Tenement Cooking

Several years ago, after a stunning lunch at Katz's Delicatessen, my wife and visited the Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side, which features a tour of a tenement building with various apartments restored to their actual states they were in during various decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  It was one of the most interesting and educational historical tours I've ever taken, and the details of tenement life remain vivid in my memory even years later.

Now Jane Ziegelman, the director of the Tenement Museum's new culinary program, has come out with 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement, which traces the eating habits of five different immigrant families and uses food as the lens to help understand the immigrant experience.