The frugal gourmet

What today’s cooks on a budget can learn from tenement life

HARD times call for resourceful cooks. And times were scarcely harder than during the Panic of 1873 and the first Great Depression, particularly for those eking out a new life on the Lower East Side.

Their ability to feed their families on next to nothing is the subject of a four-part series of “kitchen talks” at the Tenement Museum. Kicking off March 22, they’ll be set in and around the museum’s seven re-created kitchens at 97 Orchard St., once home to German-Jewish, Italian, Irish and other immigrant families.

“Immigrants aren’t financially stable in the first place,” says Sarah Lohman, the culinary historian and author (“Eight Flavors”) who leads the series. “So when the economy takes a downturn, they’re affected.”

The series focuses on the GermanJewish Gumpertz family, who lived at 97 Orchard St. in the 1870s and 1880s, and the Italian Baldizzis, who stayed from 1928 until 1935, when the building was condemned. In one of the museum’s oral histories, daughter Josephine Baldizzi recalls pizzas her mother made by rubbing water and oil into stale bread and toasting it.

Lohman tried living on what she calls “a poverty diet” eight years ago, when she found an 1877 pamphlet titled “Fifteen Cent Dinners,” outlining meals that could feed a family of six for $3 a week. Breakfasts were often broth and bread or boiled rice with milk, some of which would be repurposed into suppers of barley boiled in broth or lentils stewed in stock. The most substantial meal of the day, dinner — what we today call lunch — ran to things like “haslet stew,” a 10-cent handful of organ meats, such as sheep and pig livers.

Adjusting for inflation, Lohman followed that diet as closely as possible, eating for less than $20 a week in 2009, when a food-stamp budget was $25. She lived to blog about it — barely.

“I ate a lot of cabbage and beans that week,” says Lohman, now 35. “One of my roommates said to me, ‘You look like s - - t.’ ” Even so, it taught her some budget-savvy techniques that she uses to this day:

Buy in bulk. You’ll save money by stocking up on beans, onions and other food with a long shelf life.

Simplify. Cleaning one pot instead of many saves time, and time is money, which is one reason Lohman uses her slow cooker so often.

Use everything. Lohman freezes her vegetable scraps and makes them into vegetable stock. “Take something you’d normally throw away — extra broth, stale bread — and make something new,” she says. “Wasted food is wasted money.”

But even hard-pressed families had their treats. Lohman plans to offer on at least one tour a Charlotte Russe: sponge cake topped by whipped cream and a cherry, served in a scalloped paper cup. “During the Depression, bakeries made them from stale sponge cake or the ends of jelly rolls and sold them for 2 or 3 cents,” she says. “We’re going to pull some ingredients for it from neighborhood bakeries.”

“Tenement Kitchens: Eating in Hard Times” runs March 22 (sold out), April 19, May 17 and June 21. Tickets for each program, $35, include a tour and tasting, and meet at 6:30 p.m. at the museum shop at 103 Orchard St.; reservations required: call 877-9753786; Tenement.org