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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.
B OILED S AUERKRAUT
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,