The Suspicious Pickle

The pickle was featured in a New York Times op-ed (Jane Ziegelman, author of 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement) a day after I wrote about pickling and souring here.  Germ found the article and sent it my way.  Though now that I think about it, I'd rather be associated with something less pungent. 

My grandma prepared this jar of pickles for immediate consumption. They take only a few days to sour in a mixture of water, garlic, and dill.  The furry stuff is washed off beforehand.

Anti-immigrant feeling at the turn of the 20th Century was as rank as a furry garlicky pickle.  As Ziegelman points out, many anti-immigrant crusades were fought on the battlefield of food.  Immigrants, it was believed,

used too much garlic, onion and pepper. They ate too many cured meats and were too generous with the condiments. Strongly flavored food ... led to nervous, unstable people. Nervous, unstable people made bad Americans. 

I wonder what the reform experts noticed first, the pungent foods or the nervous people, as I have no doubt that immigrants were nervous.  They were new to the country, confused by its rules, and poor.  Many came from places torn apart by wars, and the Jews of Eastern Europe, having escaped anti-Semitism there, had to deal with it here.  

Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were acknowledged to be somewhat assimilable since they were, after all, somewhat Caucasian.  The Slavs' assumed lack of mental acumen, however, was under much discussion while their drinking habits scared the crap out of the temperance movement.  In a 1906 The Incoming Millions, Howard Grose mentions that "they tell us that the Slavs are mentally, socially, and morally undeveloped; that they live like beasts, lower the tone of the community, and are possessed of but one virtue — courage."

As the NYTimes op-ed points out, the pickle became enemy number one in the tenements of New York.  It stunk and was sour, had none of the sweetness of applesauce, and was the preferred snack of the poor and disenfranchised Jews of Manhattan's Lower East Side.  I think the shape of the pickle had something to do with it too and these do-gooding reformers couldn't get their minds out of the gutter.  

The pickle has gained favor, but immigrants keep taking turns getting the short end of the stick.

Barry Deutsch