Moo Shu Moozadell
May 12th, 2010
For a city whose port was one of the most heavily trafficked in the world, the popular offerings of fine dining in New York City after the Civil War and through the early twentieth century were limited in their variety and scant in their exoticism. The first and second waves of Irish and Germans sparked a bit of braggadocio with beefsteak and beer populism, but a quick scan of extant menus shows an infectious pattern of provincialized French dishes. In 1883, ritzy Delmonico’s on Beaver Street hosted the Commemoration of the Evacuation of the City of New York by the British with victuals wholly Gallic:
The 1895 menu for the New York Library Association tagged each French dish – and one for Spaghetti - with quotes from Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson and other canonical Britannic poets. Perhaps the contemporary obsession with France stemmed from guilt over never having truly reciprocated the gift of the Statue of Liberty, which gratitude was overshadowed by the boosterism promoted to raising homeland funds for her pedestal:
For a 1906 New Year’s Eve dinner, the old Waldorf-Astoria offers both German and Oyster Bay Asparagus, plus Virginian and Westphalian Ham, and Yorkshire Buck, but the menu is drenched in French influence:
And at Strawberry Barn in Saddle River, New Jersey, circa 1950s/1960s, the typical fare trickled out from the metropolis as evidence of the accepted fancy, including a Veal Parmigiana:
The non-French staples revolved around steak chops, lobster tail, chilled tomato juice, shrimp cocktail, and a multitude of uses for each part of the animal, from hind to tongue, not unlike the resourcefulness of a frontiersman making the carcass last until only the bones are left for soup stock.
It can be argued that the first “exotic” foods New York City formulated into its everyday living were Italian and Chinese. The recipe for this history, besides an acclimation of meat, fish and root vegetables, involves bigotry, tradition, pioneership, novelty and miscegenation. These cuisines set the stage for New Yorkers and perhaps most Americans to integrate non-native dishes into the mainstream. Today, the Olive Garden boasts cooking schools in Tuscany, and P.F. Chang’s has become the Asian Arby’s.
The Italian immigrant was originally stereotyped as a simp:
And the Chinese as a virus against righteous labor:
Italians could be expected to work as “ragpickers,” reselling found garbage, of which there was plenty, as multi-ethnic itself as today’s United Nations. Chinese laborers were forbid to enter the U.S. in accordance with the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 1882, repealed in 1943. New Yorkers would not have deigned it a savory event to track down these eateries in the physically contiguous neighborhoods where Italian and Chinese cultures would have been found, and for only the most maverick bohemians might the novelty of discovering these foods expand consciousness.
Italian and Chinese cultures are idiosyncratically similar. Like most migrations to the Lower East Side, the Chinese and Italians were refugees, fleeing natural disasters or socio-political upheaval. Even today the beer-necked investment banker paying $3,500. per month for a shoebox one-bedroom where a family of ten Turkish Jews lived eighty-five years ago is in flight from the suburbs and seeks the post-collegiate solace of mass-produce urban superculture. Little Italy and Chinatown evolved in adjacence, at the Lower East Side extending into what is today the southern blocks of Soho. Italian food, with its pasta and ravioli and spiced sauces, is akin to Chinese food, with its noodles and wontons and rich sauces. A 2004 New York Times article about an American Chinese menu collection on display at the Museum of Chinese in the Americas mentions “a 1960′s menu from the House of Lee in Oakland, Calif., featuring ‘fried ravioli,’ better known as wontons.” However, cheese is a dominant in Italian food where it thankfully never exists in Chinese. There is something indelicate about topping a dish of Kung Pao Shrimp with Gorgonzola. According to urban legend, the Chinese claim the structure and mythos of organized crime as their own, brought back to the Mediterranean by Marco Polo along with the phenomenon of starchy noodles, which in turn inspires the likes of linguine and La Cosa Nostra. This sounds good for the pithy schpiel of a doubledecker bus tour guide, but not for the accuracy of an historical exegete. The reality, for Sicily in particular, is the medieval influence of the Arab world.
In any case, in pre-Mayor Lindsay NYC, Italian and Chinese food served as the primogeniture of “exotic” cuisine in this city, as they are now commonplace and staples of the Big Apple diet.
In 1900, at the Hotel Colombo in 149 Bleecker Street, run by Luigi Tirelli, one finds a detailed amalgam of authentic Italian dishes, like Ravioli alla Genovese for 15¢, and more accessible alternatives like Succotash, Lima Beans, Fried Potatoes and Oysters.
Back then, you didn’t just get Mexican “take-out” or “go for sushi,” and it could be assumed that the only ethnic food available was found in the neighborhoods where that ethnicity was a majority, like Spanish and Portuguese down by Oak and Roosevelt and Cherry Streets, or Ukrainian and Polish in the area contemporary maps indicate as the East Village. It is no surprise that when Don Draper, a New York ad executive on the TV show Mad Men, visits Los Angeles in 1962 and is served Mexican food, he has never tasted it before. Mexican immigration and Los Angeles cuisine is surely brethern to the thesis at hand.
In The Honeymooners (1955-1956), Brooklyn bus driver/patriot Ralph Kramden talks of eating at “the Chinaman’s,” the Hong Kong Garden Chinese Restaurant in Bushwick. In The Pickup on South Street (1953), a waterfront stoolie called Lightning Louie gorges his maw using chopsticks, which he has trouble using, scraping noodles from the bowl at his fat lip, but Lightning Louie has no trouble using the chopsticks to snatch his blood money from the table.
Chinatown and Little Italy began as segregated areas of refugees. According to curators at Ellis Island, “the disastrous condition of the Island, earthquakes, social disparity and mafia” were prime factors for the “massive exodus of Sicily.” Like the sexual refugee Vito Spatafore indicates in The Sopranos while lovingly serving Pasta Patate to his lover Vincent, “real peasant food.” In The Godfather, the families agree on Louie’s Italian Restaurant in the Bronx, where they speak Italian except for McCluskey, the mick cop, who has the veal on recommendation without looking at the menu. McCluskey gets shot in his green gullet.
The market and economy of pre-globalized food consisted of immigrant families importing their own ingredients for homecooking or for the enterprise of neighborhood restaurants. It is contended that San Francisco Chinese is better than NYC, but there is only one place in the United States that proves to serve better Italian food than NYC, and that is New Jersey.
Postscript:
On May 11, 2010, Doris E. Travis died, “the Last of the Ziegfeld Girls.” The New York Times obit says “in 1919, she wore a red costume and played the paprika part in the salad dance.” Indeed, did they put paprika on their salads back then?
Reference:
Miss Frank E. Buttolph American Menu Collection, 1851-1930
