Read 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement for Free Online

sections, but even in a well-kept tenement the air was thick with competing odors. Especially in winter, when doors and windows were closed to shut out the cold, the tenement became a kind of hothouse in which smells bloomed, instead of flowers. In the German wards, however, one especially potent smell overwhelmed the rest: the sulfury, penetrating tang of sauerkraut.
    In the patchwork that made up Kleindeutschland , sauerkraut was everywhere. It cut across ethnic boundaries and economic ones, too, consumed by rich and poor alike. Between late October and early December, tenement housewives (and saloon keepers as well) turned their energies to sauerkraut-making, producing enough in those few weeks to last through most of the year. In a pre-Cuisinart world, the chopping of that much cabbage was a daunting project, so women enlisted the help of an itinerant tradesman known as a krauthobler or “cabbage-shaver.” With a tool designed specifically for the task—it worked like a French mandolin, the blades set into a wooden board—the krauthobler went door to door, literally shaving cabbages into thread-like strands. The cost was a penny a head.
    Once the cabbage was shaved, the housewife took over. She scoured an empty liquor or vinegar barrel and lined it with whole cabbage leaves. Next came the shredded cabbage, which she salted and pounded, layer by layer, until the barrel was nearly full. Now she covered the cabbage with a cloth, then a piece of wood cut to the size of the opening, weighing it down with a stone. Left on its own, the salted cabbage began to weep, creating its own pickling brine. Once a week, the housewife tended to her barrel, rinsing the cloth to prevent contamination and skimming the brine.
    Sauerkraut-making in the tenements was a harvest ritual, a celebration of the autumn bounty. Like all seasonal rites, it marked the passage of time. Its power came through repetition. The scrubbing of the barrel, the arrival of the cabbage-shaver, the salting and pounding, were all steps in a familiar routine that the immigrant housewife carried with her from Germany. Seasonal food traditions, like sauerkraut-making, supplied an uprooted community with a sense of order. At Christmas, the Germans baked squares of lebkuchen , or honey cake; loaves of stollen, a sweetbread studded with raisins, and trays of pfeffernusse , peppery spice cookies coated in sugar syrup. In spring, for just a few weeks, German saloons served up mugs of dark bock beer. Summer in Kleindeutschland arrived on Pentecost Sunday, which the Germans marked with an all-day picnic. Each of these food-based rites, carried over from Germany, was reenacted in a completely new context by the immigrants who settled in New York and other cities throughout the United States. Over the decades, as Germans assimilated into the wider culture, the need for the old rituals began to slip away, replaced in some cases by new American customs. But assimilation moved in the opposite direction as well. Many German food traditions were adopted by the wider culture, so baking stollen became a Christmas tradition in non-German families along with decorating the Christmas tree, another German contribution to American home life.
    If fall was the season for sauerkraut-making, the payoff came in the first days of winter, when the cabbage was fully ripe and ready to be eaten. It was a moment the Germans looked forward to expectantly and enjoyed completely: “The look of pleasure on the bibulous German as he steps out of his favorite lager-beer saloon these cold days tells the passer-by as plainly as do the words that hang outside the door that the day of sauerkraut lunch is here.” 15 This happy vignette is taken from a Philadelphia newspaper, another city with a large German community, but could just as easily describe the saloon-goers of Chicago, Milwaukee, or New York.
    Alongside the krauthobler , a figure who had vanished from New York by the close of the Civil War, the