97 Orchard

A “highly entertaining” culinary and social history of five immigrant families living in a turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City tenement house (New York Times).

“A unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round.” —Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World

In ninety-seven Orchard, Jane Ziegelman explores the culinary life that was the heart and soul of New York’s Lower East Side around the turn of the twentieth century—a city within a city, where Germans, Irish, Italians, and Eastern European Jews attempted to forge a new life. Through the experiences of five families, all of them residents of ninety-seven Orchard Street, Ziegelman takes readers on a vivid and unforgettable tour, from impossibly cramped tenement apartments, down dimly lit stairwells, beyond the front stoops where housewives congregated, and out into the hubbub of the dirty, teeming streets. Ziegelman shows how immigrant cooks brought their ingenuity to the daily task of feeding their families, preserving traditions from home but always ready to improvise. ninety-seven Orchard lays bare the roots of our collective culinary heritage.

“A celebration of food, language, and of the mutual aid and comfort that these brave pioneers shared with their tenement neighbors.” —Boston Globe

“A tasty, satisfying stew of history, sociology, cultural anthropology, and spicy prose.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)