CHAPTER

2

They Brought Their Food With Them

The traveler indeed will find in China good eating of
every sort—except chop suey. —THE MIXER AND SERVER, 1912

If you live in America, you likely live near some standard ethnic restaurants—that is Mexican, Chinese, or Italian. The truth is most of the dishes served in these restaurants originated in America, and while they may have been inspired by or first created by immigrants, many of the dishes are unknown in the native countries. Unless you live in a major city or near a large immigrant population, you’re unlikely to encounter absolutely authentic ethnic food simply because many of the necessary ingredients are hard to come by here in America. Your immigrant ancestors would have experienced the same difficulties when they arrived in this country, whether they emigrated two hundred years ago or thirty years ago. This chapter looks at the true origins of ethnic food in America and includes stories of actual immigrants who brought food traditions with them.

FROM CHOP SUEY TO MATZO BALLS

Immigrant communities cook the food they grew up with or are accustomed to. They look for ingredients that they know or find as passable substitutes. Ethnic markets spring up to provide the community with the taste of home that they long for. But that is not the case in the ethnic restaurants that serve a wider community of people outside of the immigrant community. This population is not familiar with the look or smell of the cuisine. In most ethnic restaurant settings, whether Mexican or Chinese, the food served is going to appeal to local taste palates and not necessarily reflect the food of the country.

ITALIAN

If you are not from an Italian background, the mention of Italian food may conjure up images of red checkered tablecloths and bottles of wine, maybe even plastic grapes hanging from faux arbors. But the food we think of as Italian is quite different from the food that is truly Italian. Sure, they still eat lasagna and pizza, but the so-called Italian foods non-Italians eat tend to be heavy with cheese and tomato sauce, whereas food in Italy is healthier and much more diverse because it takes advantage of fresh vegetables, seafood, and olive oil.

While there were some Italian immigrants to American during the colonial period, between 1890 and 1924 Italians immigrated to America in droves for economic reasons.¹ The immigrants settled in ethnic enclaves, and little Italys starting popping up in large urban centers.² While Italian food is now one of the more popular cuisines in America, it was not always so widely accepted. Assimilation into American culture was seen as vital in the early twentieth century, and sticking to ethnic customs, even food traditions, was seen as detrimental. In 1920, a New York social worker wrote of one of her charges, “Not assimilated yet—still eating pasta.”³

Pizza is one of the most popular Italian dishes in America today. Italian immigrants to America were making pizzas in bakeries at the close of the nineteenth century. The first pizzeria in the United States was Lombardi’s in New York City, which opened in 1905. Gennaro Lombardi was making pizza in a bakery in America as early as 1897, but didn’t open his own pizza restaurant until eight years later. Originally from Naples, Lombardi took his knowledge of Italian pizza making and adapted it to his new homeland, substituting ingredients and cooking methods available in the United States. At the turn of the twentieth century, Italian food in American was being made by Italians for Italians, but after the Great Depression, non-Italian Americans were eating Italian food and pizza in Italian restaurants. However, pizza didn’t start to gain popularity until after World War II. Returning soldiers had enjoyed pizza in Italy and sought out the dish after they returned home. As non-Italian Americans embraced pizza, it evolved from the tomato pie that was served in Italy to having more cheese and thicker crust. Chicago deep-dish pizza was created in 1943.

CHINESE

To understand the Chinese food eaten in restaurants all over the United States, we need to first understand the Chinese immigrant population and its history in the United States. Chinese immigrants started coming to the United States in the nineteenth century. Shortly thereafter, immigration laws were changed to exclude Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) put a stop to Chinese immigration and restricted the ability of those who were already here from re-entering after a visit to China. The act was not repealed until 1943. This legislation greatly affected Chinese men who were already in the United States. They typically came without their wives and families, and once here it was almost impossible for their wives to join them. Without wives in the home, many Chinese men were required to take on household duties traditionally done by women, including laundry and cooking.

Many Chinese found work building the railroad across the nation. Their white employers viewed Chinese workers as disposable, so the Chinese were often given the most dangerous assignments. They also took mining jobs and were often hated and persecuted by white miners who viewed the immigrants as competition. After the railroad was completed, the Chinese took jobs that were entrepreneurial in nature, and many owned laundries and restaurants.

In nineteenth-century America, there was great prejudice against the Chinese, and that prejudice extended to food. Most white Americans in the nineteenth century found Chinese food odd, both in look and smell. They told stories of Chinese people eating rats, dogs, and cats.

Chinese staples such as fortune cookies and chop suey are on every Chinese restaurant menu in America, but as author Jennifer Lee points out, these dishes aren’t real Chinese food.⁴ So if these dishes didn’t come from China, where did they come from?

The actual origins of chop suey are hard to track down. One explanation is that a Chinese cook trying to feed miners simply added a little bit of this and that. No matter the origin, chop suey became so popular in the United States that it was a shock when early twentieth-century American tourists traveled to China and discovered no one there knew of the dish. In the trade journal The Mixer and Server from 1912, a tourist wrote, “Chop Suey Hoax Exposed: Sold in the United States as China’s National Dish, But Orientals Have Never Heard Of It.” The article went on to say that the ingredients found in chop suey weren’t even eaten by the Chinese. In America, the dish was made with beef, but the tourist wrote, “A Chinaman of China very rarely tastes beef, for not only is the religious influence of the Buddhists against the eating of any beast of burden, but there is not enough grazing land in the empire to make it possible for beef to be raised for consumptions.”⁵

JEWISH

Delicatessen is from a German word that means “delicacies.” While we associate delicatessens or delis with the Jewish culture, the first delis in America were owned by Germans and sold foods like sausages, sauerkraut, meatloaf, frankfurters, liverwurst, and pretzels. Germans were one of the largest immigrant groups coming to America after the American Civil War, and a good percentage of them were Jewish.⁶

Jewish entrepreneurs started selling foods from pushcarts to other immigrants. These food pushcart businesses were a family effort with the wife making the food in the family apartment and the husband selling it later in the day. Because the food was sold to workers, it had to be portable and preserved so as not to spoil. Popular pushcart foods included knishes, black breads, ryes, bagels, pickled herring, cold meats, and pickles. Over time, the pushcarts disappeared and delis started springing up.⁷ Jewish delis provide patrons with a mix of cured meats, fish, and sandwiches.

By 1931, there were 1,550 kosher delicatessen stores in the New York City boroughs.⁸ Due to various factors including the rise of full-service grocery stores and migrations from cities to suburbs, the Jewish deli in New York City has almost gone the way of the dinosaur. According to author David Sax, fewer than fifty are left in the boroughs.

MEXICAN

For some areas of the United States, Mexican food was a part of the region’s early history. The cuisines of California, Arizona, Texas, and New Mexico have all been influenced by the first settlers to these regions—the Spanish. The food eaten by these earlier settlers was very different from the Mexican food Americans eat today. It was even different from the food eaten by people in modern-day Mexico. For example, a standard midmorning repast for Mexican cowboys in 1769 California would have included chorizo y frijoles, tortillas, queso, vino tinto, burritos de carne con chile, frijoles refritors, and café. A noonday dinner might include puchero-caldo, carne, verduras (boiled pot with broth, meat, and vegetables), ensalada de verdolagas (pigweed salad), tortillas, and vine tinto or café.⁹

At the turn of the twentieth century, most “Mexican” food served in California used beef as a main ingredient. Dishes also included olives, raisins, and grapes as part of fillings for enchiladas and chiles rellenos, for example, because these foods were readily available in the region, and the “meals were always accompanied by wine.”¹⁰

Salsa is the Spanish word for sauce. This dish can be made in a variety of ways, though most Americans are used to a red, tomato-based version. Salsa became popular with Americans, especially in the Southwest, after the 1940s. The first bottled salsas began appearing on store shelves during this time, making access to salsa easier.¹¹ Today salsa can be found in non-Mexican restaurants (in some areas of the country McDonalds has salsa packets available alongside ketchup packets), grocery stores stock wide varieties of salsa, and stores catering to “chile heads” sell hot sauces that make jalapenos taste like a dessert.

THE IMMIGRANTS’ EXPERIENCE

Journeying to a foreign country takes faith. There are challenges to starting a new life in a place where the language is foreign, the people are different, and everything is unknown, including the food. Many immigrants arrived in America with very little, but they did bring their knowledge of the recipes and foods of their homeland. In some families, those food traditions are carefully passed down and taught to each generation of women.

However, over time this knowledge may become diluted as descendants Americanize recipes and lose a taste for ingredients that are staples in the homeland but a rarity in America. Sometimes recipes were changed because the traditional ingredients weren’t available in the immigrants’ new country. Through travels and interviews with family members and Italian cooks, author Laura Schenone discovered her family’s ravioli recipe uses Philadelphia Cream Cheese in the filling because it was a close substitute for the cheese her family used back in Italy. She chronicles her journey in pursuit of her family’s ravioli recipe in The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken: A Search for Food and Family.

In her book, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, Jane Ziegelman describes German krauthobblers who went door to door slicing cabbage for sauerkraut at the turn of the twentieth century.¹² These krauthobblers likely provided continuity between the way sauerkraut was made in Germany and the borough they served. But as technology made krauthobblers obsolete, one connection to the old country was lost, which could make it more difficult to follow the traditional recipes and methods.

A CONTEMPORARY IMMIGRANT

Recent immigrants can often give us the best perspective on how foodways change when moving from one country to another. Their diets often incorporate the foods they know from their homeland as well as those of their newly adopted country.

In the 1980s, Teresa Bettancourt Philibert immigrated to the United States from the island country of São Jorge in the Azores when she was a teenager. The language and culture were entirely new to her, as was the food. In São Jorge, Teresa’s family had produced most of the food they ate through gardening, raising animals, and fishing. They purchased very few food items from a small, nearby store. She was used to fresh, organic foods grown right in her yard. She immediately noticed a difference in the taste of food in the United States. “Even the sugar here tastes different,” Teresa says.

The following cookie recipe is a specialty of São Jorge. It’s made for holidays, festivals, and special occasions.

ESPÉCIES (SPECIALTY OF SãO JORGE, AZORES)

White dough:

1 kg all-purpose flour

125 g of butter

2 eggs

1 pinch of salt

1 tablespoon of lard

Cold water

Place all the ingredients except water in the food processor. With the food processor running, slowly add water until the dough forms a ball. Set aside.

Filling:

1 kg of sugar

½ kg of toasted bread flour

Zest of 3 lemons

50 g of cinnamon

50 g of anise

1 liter of water

4 tablespoons of butter

White pepper to taste

Place all the ingredients minus the flour and butter in a heavy stockpot, bring to boil, and boil the mix for about 10 minutes stirring it occasionally. Remove from heat, add the butter, mix, and then add the flour, and mix again. Set aside and let cool.

To assemble the cookies, divide the white dough into four to six pieces. Roll out the dough with a rolling pin to ¹/₁₆ inch thickness, and then cut into strips 3 inches wide and 6 inches long. Make 5 to 6 diagonal cuts on one side of the dough with a pastry crimper. To make the center, fill a pastry bag fitted with a wide tip with the filling, and pipe the filling onto the length of the dough. Fold over the dough so the side with the diagonal cuts is facing up. Crimp the edges, and form them into a horseshoe shape that connects at the tips.

Bake at 350ºF on a baking sheet until lightly golden. Set aside and let cool.

FOOD AS A NECESSITY

In her e-book Value Meals on the Volga, genealogist Anna Dalhaimer Bartkowski records her family history, food traditions, and the recipes of her Russian immigrant grandmother who came from the German-Russian town of Mariental. According to Bartkowski, her grandparents “did not dine, they ate.”¹³ Even in the United States, vegetables and meats were considered a treat on their dinner table. Before refrigeration and high-speed shipping methods, fresh produce was only available in season, and even then it was only what could be grown locally. Meat was expensive and hard to keep fresh for more than a day. As a result, dairy, eggs, and grains constituted a large part of our ancestors’ diets before the nineteenth century. Anna records a number of the recipes her grandmother’s family used, including one she and her sister called “the stuff in the brown pan” because they had trouble pronouncing the name.

SOUR CREAM MAULDASHA A.K.A. RA MAULTASCHEN

(pronounced sour cream mull da sha or ra mull da sha)

Ingredients:

3 cups flour

1 tablespoon salt

½ tablespoon sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 eggs

1½ cups water

3 tablespoons butter

4 cups milk

8 oz. sour cream

Preheat oven to 450 ° F. Mix flour, salt, sugar, baking powder, and eggs in large bowl. Add 1½ cups of water. Mix together until all ingredients form dough. Knead the dough until smooth.

Add flour if necessary to make a stiff but malleable dough. Use rolling pin to spread out thinly, approximately ¼ inch thick, on a floured board.

Set 13 × 9 × 2 pan with 3 tablespoons of butter in it over a burner. Heat butter on low until melted. Warm 4 cups milk on low heat on stovetop and set aside.

Spread sour cream over the flattened dough just like you would spread frosting on a cake. Cut the dough with a sharp knife into square or rectangular pieces. Roll up each piece lengthwise into a circular tube, like a Swiss cake roll. Set each tube into the pan with the melted butter. Arrange in pan as it best fits. Pour warm milk over rolls.

Bake in 450°F oven for approximately 30 minutes. Lower oven temperature after milk boils. Meal serves family of four for two meals. Leftovers can be cut up and reheated in frying pan or microwave.¹⁴

Because the United States is such a melting pot of cultures, odds are good that your everyday diet has been shaped in some way by immigrants and ethnic traditions. While some of us may have ethnic food that is a part of our everyday lives, those of us who are more removed generationally from our immigrant ancestors may not be as lucky. How can you learn more about your ethnic food traditions? Reading other people’s stories of their food traditions can be a start. Consider such compilations as Pilaf, Pozole, and Pad Thai: American Women and Ethnic Food by Sherrie A. Innes and Storied Dishes: What Our Family Recipes Tell Us About Who We Are and Where We’ve Been by Linda Murray Burzok.

Aside from searching out ethnic cookbooks, try looking for older community cookbooks from your ancestor’s home to get a sense of what may have been cooking on your ancestor’s stove. Also consider regional history books and the biographical writings of those who share your ancestor’s cultural and ethnic background.

 

NOTES

» ¹ John P. Colletta, Finding Italian Roots: The Complete Guide for Americans (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1993), 16.

» ² Ibid., 17.

» ³ Stewart Lee Allen, In the Devil’s Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (New York: Ballantine Books, 2002), 103.

» ⁴ Jennifer Lee, The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food (New York: Twelve, 2008), 34.

» ⁵ Ibid., 34.

» ⁶ David Sax, Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009), 23.

» ⁷ Ibid., 24.

» ⁸ Ibid., 27.

» ⁹ Ana Bégué Packman, Early California Hospitality: The Cookery Customs of Spanish California, With Authentic Recipes and Menus of the Period (Glendale, Calif: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1938), 45.

» ¹⁰ Charles Perry, “Piedad Yorba,” Gastronomica 10 (Summer 2010): 53.

» ¹¹ Andrew F. Smith, ed., The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 517.

» ¹² Jane Ziegelman, 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement (New York: HarperCollins, 2010), xiii.

» ¹³ Anna Dalhaimer Bartkowski, Value Meals on the Volga: Sharing Our Heritage With New Generations (Fargo, North Dakota: Germans From Russian Heritage Collection, 2006), 5.

» ¹⁴ Ibid., 31.