Gone - most local neighborhood bakeries - now baked goods come from large supermarket chains
New York Bakeries
In 1946 almost every neighborhood in New York City had a bakery or two along the main drag. Some were independent and some were part of a chain. Bakery trucks plied the streets of the outer boroughs delivering bread, cake, donuts and pies to the doors of housewives. The home delivery trucks were still around in the suburbs when I was a little kid in the 1950s. I remember the Dugan man, with his coffee cakes and, at Easter time, hot cross buns, knocking at the back door in the morning. At my grandmother's house in Queens, it was Krug's who delivered.
In Arthur Schwartz's New York Foods, Schwartz points out that the donuts and crullers were around since New York was New Amsterdam but the bakery explosion dated to the arrival of the Germans. In ethnic neighborhoods you could find bakeries offering up the baked goods of the homeland whether it was Italy, Sweden, Hungary, Poland or somewhere else. Jewish bakeries proliferated in Jewish neighborhoods. Snooty neighborhoods had their French pastry shops. But German bakeries were everywhere. In Yorkville, bakeries served strudels, pastries and cakes that you could take home or eat on the premises with a cup of strong coffee or tea at cafe tables just like in Mitteleuropa. Mrs. Herbst was the most celebrated and visited even by the rich and famous for its strudel.
One of the specialties of the Jewish bakeries was kaiser rolls even more popular on a Sunday morning than bagels were in the Forties. And kaiser rolls were not enjoyed only by Jews. It was a common choice for sandwiches as well as for breakfast. These were not the soft sandwich rolls passed off as kaisers in supermarkets nowadays. Real kaiser rolls have a crisp, hard, thin outer crust that was laden with poppy seeds and a soft, light interior, perfect with a big glob of butter but also great filled with cold cuts or eggs as well. They were best when they were not long from the oven. Schwartz wrote that German rye with caraway or nigella seeds was the quintessential local bread, associated with the city to many visitors.
Bakeries offered more than bread. Some favorite cakes were black and whites, a yellow cake topped half with chocolate and half with vanilla icing. Ebingers in Brooklyn and Queens was known for its blackout cake, a chocolate cake with crumbs and a chocolate filling. Nesselrode pie was immensely popular in the Forties. It included rum, chestnuts, candied fruit, Bavarian cream and chocolate curls.
Besides Ebingers, where the women behind the counter had German accents, other popular bakeries included Drake's, Cushman's, Pectors and Entenmann's, now a supermarket favorite. Department stores like Macy's and Altman's also had bakery counters back then. The newspapers this week carried ads from Hanscom bakeries, with outlets throughout the city, for its egg-shaped Easter cakes filled with chocolate butter cream, iced with chocolate and decorated with flowers. Hot cross buns were abundant this year after a wartime scarcity. But continued scarcity of flour and sugar meant there were fewer sweet cakes and some of the white bread on sale had a grayish color and whole grain taste not preferred at the time.