from cameling

Through the 19th and 20th century, New York has seen waves of immigrants from various countries. In the 1800s, blocks of apartments known as tenements were developed specifically to house the incoming immigrants. The author concentrates on 5 families that lived at 97 Orchard in New York through t...

from VioletBramble

97 Orchard is a tenement building on the Lower East Side of NYC that was home to generations of new immigrants from 1850-1935. Ziegelman bases each chapter on a different family that once lived in the building. The chapters aren't actually about that family though. Each family represents the memb...

from tshrope

Jane Ziegelman does an excellent job of taking the modern reader back to the immigrant tenements of the Lower East Side of New York City, during the late 19th Century. She has done a lot of research not only on the food that immigrants ate and modified to the availability of food stuffs in their ...

from RealLifeReading

“A place to cook and to eat, the kitchen was also used as a family workspace, a sweatshop, a laundry room, a place to wash one's body, a nursery for the babies, and a bedroom for boarders. In this cramped and primitive setting, immigrant cooks brought their formidable ingenuity to the daily chall...

from book58lover

I throughly enjoyed reading this book although it really isn't a "history of five immigrant families". That is just a lynchpin for the real discussion of food and eating history based on five nationalities and frankly I am happy that it isn't another book about a turn of the century eastern Europ...