One morning both my E mails on my phone and my E mails on my computer wouldn’t update.
I couldn’t find our theatre tickets – lost in my phone or did I actually misplace the physical tickets in one of my three desks in my house?
My nails were a mess and in need of a manicure.
And the lawn guy had mowed down one of my freshly popped-up bulbs in the garden.
Geez.
Clearly I wasn’t coping with the little daily annoyances of life in the year 2023.
Poor me.
I decided to calm down by reading my new book 97 Orchard – An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman.
I learned that due to the sharp rise in immigration, tenements began appearing in New York City around the 1820’s. Since there was an absence of indoor plumbing, tenement housewives “were like human freight elevators, hauling groceries, coal, firewood and children up and down endless flights of stairs.”
Housewives carried heavy, sloshing tubs of water needed for bathing, cooking and house cleaning. The tubs soaked both the stairs and the women carrying them – not pleasant in bone-chilling February.
Due to lack of space and short on resources and money, the women of the house cooked as simply and efficiently as they could. That could mean going out and shopping a few times a day – haggling over prices and quantities. And amidst the plethora of push carts, cramped tenements, and dirty teeming streets, these displaced housewives preserved their culinary traditions while also improvising and adapting to the conditions at hand.
And then there is the subject of gefilte fish – you know, the kind immersed in jelly and vacuum-packed in a glass container? That simply didn’t exist back then. Instead, immigrant housewives routinely slit the backbone of the fish, scraped off the flesh, chopped it finely into a paste, put it back in the fish, and sewed it shut. And then cooked it. Being a delicacy in Jewish households for the Sabbath, the dish “was a perfect measure of the Jewish housewife’s culinary skill.”
Omg! I would have failed miserably. My main skill is charcuterie boards – involving little more than choosing delicacies from the vast array of foods at one of the major grocery chains near my house and then artfully displaying them on my wooden board.
Immigrants were most impressed with two foods in particular: bananas and sandwiches. “Many tried to gnaw through the skin” on the banana and as far as the American sandwich, immigrants were busy “marveling over the sweetness of American white bread.” Most of us with any degree of sophistication know enough to peel a banana and wouldn’t serve white bread as a delicacy under any circumstances. Perhaps it’s time to re-think Wonder Bread.
The ubiquitous push carts were both a reminder of the old country and an antidote to hunger for the immigrant. Push carts contained a wide assortment of familiar foods at the lowest possible prices and in the quantities the tenement housewife desired – a single egg – a cup of pot cheese. This was a practical matter: there was nowhere to store provisions or to keep food from spoiling – so shopping meal by meal was the most practical action.
I have a refrigerator and freezer in my kitchen and an extra one in the garage – and yet, I’m always complaining that I have to walk an extra thirty steps into the garage to check to see if I am running low on mozzarella cheese and Coffee Mate.
Geez. One of my biggest frustrations? No room on my kitchen counter for my Instapot. Poor me. Every time I want to use it I have to schlep to my butler pantry seven steps away and bend down to get it. Imagine that!
And my paper goods? In an outside storage area because I ran out of room in my pantry due to an overabundance of appliances I never use and have long forgotten how to operate.
Apartment doors were hardly closed. Stairways were playgrounds. Rooftops were communal bedrooms. Front stoops were open living rooms.
What a far cry from today with our Ring doorbells to keep out intruders, our fenced years, our sprinkler systems, our alarmed equipped homes and sealed up windows.
We now can go days without talking to a live person. Uber Eats fulfills our need for food. Remote work is routine. We live in sweats and t shirts that rarely need much care.
We get highly irritated with our long list of passwords, never- ending tech directions and not talking to a live person when we need to solve a problem with our credit cards.
We are isolated.
We live far from family.
We rely on the Internet for advice.
The immigrants lived jumbled together where privacy was craved and quiet non-existent.
We’ve got the privacy and the quiet, but we are certainly missing community, connection and camaraderie.
Ah the good old days!
Keep Preserving Your Bloom,
Iris Ruth Pastor