the Litvaks (Lithuanians and Latvians), using it in conversation as a kind of code. So, if an East Sider wanted to know what part of the world a fellow Jew came from, he could ask, half-jokingly, “How do you like your gefilte fish, with sugar or without?”
Here’s a classic version of gefilte fish from the International Jewish Cook book, a dish of surprising delicacy to anyone who has tasted the mass-produced version found in the kosher aisle of your local supermarket:
GEFILLTE FISCH
Prepare trout, pickerel, or pike in the following manner: After the fish has been scaled and thoroughly cleaned, remove all the meat that adheres to the skin, being careful not to injure the skin; take out all the meat from head to tail, cut open along the backbone, removing it also; but do not disfigure the head and tail; chop the meat in a chopping bowl, then heat about a quarter of a pound of butter in a spider, add two tablespoons chopped parsley, and some soaked white bread; remove from the fire and add an onion grated, salt, pepper, pounded almonds, the yolks of two eggs, also a very little nutmeg grated. Mix all thoroughly and fill the skin until it looks natural. Boil in salt water, containing a piece of butter, celery root, parsley, and an onion; when done, remove from the fire and lay on a platter. The fish should be cooked for one and one-quarter hours, or until done. Thicken the sauce with yolks of two eggs, adding a few slices of lemons. This fish may be baked but must be rolled in flour and dotted with bits of butter.6
By the mid-nineteenth century, a distinct form of Jewish life had evolved in East Prussia, the region where Natalie Gumpertz spent her first twenty-odd years. The Jews here were thinly scattered in small towns and villages, representing only a tiny fraction of the local population. Out of two million East Prussians, fourteen thousand were Jews. Dispersed as they were, East Prussian Jews lacked the critical mass to sustain the kinds of Jewish institutions found farther east in the larger, more-bustling Polish shtetlach. The town of Ortelsburg, East Prussia, where Natalie was born, was a sleepy market town, its Jewish population never much larger than that of a single East Side tenement. Too small and too poor to support a Jewish school, in the 1840s, the Ortelsburg Jews pooled their resources to build a synagogue, but never hired a permanent rabbi. No rabbi, no school. And yet, this remote outpost of European Judaism was of sufficient size to accommodate two Jewish-run taverns.
Among rural Jews, the local tavern was the preeminent social spot, especially for men, who came to play cards (a popular Jewish pastime), read the newspaper, and drink. Over a mug of
beer or glass of schnapps, Jewish businessmen, from shopkeepers to horse dealers, cemented partnerships, found new customers, and made new contacts, not only with fellow Jews but with Christians too, who were likewise tavern customers. In many cases the taverns were attached to roadside inns that catered to Jewish merchants and traders. The inn provided them with a bed to sleep in and a stable for their horses, while the tavern kitchen, usually run by the tavern keeper’s wife, provided them with sustenance. On Saturday afternoons, whole families would stop by the tavern for a late lunch, paying for it when the Sabbath was over. At the start of the nineteenth century, the vast majority of German Jews lived in the countryside, but in the cities, too, Jews found their way into the hotel and restaurant business, one facet of their larger role in the food economy. Set apart from the wider culture by their distinct food requirements, the Ashkenazim relied on a vast network of butchers, bakers, vintners, distillers, traders, and merchants. The tavern-keeper belonged to this culinary workforce, supplying Jews with kosher food and drink in a public setting. Remember, too, that Christian-owned establishments were free to turn Jews away and often did. Jewish taverns and cafés, hotels, restaurants, and even Jewish spas, were the answer to widespread discrimination.
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