Why am I passionate about this?
Rachel's 3 favorite reads in 2023
Plus, Rachel's 14-year-old's favorite books.
Why did Rachel love this book?
Like most Americans, I’m the descendent of immigrants, and this book gave me a sense of what my great-grandparents’ experience was like better than anything I’d previously read.
Ziegelman has an incredible ability to connect concrete details to big historical transformations. Her discussion of how Irish peasants’ overreliance on potatoes led to famine, for example, was both fascinating and shattering.
As a New Yorker, I was struck by how much seemed the same but also by how much had changed. The families at 97 Orchard didn’t always have running water, but they had access to a wide range of affordable, good-quality food in a way residents of contemporary "food deserts" do not.
4 authors picked 97 Orchard as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
“Social history is, most elementally, food history. Jane Ziegelman had the great idea to zero in on one Lower East Side tenement building, and through it she has crafted a unique and aromatic narrative of New York’s immigrant culture: with bread in the oven, steam rising from pots, and the family gathering round.” — Russell Shorto, author of The Island at the Center of the World
97 Orchard is a richly detailed investigation of the lives and culinary habits—shopping, cooking, and eating—of five families of various ethnicities living at the turn of the twentieth century in one tenement on the…