Jane Ziegelman takes an interesting perspective on immigration history when she places food as the primary focus of each family's story. Over the years, German, Italian, Irish and Eastern European Jews immigrated to New York and set about solving the problem of how to obtain what they wanted to eat. The small businesses they create to solve their problems influence the way the larger community eats and in time we have our beloved American staples such as lager beer, spaghetti, pizza, corned beef, and potato latkes. Each still has links to the food tradition that brought it here, but each has become a part of the wider American culture as well.

The road was often bumpy; the descriptions of what the immigrants faced when trying to provide for their families in the cramped and often squalid tenements when living on subsistence wages is often one of stretching poor food supply to the limit. Yet the variety of foods available to the immigrant is often surprising -- fresh fruit and vegetables may have been more abundant then than they are in the slums of today.

The immigrants didn't arrive in discrete units, and there was much overlap in the tenement (now a museum, one I want to visit when I next go to New York) over the years, but occasionally the book seems to jump between points in history and the flow seems erratic. That's a minor quibble, however, as the book is overall well thought out and presented, and includes recipes -- some modern some not -- which give a taste for what the immigrant families ate in the land of plenty. If you're interested in recipes from your immigrant ancestors, do some research at the library, but be sure to check out The Frugal Gourmet on Our Immigrant Ancestors: Recipes You Should Have Gotten from Your Grandmother which covers many many of the groups to arrive in America over the last two hundred years or so.