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

foods. For the most part, however, Irish boardinghouse cooking was governed more by issues of economy than national origin.
    The American boardinghouse is today close to extinction, but for most of the nineteenth century and part of the twentieth it was a very common living option. Writing about New York in 1872, the journalist James McCabe portrayed the city as one vast boardinghouse, a description that could also apply to Philadelphia, Boston, and other large cities. City dwellers regarded the boardinghouse as a necessary evil, a kind of residential purgatory that one must endure before moving on to other forms of housing. The woman who stood at the helm of this much-disparaged institution, the boardinghouse landlady, became a stock character in the popular imagination of nineteenth-century urban America, best known for her cheapness. She made regular appearances in newspaper and magazine stories, often seen prowling the public markets for third-rate ingredients. Here she is shopping at one of the city’s night markets, outdoor venues that catered to the budget-conscious:
That woman in the red reps underskirt, over-trimmed with velveteen, with very little bonnet but a jungle of artificial flowers and parterre of chignon, with almost the entire back of a gallipagos turtle in her tortoise-shell earrings…with the coarse hand in the soiled gloves, and the large greasy pocketbook tightly clasped—who is she? Her index finger is uncovered. She uses it as a convenient prod to go through meat and find out how tough it really is. Know her business? Of course she does. A slatternly Irish girl, maid of all work, with a basket big enough for a laboring man to carry, follows diligently at her heels. “Beef,” said the lady of the earrings very laconically, stopping full before the butcher. He looks at her for a moment, and with a long pole hooks down a piece of meat. It is a long, stringy portion of singularly unappetizing appearance. 17
    Her purchase tells the story, in encapsulated form, of boardinghouse cuisine. As a rule, it was built on the most gristly cuts of beef, mutton, and pork, organ meats, including heart, liver, and kidney, salt mackerel, root vegetables, potatoes, cabbage, and dried beans—the core ingredients of urban working people. Boardinghouse cooks were known for their tough steaks, greasy, waterlogged vegetables, and insipid stews. Their signature dishes—hash, soup, and pies—were recycled from previous meals. The corned beef served for dinner might reappear as the next day’s breakfast steak, only to turn up again in a meat pie or a hash.
    Though hash in its many forms (not just corned beef) has drifted to the culinary margins, at one time it was an American staple, especially among working people. Along with meat pies, its raison d’être was to use up leftovers. Economy-minded cookbooks of the period devoted whole chapters to hash. Miss Beecher, for example, the well-known domestic authority, gives eighteen hash recipes in her Housekeeper and Healthkeeper . Among them are ham hash with bread crumbs, beefsteak hash with turnips, and veal hash with crackers. Though hash was found in home kitchens and cheap restaurants, it was most closely tied to the boardinghouse. “Hash eaters,” a common nineteenth-century label, was a synonym for boardinghouse dwellers, while “boardinghouse hash” was a term used to denote any mixture—edible or not—of uncertain composition. The recipe that follows is adapted from First Principles of Household Management and Cookery by Maria Parloa, who taught at the Boston Cooking School. The ingredients are inexpensive, but the end product is extremely satisfying—just what a good hash should be.
F ISH H ASH
One half pint of finely chopped salt fish, six good-sized cold boiled potatoes chopped fine, one half cup of milk or water, salt and pepper to taste. Have two ounces of pork cut in thin slices and fried brown; take the pork out of the fry pan, and pour some of the