Review of "97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement" by Jane Ziegelman

A nice idea - a history of immigration to the US (and New York's Lower East Side in particular) told through the stories of five families who had all lived in one building at different times; made easier by the fact that the building in question has become the Tenement Museum. 

To my surprise I learned quite a lot, about the different waves of immigrants...I'd thought that I knew most of it, but I was wrong. In particular, I learned how much more assimilation-oriented the German Jews who came in the 1850s were - Jewish cookbooks with recipes for ham, pork and shellfish, and justifications for why oysters were kosher; and I learned about how poor and despised the second wave of Italian immigrants had been, and how they had done the dirtiest jobs and lived in the worst places, and still believed themselves to be culturally superior (or at least superior in terms of food) to the "native" US population.

And lots more too. I read this on kindle, but I think it's going to be bought as a present for various friends.