Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  Scholars tend to focus not just on the food itself but on “foodways”—the social context in which food is prepared, served, and consumed—as well as the historical and sociological meaning with which food is endowed. Thus, at a time when Jews were stereotyped as uncouth and uncivilized, it is significant that they created an unusual type of eatery, one that in some ways fulfilled the very ideas that other Americans had of them. The deli was a place where they could eat with their hands, talk with their mouths full, fill their bellies, and enjoy the pleasure of each other’s company in a raucous and convivial setting.44 The historian Barry Kessler sums this up in the title of his article on the tumultuous delicatessens of Baltimore: “Bedlam with Corned Beef on the Side.”45

  The most significant recent academic works about Jewish food include the historian Hasia Diner’s chapters on eastern European and immigrant Jewish food in her exemplary, cross-cultural study Hungering for America and David Kraemer’s wide-ranging survey Jewish Eating and Identity through the Ages. But there has been no full-length study of the Jewish delicatessen. Historians have given the towering deli sandwich—and the place in which it was consumed—surprisingly short shrift. As the historian Michael Alexander declared, “It’s about time historiography took serious notice of deli life.”46

  The deli has fared far better in popular writings. Nick Zukin and Michael Zusman’s The Artisan Jewish Deli at Home (based on Kenny and Zuke’s Deli in Portland, Oregon) and Noah and Rae Bernamoff’s Mile End Cookbook (based on the Mile End Deli in Brooklyn and Manhattan) have joined earlier, anecdote-filled recipe books from the Second Avenue Deli and Junior’s. Also worthy of note are Sheryll Bellman’s lavishly illustrated coffee-table book on classic American delis, Arthur Schwartz’s tantalizing guide to eastern European Jewish dishes, the journalist Maria Balinska’s well-rounded history of the bagel, Laura Silver’s foursquare history of the knish, Jane Ziegelman’s enticing “edible history” of immigrant life in one New York tenement building on the Lower East Side, and the travel writer David Sax’s edgy elegy Save the Deli.47

  The publication of these volumes, along with popular food columns in Jewish newspapers such as the Forward and the Jewish Week and cover articles on Jewish food in Moment magazine, the Baltimore Jewish Times, and other Jewish publications, testify to the continuing interest in Jewish gastronomy and a growing sense that Jewish food connects Jews—and also appeals to non-Jews—in a way that few aspects of Judaism continue to do.48

  Social scientists have adopted three main approaches to the study of food and foodways. The first is a functional approach, which looks, in part, at the role of food preparation and consumption in the formation and maintenance of group identity. The second is a structuralist approach, which treats food as a signifying system, as a “language” of its own and which, especially in the work of Roland Barthes, also theorizes a semiotics of media images of food and food advertising.49 (The structuralist approach also emphasizes the fact that foods are arranged hierarchically within a culture, with particular foods eaten to mark special occasions.) The third is a developmental approach, which investigates how certain foods became part of the diet of specific peoples (and how other foods were shunned), examining the history of each group and the evolutionary and environmental processes that helped to determine its diet.

  The approach in this book is eclectic; it borrows from each of these perspectives in analyzing the changing place of the delicatessen in American Jewish culture. In line with the functional approach, I view the deli as playing a crucial role in American Jewish life, one that helped to facilitate Jews’ joining the American mainstream. Vis-à-vis the structuralist approach, I see the foods and foodways associated with Jewish delicacies as helping to organize the reality of Jewish life, both through the actual consumption of deli meats and also through the—often comedic and heavily eroticized—-images and representations of the deli in popular culture. Finally, with regard to the developmental approach, I view the passionate embrace of the deli as tempered over time as other social and economic factors led Jews away from the deli and toward other, more exotic-seeming, “gourmet” and healthier kinds of food. In each case, I see many layers of cultural and social meaning crammed into the overstuffed deli sandwich.

  The research for this project took place over more than a decade, and it took many forms. I began by doing dozens of interviews with current and retired deli owners both in New York and along the Jewish retirement corridor in southeast Florida, between West Palm Beach in the north and Miami Beach in the south. While continuing to conduct interviews, both in person and on the telephone, I then did archival research in both corporate and public archives, ranging from the Hebrew National Company’s files at its headquarters in Jericho, New York, to the Dorot Division of the New York Public Library, the Center for Jewish History, the New York City Municipal Archives, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and the Yeshiva University Archives. I made extensive use of both Yiddish- and English-language newspapers, trade journals (especially the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine), and books. I found a plethora of photographs of delis in the collections of the Bronx Historical Society, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the Brooklyn Public Library, and the New York State Archives.

  The final stage of the research involved finding cartoons, film clips, television episodes, and other examples of the reflection of the Jewish deli in pop culture. I found material at the Paley Center for Media (formerly the Museum of Broadcasting), the Jewish Museum in New York, the Billy Rose Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the George Eastman House (Rochester, New York), and the Academy for Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (Los Angeles). I also found copious references to delicatessens in memoirs, novels, short stories, plays, and poetry—these helped immensely to round out the role of the delicatessen in American Jewish culture.

  Throughout the research process, I collected hundreds of items of memorabilia relating to every aspect of deli culture throughout the United States—including neon signs and clocks, seltzer and soda bottles, menus, photos, placards, postcards, matchbooks, and even a scale and a slicing machine. Part of my collection was featured in “Chosen Food,” an exhibition, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, on Jewish food that began at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and transferred to the Jewish Museum of Atlanta.

  Will the deli survive for even one more generation? On a visit to my hometown, I took my five-year-old daughter to Kensington Kosher Deli on Middle Neck Road (Squire’s, alas, is long gone), where I ordered a brisket sandwich for us to share. She barely nibbled at it. When I asked her if she didn’t think it was the best food she had ever tasted, she patiently explained that her favorite food is Indian, followed by Chinese, followed by a dinner that her mother recently made that she “fell in love with and wanted to marry.”

  While I share her enthusiasm for her mother’s cooking, I realized with a sharp pang of regret that she and her two sisters will almost inevitably grow up without having the same fondness for deli food that I did. Her metaphor of “marrying” food stuck with me, though. Will Jews ever again feel the same deep connection to deli food that they did throughout so much of the twentieth century, or have they found new gastronomic spouses and partners? Then again, as Rabbi Carol Harris-Shapiro has put it, “Jews keep fishing in the same ethnic waters. Perhaps some day they’ll pull up gefilte fish again.”50

  1

  According to the Customer’s Desire

  The First Delicatessens in Eastern Europe and the United States

  An illustrated advertising postcard from a Belgian butcher and food shop from the mid-nineteenth century is decorated with colorfully plumed birds, clusters of grapes, and an iron cooking pot on the bottom. A petite oval at the top, as if a window into an upper-class home, shows a nattily dressed gentleman sitting at a table with knife and fork in hand, preparing to dig into a feast of fancy foodstuffs. The caption, in French, lists all the meats, cheeses, pâtés, and other items that are av
ailable for purchase from the shop, which promises that everything will be prepared “according to the customer’s desire.”1

  Perhaps it should not surprise that the pastrami sandwich became an object of such potent and piquant obsession in Jewish culture, given that the very word delicatessen derives originally from the Latin word delicatus, meaning “dainty, tender, charming, enticing, alluring, and voluptuous.” Indeed, the Romans often used the word to refer to sexual attractiveness, as in the expression puer delicatus, the “delicious” boy, who was the recipient of an older man’s erotic attentions. It entered medieval French as delicat, meaning “fine,” and by the Renaissance morphed into delicatesse, signifying a fine food or delicacy. It was picked up as delicatezza in Italian and Delikatesse in German, both also denoting an unusual and highly prized food. It entered English only in the late 1880s, with the influx of Germans into the United States, and then only in the plural form, delicatessen.

  Advertising card for a Belgian gourmet store from the mid-nineteenth century (Collection of Ted Merwin)

  The origin of the delicatessen as a food store derives from the democratization of gourmet eating in Europe. This occurred at some times through political upheavals such as the French Revolution, after which many chefs found themselves out of work, and at other times as a result of papal decrees. Pope Gregory XIII, who was invested in 1572, inveighed against the bishops and cardinals of his day for eating sybaritically despite their purported devotion to austerity and self-abnegation, and he mandated that they could employ no more than one chef apiece.2 Unemployed chefs opened Italian specialty food shops called salumerie in which cured and smoked meats were sold to members of the haute bourgeoisie who, unable to afford their own chef, still desired to eat like a king—or a pope. Among the specialties of these stores were cured meats, which were especially popular in Italy. According to the Harleian Miscellany of 1590 (first collated and edited in the mid-eighteenth century by Samuel Johnson), “the first mess [course] or antepast, as they call it, that is brought to the table, is some fine meat to urge them to have an appetite.”3

  Delicatessens competed to provide the most unusual foodstuffs from around the globe. Their ostentatious, symmetrical window displays, which typically featured the head of a wild boar (the origin of the name for Boar’s Head, an American company that was founded in 1905) were likened, by the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, to a symphony.4 The most opulent German delicatessen of all, Dallmayr, which opened in Munich during the late seventeenth century (and is still in existence), made daily deliveries to Prince Luitpold of Bavaria. By the late nineteenth century, when the newly unified country flexed its imperialist muscles, delicatessens were also known as Colonialwaren, since most of their products were brought back from German colonies abroad. Dallmayr, for example, introduced the German public to bananas, which it imported from the Canary Islands.

  France was not far behind in the realm of imported delicacies. After the French Revolution, the Israeli food and wine expert Daniel Rogov estimated, seventy royal chefs were guillotined, eight hundred opened restaurants, and no fewer than sixteen hundred opened gourmet food shops called charcuteries, which specialized in cured and smoked meats.5 In addition, many of the workers in fine luxury goods transformed themselves into purveyors of fine food and drink. According to a French scholar, Charles Germain de Saint Aubin, writing in 1795, most of the haberdashers, embroiderers, jewelers, goldsmiths, and other high-end artisans in Paris opened food stores, bars, and restaurants; he notes that they had “crowded into the center of Paris to such an extent that it [was] not unusual to find a whole street occupied by nothing but their shops.”6

  By eating spiced and pickled meats, along with other gourmet foods, the Parisian bourgeoisie were able to show off their rising economic and social status, just as second-generation Jews were to do in New York a century and a half later by patronizing the delicatessens in the theater district, as we will see. Long before the birth of the overstuffed delicatessen sandwich, these meats had begun to symbolize the achievement of economic and social aspirations, of rising to an elevated status in society.

  Pickled Meat in the European Jewish Diet

  Cured meats and sausages entered the Jewish diet during the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Jews were living in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. When they moved eastward in large numbers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at the invitation of the Polish kings, they brought along what the Yiddish writer Abba Kanter called “this-worldly articles such as Dutch herring, smoked and canned fish, . . . and German sausage.”7 Pastrami, as mentioned earlier, was a Romanian specialty; it originated in Turkey and then came to Romania through Turkish conquests of southeastern Europe, in the area of Bessarabia and Moldavia. The name seems to derive from similar words in Romanian, Russian, Turkish, and Armenian—pastram, pastromá, pastirma, and basturma, words that mean “pressed.”8 Indeed, meat was preserved by squeezing out the juices, then air-drying it for up to a month. Turkish horsemen in Central Asia also preserved meat by inserting it in the sides of their saddles, where their legs would press against it as they rode; the meat was tenderized in the animal’s sweat.

  The eighteenth-century French gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin—who famously said, “Tell me what you eat and I will tell you who you are,” frequently paraphrased as “You are what you eat”—quoted a Croat captain to the effect that when his people are “in the field and feel hungry, we shoot down the first animal that comes our way, cut off a good hunk of flesh, salt it a little (for we always carry a supply of salt in our sabretache) and put it under the saddle, next to the horse’s back; then we gallop for a while, after which,” he demonstrated, “moving his jaws like a man tearing meat apart with his teeth, ‘gnian gnian, we feed like princes.’”9 The etymologist David L. Gold discovered a longer form of the word, pastramagiu, in both Turkish and Romanian, that referred to the person who both made and purveyed the salty, smoky, reddish meat. Interestingly, the ethics of the pastramagiu were suspect; it was a term also used to refer metaphorically, according to a Romanian dictionary, to a “bum, loafer, scalliwag, vagabond; rascal, rogue, or scamp.”10

  Given widespread and grinding poverty, meat consumption of all kinds among eastern European Jews was extremely low; historians have speculated that the average consumption of meat per household among the Jews of Poland was about a pound a week during most of the nineteenth century, with poor families eating almost none.11 As Hasia Diner (the Hungering for America author) has noted, beef was especially expensive because of a hefty sales tax. This tax had been originally instituted by Jews themselves in order to provide funds for communal life but then taken over in many areas by the government. The despised tax, called the korobka, thrust most meat out of reach of the poor.12

  In “Tevye Strikes It Rich,” the Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem describes what happens after Tevye the Dairyman (later the hero of the pathbreaking 1964 Broadway Jewish musical Fiddler on the Roof, by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein) gives two rich Russian Jewish ladies a lift home on his wagon. The family sets out an immense banquet to celebrate their safe return. Tevye is wide-eyed, realizing that he could feed his family for a week with the crumbs that fell off the table. He is finally invited to join the feast, which includes food that he “never dreamed existed,” including “fish, and cold cuts, and roasts, and fowl, and more gizzards and chicken livers than you could count.”13

  Smoked and pickled meats remained rare delicacies for most eastern European Jews well into the twentieth century. They were viewed as a special treat, as one notes in the exuberant klezmer tune “Rumenye, Rumenye” (Romania, Romania). Aaron Lebedeff, who wrote and performed the song, was the most celebrated Yiddish vaudeville star in New York in the 1920s. He punctuated his rendition with popping noises to imitate the sound of uncorking bottles for his favorite meal back in the Old Country, which comprised “a mameligele, a pastromele, a karnatsele—un a gleyzele vayn” (a little polenta, a little pastrami, a li
ttle sausage—and a small glass of wine). As the sound of the clarinet goes into ecstatic whoops, the singer recalls the pleasure of eating just a tiny bit of each of his favorite foods.14 Similarly, the painter Mayer Kirshenblatt, who grew up in the Polish shtetl of Opatow in the 1920s, noshed on corned beef only when his uncle brought it back to his own shtetl, Drildz, from business trips to a larger town, Radom.15

  For wealthier Jews, pickled beef was a part of their regular diet. Hans Ullman, who grew up in northern Germany in the early years of the twentieth century, recalled the double-walled wooden shed that stood on his family’s farm and that was used to cure meats. Sawdust filled the space between the inner and outer walls of the building. In the winter, the shed was filled with ice from the mill pond, and the ice was covered with more sawdust. Beef was placed in earthenware pots, which were filled with brine and then submerged in the sawdust. After the beef was cured, it was immersed in a series of baths of fresh water to remove as much salt as possible. It was then minced by a servant girl who used a hand-cranked machine that turned the beef into meat loaf or patties.16