Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

  Geese and poultry were more available than beef, given the relative lack of grazing land in eastern Europe that was available to Jews, who were barred by the czar from owning land. In Yekheskl Kotik’s memoirs of a privileged late nineteenth-century upbringing in the eastern European town of Kamenits, the author recalled his Aunt Yokheved slaughtering up to thirty geese at once. She cured the geese in a barrel for a month and then served pickled goose meat and cracklings to everyone in her extended family.17

  In eastern Europe, Jews were much more likely to own drinking places than delicatessens; indeed, according to the historian Glenn Dynner, the vast majority of taverns in Poland were leased by Jews from the nobility.18 As the memoirist Aharon Rosenbaum recalled of his hometown of Rzeszow, Poland, “There were a lot of taverns in Rzeszow. . . . Given the opportunity, men would sit down and discuss politics or municipal affairs. The best known tavern with the best mead belonged to Yekhiel Tenenbaum whose wife Khana would serve her tasty kigels [kugels, in Lithuanian Yiddish] and cholent [a hearty stew usually served on the Sabbath] to the guests.”19

  While few in number, delicatessens did exist in eastern Europe. Memorial Books (Yizkor Buchs in Yiddish)—collections of records and memoirs of eastern European Jews compiled by Holocaust survivors in the 1940s after their towns had been destroyed by the Nazis—often mention delicatessens, where prepared or imported (typically canned) foods were sold. But they make little distinction between them and ordinary grocery stores, such as in an 1891 business directory from Nowy Sacz, Poland, that lists no fewer than thirteen grocery/delicatessen dealers.20 Similarly, a description of the shops next to the market square in the Ukrainian town of Gorodenka reads, “Some stores sold leather and boots, and only a few grocery stores like those of Yankel Haber and Shlomo Shtreyt met the ordinary needs of the citizens of the city. They sold a greater and colorful selection of supplies; some even sold delicatessen.”21 But what was meant by “delicatessen” is not clear.

  A memoir of Jewish life in Mlawa, Poland, offers a tantalizing clue. It notes that a particular store “also served as a delicatessen. One could eat a piece of herring and polish it off with a slice of sponge cake, drink a glass of tea or a glass of soda with syrup which was measured out in small wine glasses made of white metal. . . . The Gentiles drank beer and brandy there and gorged themselves on derma and cabbage.”22 And in the town of Kelem, Lithuania, the businessman Yerachmiel Imber owned two different stores, a grocery store and a delicatessen, the latter called Vitmin. This was, in the words of the Mlawa memoirist, “a new and different type of shop in such a small town like Kelem. In it one could buy such things as candies in all varieties, tropical fruits, and other imported and fine delicacies.” In neither of these establishments, it seems, was meat on the menu.23

  Interior of an early twentieth-century delicatessen / grocery store in Russia (Collection of Ted Merwin)

  The Delicatessen Migrates to the New World

  When did delicatessens first come to the United States? Even before the Revolutionary War, Thomas Jefferson, who was known for his epicurean tastes, lauded the gourmet food stores that he patronized in Philadelphia.24 But the first real influx of what were actually called “delicatessens” began with the successive waves of central European immigration in the mid-nineteenth century; indeed, Germans and other central Europeans became the largest ethnic group in New York. The first delicatessen owners in New York were from Germany and the neighboring Alsace-Lorraine region of France.

  Among the most successful delicatessen owners was H. W. Borchardt, who had opened an iconic food store in Berlin in 1853. In the German capital, Borchardt purportedly served customers from as far away as Asia; he claimed that the sultan of Turkey employed him to cater meetings with foreign princes. Upon his arrival in New York, he opened a store on Grand Street on New York’s Lower East Side. His shelves brimmed with cooked meats, hard cheeses, fancy canned foods, imported teas, olive oil, and other high-end groceries. According to the writer Edwin Brooks, “Everything capable of making a mouth water was there—and at prices prohibitive to the average person’s pocketbook.”25

  The very first use of the word delicatessen in the New York Times occurred in 1875 in the context of an amusing lawsuit. A dyer, August Rath, had fallen in love with the daughter of a German delicatessen owner named Caesar Wall. “August dyed for a living in Jersey,” the journalist quipped, “while Caesar ministered to the living in the form of sausages, sauerkraut and other delicatessen.” On a shopping trip to the store, August met Caesar’s virginal daughter, with whom he promptly fell in love, especially after being given her delicate lace jacket for cleaning. Before the nuptials were solemnized, August was invited to become a partner in the business. But when the daughter began to bestow her attentions on another man, August wrathfully withdrew both his funds and his affections.26

  German delicatessen stores in New York did a brisk business, especially at Christmas time, by purveying dozens of kinds of sausages, smoked goose breast, apricot jam, honey cake, and plum duff. For an authentically German Christmas, the New York Tribune reported in 1900, a visit to a German delicatessen was essential since “it takes the German many years to become so thoroughly Americanized that he does not want the regulation German Christmas table luxuries, and these constitute the Christmas stock of the delicatessen dealer.”27

  Patronizing these small, mostly family-owned German delicatessens, the New York Times journalist L. H. Robins recalled, was an exotic pleasure; indeed, “to visit them and breathe their unfamiliar good odors had the tang of an adventure in foreign parts. New Yorkers used to do it just for the thrill.” The recipes were “handed down in the old country from generation to generation of hausfrau.”28 The German section of the Lower East Side was called Kleindeutchland (Little Germany); if one went down there at daybreak, the New York Herald noted, “before it is fairly light, you will see the worthy burghers astir, opening the windows of the small delicatessen stores.”29

  According to the etymologist Edward Eggleston, writing in 1894, the term delicatessen store was still used exclusively in New York, demonstrating that the English tongue, as spoken in America, had borrowed relatively few words from German at that point.30 But by the 1920s, the critic H. L. Mencken already observed the “profound effect” of the German migration on American culture, as shown by the nationwide adoption of many German words for food and drink.31 Furthermore, the delicatessen trade, like many other occupations, had a colorful, exuberant lingo of its own. The etymologist H. T. Webster reflected in 1933 that “delicatessen men,” like shoemakers and undertakers, had an occupational vocabulary that was “as little understood by outsiders as if it were Choctaw.”32

  Not all delicatessens were German ones, however. In 1885, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle complained that a neighborhood food store on Mott Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown was making “no attempt to sell foods made or grown in this country, there being sold what the Germans would call a ‘delicatessen.’”33 A Chinese journalist, Wong Chin Foo, took exception to this idea that the Chinese delicatessen was in any sense inferior to a German one; he extolled the store’s “perfumed ducks, pickled oysters and beautifully roasted and powdered pigs, with pink ears and red nostrils.” Foo opined, moreover, that the Chinese delicatessen, of which there was but one for the city’s ten thousand Chinese residents, was far superior to its numerous “Caucasian” counterparts, in that the latter “always sells stale meat and rotten cheese,” while the former was known for its freshly killed pigs, chickens, and ducks. Foo insisted that while the European-style delicatessen required an initial outlay of hundreds of dollars and brought in little, the Chinese delicatessen cost a mere twenty dollars to purchase the meats and yielded “big profits.” And, he observed, an “ordinary hallway” could accommodate a good-sized Chinese delicatessen store.34

  Whatever the delicatessen’s country of origin, its fare was widely perceived as exotic. A journalist for the New York Tribune who toured the food shops of the Lower East Side
in 1897 found a “profusion of uncommon, foreign-looking eatables” sold in delicatessens, including smoked beef, smoked jowls, fresh ham, meat jelly, liver pudding, Russian caviar, and pumpernickel bread. These shops, the observer noted, had “gradually come to take the place of the English bakeshops,” adding that they would “roast any desired article for their patrons, from a small bird to a boar’s head elaborately decorated.” The writer singled out the kosher delicatessen shops on the Lower East Side, in which he discovered smoked goose meat of various kinds, along with potato, beet, cabbage, parsnip, and herring salads in stone crocks. The kosher delicatessen is a “source of much comfort to those who live ‘by the family,’” he explained, “and whose time is too valuable to devote to cooking.”35

  Food experts picked up on the parade of ethnic edibles that were making an entree into New York. As the historian Donna Gabaccia has noted, “cross-over” eating was common in New York and other cities in the late nineteenth century, as ethnic groups avidly enjoyed each other’s cuisine.36 This tradition, as Gabaccia has found, went back to the colonial era, when the English, Spanish, Dutch, and Native Americans occasionally sampled each other’s foods.37 But by the turn of the twentieth century, according to the journalist George Walsh, a proliferation of “queer foreign foods” had surfaced in American cities to sate the appetites of recent immigrants. Walsh reflected that “the early tastes which we cultivate are hard to eradicate, and the foreigner turns to the food of his fatherland with great relish, even though coarse and unsavory compared with the food of his adopted land.”38

  Walsh made no mention of Jewish delicatessens, but he limned the French, German, and Italian delicatessen shops that he discovered in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago—stores that, he observed, had begun to attract “Americans” as well as immigrants.39 In the growing number and variety of these stores, Walsh espied blood sausage from Italy, pigs’ knuckles from France, air-dried beef from Spain, tree and sea mushrooms from Japan, dried chickens and ducks from China, cabbages from Scandinavia, tamales from Mexico, and cinnamon and clove cakes from Palestine. While he considered none of these items to be particularly appetizing, Walsh was impressed by the growing diversity of the urban food scene, in which, he conceded, “all of these odd dishes of the foreigners in our midst tend to broaden our own national bill of fare.”40

  Nor was Walsh alone in omitting Jewish delicatessens from a round-up of local food stores. Forrest Chrissey, the author of a book on American food published in 1917, also overlooked them in his chapter on “tempting table delicacies” purveyed in delicatessen stores of various nations. Chrissey catalogued Hanover tea sausage from England, candied cherries and goose liver sausage from France, guava jelly from the West Indies, pimento peppers from Spain, vermicelli from Italy, birds’ nest soup from China, and even canned kangaroo tail from Australia—but no corned beef or pastrami.41

  Indeed, there were relatively few kosher delicatessens in New York during the period of mass migration from eastern Europe—this despite the fact that Jewish immigrants owned a variety of mom-and-pop food businesses such as grocery stores and butcher shops. In 1899, an oft-cited survey of the Tenth Ward of the Lower East Side (which, with more than seventy-five thousand people crammed into a mere 109 acres was the most densely populated place on earth) found only ten delicatessens and ten wurst (sausage) stores—the latter likely overlapped with delicatessens to some extent in terms of their wares.42 Indeed, delicatessen stores were themselves known as wurst gesheftn—sausage stores. By contrast, there were 131 kosher butcher—schlacht, in Yiddish—shops, suggesting that most Jewish families preferred to cook their meat at home. Indeed, in the entire immigrant ghetto, there were more than a thousand kosher butcher shops, selling an impressive total of six hundred thousand pounds of kosher beef a week.43

  The Jewish delicatessen was an outgrowth of these kosher butcher shops. Some kosher butchers had started selling prepared foods, displaying pickled meats and frankfurters on hooks, along with shelves of beans, ketchup, crackers, and soup.44 From the outset, the delicatessen stores tended to be long and narrow, with a counter running down one side. From this, kosher delicatessens developed, in which meats could be sliced hot, with hot dogs and potato knishes cooked on a grill in the window.

  Katz’s, which opened in 1888, was perhaps the first “true” Jewish delicatessen in New York. Originally opened under the name Iceland’s Delicatessen in 1888 by two brothers of Reuven Iceland, an important Yiddish poet, the store quickly thrived. In 1903, after the Iceland Brothers were joined by Willy Katz, the store was renamed Iceland and Katz. In 1910, Willy Katz and his brother, Benny, bought out the Icelands. Redubbed Katz’s, the deli then moved across to the west side of Ludlow Street. It was soon joined by other delicatessens, both on the Lower East Side and throughout the city.

  Patricia Volk, the author of the lyrical memoir Stuffed, a chronicle of her family’s life in the restaurant business, claims that her paternal grandfather, Sussman Volk, a miller from Vilna, introduced pastrami to America. Having failed to make it as a tinker, Volk left the cookware business in 1887 and opened a butcher shop on Delancey Street. A friend asked Volk to store a suitcase in his basement while he returned home to Romania for a visit. In return, he gave Volk his pastrami recipe, which Volk used to such success that he had to open a delicatessen to meet the demand.45 While Volk’s story is apocryphal, the author Marcus Ravage has corroborated it to the extent that at the turn of the twentieth century, Romanian delicatessen stores appeared with their “goose-pastrama and kegs of ripe olives and tubs of salted vine-leaves.”46

  Employees of Katz’s Delicatessen standing outside the store on Houston Street in the 1930s (Courtesy of Malene Katz Padover and Marvin Padover)

  Some housewives pickled and smoked their own meat at home. But the process was so complex and time-consuming that few chose to do so. The first American Jewish cookbook, published in 1871 by Esther Levy and directed mostly to upper-class German Jewish women who had servants, contains directions for doing both. To cure a piece of kosher meat, Levy explains, first “make a pickle of salt, strong enough for an egg to swim on top of the water; add some salt-petre, a little bay salt, and coarse brown sugar.”47 After boiling all of these ingredients together and skimming off the fat, the meat is pressed down in a tub for a week or two. Smoking the meat presented particular challenges for the home cook; after the meat has been pickled for exactly sixteen days, Levy directs, either “send it out to be smoked” or, if the cook insists on doing it herself, “place it over a barrel, containing a pan of ignited sawdust, for some hours every day, until nicely browned.”48

  Poverty and Pickled Meat

  For Jewish immigrants, the family budget dictated how much meat could be consumed. When kosher beef prices suddenly spiked from twelve to eighteen cents a pound in 1902, enraged Jewish women led a three-week boycott that began by picketing the downtown slaughterhouses. Protests erupted in Brooklyn, Harlem, Newark, Boston, and Philadelphia. Some of these were directed against delicatessens on Rivington and Orchard Streets, where rioters grabbed meat and poured kerosene on it. A few weeks later, after Orthodox rabbis also endorsed the boycott, the prices reverted to previous levels. But, as the historian Paula Hyman has written, the episode demonstrated the power that women had when they banded together; it became a model for later activism by both Jewish and non-Jewish women.49

  On the whole, Jewish immigrants did eat better in America than they had done in eastern Europe. But many were still desperately poor and had few funds either for food or for the ice that was needed to keep it from spoiling.50 For example, hunger was a constant companion for the future boxing promoter Sammy Aaronson, who lived on the Lower East Side until the age of ten, when his family moved to Brownsville. “Eating was always a struggle,” Aaronson recalled in his memoir. “We lived on pumpernickel, herring, bologna ends and potatoes.” His mother sent him to a Hester Street delicatessen, where he purchased a “steering wheel”–sized pumpernickel bread for a dime.
The Aaronson family enjoyed hot food on Friday night, when they enjoyed a thin meat soup from the butcher’s leftovers and bones. On Saturday nights, they scored the ends of salami, bologna, or garlic wurst or even some higher-quality meat if it were “late enough at night when the guy wanted to clean out his shelves.”51

  As the historian Moses Rischin noted, immigrants were obliged to “husband” their energy, time, and money in order to eat meat for their Sabbath dinner on Friday nights.52 This often meant eating quite meager meals during the week. Those who spent their hard-earned funds on delicatessen food were castigated by social workers who tried to educate them about the importance of thrift.53 Sara Smolinsky, the protagonist of Anzia Yezierska’s autobiographical novel Bread Givers, was starving from working in a sweatshop, to the extent that, she says, “Whenever I passed a restaurant or a delicatessen store, I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the food in the window. Something wild in me wanted to break through the glass, snatch some of that sausage and corned-beef, and gorge myself just once.”54

  Jewish parents’ attitudes toward food were often conditioned by their own childhood memories of want in eastern Europe. When they could, Jewish mothers routinely overfed their children, especially their sons. Indeed, providing one’s children with excessive amounts of food became ingrained in American Jewish culture. “In the swelling and thickening of a boy’s body was the poor family’s earliest success,” noted the critic Alfred Kazin. “‘Fix yourself!’ a mother cried indignantly to the child on the stoop. ‘Fix yourself!’ The word for a fat boy was solid.”55 The boy’s heft concretized the sturdiness of the Jewish family’s position in society—it demonstrated the “solidity” of their grasp of an American identity.56