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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