97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement by Jane Ziegelman Read Free Book Online

similar establishment on Tenth Street and Broadway in New York.
    The Vienna Bakery arrived on the gastronomic scene like a visiting dignitary. Alongside the actual bakery, Fleischmann opened an elegant café that quickly became a favorite dining spot among German intellectuals and opera stars. It was also popular with New York society women, who flocked to the bakery after a strenuous morning of shopping on the Ladies Mile, the strip of department stores that once ran along Lower Broadway. Of all the dishes on the menu, Vienna bread was the star attraction. When Teddy Roosevelt was police commissioner of New York in the 1890s, he used to walk uptown from his office on Mulberry Street and stop at the bakery for a lunch of Vienna bread and milk. From Fleischmann’s bakery, Vienna bread spread to German bake shops around the city, but the stores most likely to carry it were on the Lower East Side. An 1877 article on the Vienna-bread phenomenon opens with the following observations:
One remarkable result of the Centennial exhibition is the striking and admirable fact that Vienna bread is now to be bought all over New York. Indeed, we are quite sure that the genuine article is now more easily procurable in this city than in the Austrian capital. You will find it in the Bowery, and in the streets crossing that elegant avenue; nay, you shall not enter a little baker’s shop in Mackerelville without finding at least Vienna rolls upon the counter. 18
    When Louis Fleischmann died in 1904, the Vienna Bakery had already lost its glamour, though it remained in business for several decades. The craze for Vienna bread was also starting to fade. The precise date is hard to pinpoint, but sometime after World War I, when Germans and their food fell out of favor, it began its final descent into obscurity. Even so, Fleischmann’s legacy continues, visible on every packet of Fleischmann’s Instant Yeast, the brand most used by American bakers for over a century.
    The greatest contribution made by German bakers to the American kitchen came in the form of yeast-based cakes, which began to appear in East Side bakeries during the second half of the nineteenth century. Though all were made from the same basic dough, they came in an assortment of shapes and with a variety of toppings and fillings. There were round cakes crowned with apple slices, ring-shaped cakes filled with chopped nuts or poppy seeds, pretzel-shaped cakes, and cakes that were rolled up like snails then brushed with butter and sprinkled with cinnamon, sugar, and currants. The allure of these buttery confections quickly leapfrogged beyond Kleindeutschland into the wider city. The Germans called them kuchen, but we know them as coffee cake.
    In the 1870s, the New York Times ran a food-related column on their women’s page, called “The Household.” Most columns opened with a round-up of what New Yorkers could expect to find at the market that week, which foods were in good supply, which were scarce, and current prices. The market news was followed by a selection of recipes and household tips covering a broad range of very practical topics, like how to make glue or how to stop one’s shoes from squeaking. The column ended with questions and requests from readers, including this one, which ran in 1876: “I would like a receipt for pumpkin pie and German coffee-bread or coffee-cake like you get in the bakeries in New York and which cannot be found in the country.—JEWEL” 19 Unfortunately, it seems that Jewel never got a response, but over the next few decades, recipes for German coffee cake began showing up in American newspapers, magazines, and cookbooks. The following recipe for a kind of circular coffee cake called a kranzkuchen is courtesy of a German-American housewife who shared her kuchen-making technique with a New York reporter. It appeared in an 1897 feature under the headline “Toothsome German Dishes, Lessons To Be Learned From The People Who Eat Five Meals A