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

however, and wholly inadequate to meet the demands placed on them. In desperation, passengers ate their food raw, mixing flour and water into a paste and gulping it down as best they could.
    By the time of Bridget’s journey, it had become routine for ships to provide their passengers with cooked meals. They were eaten down in steerage on collapsible tables that were no more than crude boards balanced on trestles. On some ships, tables were lowered from the ceiling into the aisles, creating an impromptu dining room that was hoisted back up when the meal was over. Three times a day, stewards descended the narrow staircase with oversize cooking vessels, and dished out the contents. For breakfast, there was porridge with molasses, or salt fish; for lunch, boiled beef and potatoes; and for dinner, bread or biscuits and tea. Even if the meat was rank and the bread moldy, to a half-starved Irish peasant the quantity and variety was extravagant, a good omen for all the good eating that lay ahead.
    The biographies of Bridget Meehan and Joseph Moore are representative of the larger Irish migration on several counts. First and most important, both arrived in New York young and unmarried: Bridget was seventeen, and Joseph twenty. Where other national groups—the Germans, Italians, and Russians, for example—settled in the United States as families, the Irish migration was essentially a movement of teenagers. Though many sent money home to bring over brothers or sisters or cousins, parents were generally left behind. The Irish were also the only major immigrant group in which women outnumbered men. Amid the cultural and economic changes in post-famine Ireland, women’s status declined drastically. For many, a relatively inexpensive ticket to America was the only way to improve their lot.
    Very little is known about Bridget’s life during her first two years alone in New York. If she were fortunate, the still “green” Miss Meehan had a cousin or some other relative already in America to unravel the mysterious workings of her adopted home. The hard-edged geometry of the American city was utterly alien to the Irish immigrant. The ceaseless motion of both men and machines tested the newcomer’s very sanity. One young Irishman, writing home to his family in 1894, tried to convey the strangeness of his current home. “This country is very different from the old one,” he tells them:
The houses are of brick five to nine stories high with flat roofs on which people walk as in a garden…The streets here are paved with stones, and as they are filled with fast-driven vans at all hours—the streets are as bright by night as day—the din and uproar is something horrid. Add to this the elevated railways running 30 feet above the avenues, as the cross-streets are called, the trains flying after one another like furies, and thousands of factories and steamboats whistling and roaring all the time. 3
    Letters from home were a salve to the disoriented and uprooted immigrant, but the waiting time between letters brought its own torments. A young Irishwoman living in Brooklyn in the 1880s hints at the terror she experienced waiting for the letter that never seems to arrive:
My dear Mamma,
What on earth is the matter with you all, that none of ye would think of writing to me. The fact is I am heartsick fretting. I cannot sleep the night and if I chance to sleep I wake up with frightful dreams. To think it’s now going and gone into the third month since you wrote to me. I feel as if I’m dead to the world. 4
    What the lonesome immigrant seemed to crave most was information about relatives and friends in Ireland. Writing to her sister back home, a young New York immigrant named Mary Brown asks for news on aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces, siblings and neighbors, mentioning each by name and wondering who among them is in good health, who is sick, and who has been married. Just before signing off, Mary asks her sister to send her a locket of hair