Pastrami on Rye

by Ted Merwin

Eating Out in New York

  Despite the poverty of immigrants, they did enjoy eating food away from home. While delicatessens were not yet a prominent part of the urban landscape, other kinds of eateries and places of leisure were woven into the fabric of life in the city. New Yorkers went out to a staggering variety of places, including, according to the historian David Nasaw, “restaurants, lecture halls, and lodges; beer halls, bawdy houses, brothels and dance halls; billiard rooms, picnic groves and pleasure gardens located just outside the city; and thousands of concert saloons and cheap variety theaters.”57 Rather than enabling immigrants to “escape” reality, the scholar Sabine Haenni has suggested, eating out and other leisure activities furnished a useful take on reality, one that enabled immigrants to “negotiate the massive upheavals, dislocations, and disruptions attending urban immigrant modernity.”58

  Buying and consuming delicatessen food was thus part and parcel of becoming American—and even, for some, of learning English. The writer Maurice Hindus, who arrived from Belarus in 1905, when he was a young teenager, learned English by taking sandwich orders from the girls who worked in a garment factory and fulfilling them at a local delicatessen. After struggling for a week, Hindus’s facility with English rapidly improved, to the extent that the well-meaning boy would “only rarely get them so badly mixed that the girl who ordered a frankfurter without mustard received a corned-beef sandwich with mustard.”59

  Food also played an essential role in mitigating feelings of homesickness; as the historian Susan J. Matt has noted, “urban ethnic enclaves offered immigrants the cushion of the familiar, for the numerous grocery stores, bakeries and restaurants provided the opportunity to purchase a taste of home.”60 Matt quotes the Romanian-born author Marcus Ravage, who moved from New York to Missouri, where he “suffered unendurably from hunger” because “everything tasted flat.” He lamented that he “missed the pickles and fragrant soups and the highly seasoned fried things and the rich pastries made with sweet cheese that [he] had been brought up on.”61

  There were a plethora of opportunities to eat out in New York, including inexpensive restaurants (such as the “penny” restaurants in Brooklyn, which actually sold meals for a nickel), pushcarts (which carried bagels, pickles, and other familiar eastern European Jewish items), and outdoor food stalls. Most popular of all was the candy store, with its all-important soda fountain. “Subsisting on a scatter of pennies,” the historian Irving Howe recalled, “the candy store came to serve as an informal social center in the immigrant streets.” The delicatessen, “while important,” Howe concluded, “seldom served as the center for either adolescents or grownups as the candy store did.”62

  The candy store was the social center of the neighborhood. “To the boy home from work in the office or factory, and to the school boy, with nothing to do in the evening, the candy store serves as a club-house, where he can meet old friends and make new ones,” the sociologist Benjamin Reich observed in 1899. Many of these stores had back rooms that were advertised as ice-cream parlors but that also served as venues for club meetings and performances by teenager amateur comedians testing out their vaudeville routines.63

  The Tenth Ward boasted more than fifty confectionary shops at the turn of the twentieth century—fully five times the number of kosher delicatessens. The playwright Bella Spewack, who moved four times during a tumultuous childhood on the Lower East Side, did not mention eating in delicatessens in her memoir, Streets, but did recall with great fondness the candy store on the corner of Lewis and Stanton Streets, where her mother bought her hot chocolate on cold winter nights.64 And while the delicatessen and candy store may have seemed quite different from each other, a bizarre combination of the two occurred at Luna Park, the Coney Island amusement park, where two German sisters named Bauer opened a “candy delicatessen” that sold marzipan versions of delicatessen products, including frankfurters, sausages, and sauerkraut.

  Candy stores, the historian Jillian Gould has pointed out, were “not merely about a commodity. Rather, they were as much about the pivotal role they played within the community. . . . What happened around the store crystallized what was happening in the neighborhood at large.”65 Immigrant Jews flocked to candy stores for seltzer or soda water, known colloquially as “two cents plain.” Gould dubbed the candy store the “local communications center,” where tenement dwellers could use the telephone (at a time when few families had their own) or converse with the other denizens of the neighborhood.

  Also important were coffeehouses; by 1905, according to Howe, there were “several score of these cafes, or, as they were sometimes called, coffee-and-cake parlors, on the East Side.”66 As in fin de siècle Vienna, where it was proverbial that Der Jud gehört ins Kaffeehaus (the Jew belongs in the coffee house), Jewish New Yorkers found the cafe to be a congenial haunt. For a dime, plus a nickel tip, one could order a glass of tea and a slice of cake, in an atmosphere filled with Yiddish and Hebrew writers, actors, scholars, and artists. In David Freedman’s comic 1925 novel Mendel Marantz, a successful Jewish immigrant purchases a whole tenement building on the Lower East Side, where he establishes a combination delicatessen and coffeehouse. The crowd of nouveau riches manufacturers and businessmen relax at tables with samovars; they play cards or chess, while “munching tongue and bologna sandwiches and drinking bottles of celery-tonic.”67

  Fried-fish stalls, similar to those in London (which had been opened by Sephardic Jews—from the Iberian Peninsula—who appear to have invented “fish and chips”),68 also made their appearance in New York in the “tenement house districts” such as the Lower East Side. Such stands sold cooked fish, eels, oysters, or crab for a few pennies. Most immigrant Jews, of course, would have eschewed the shellfish. “Like the delicatessen store,” the New York Times observed, “these fried fish shops are a boon to the woman who doesn’t want to cook, or who for some reason or other cannot do so at a particular time.” There were only a few seats in the store, so it was assumed that the customer would take the food away. “A specially cooked order that may be taken hot to the tenement a few doors away costs a little more than cold cuts,” the Times reported, pointing out that what a restaurant would sell for a quarter retailed for no more than ten or fifteen cents at a fish stand. On the other hand, the newspaper conceded, bread was not included.69

  During the 1880s, some soda fountains, which were also commonly found in drug stores, had begun to serve sandwiches and evolve into what were called luncheonettes. Luncheonettes were found not just on the street but also in department stores, dime stores (such as Woolworth’s), and railroad depots. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, luncheonettes—where customers generally sat at a counter—then evolved into lunchrooms, where table service was added. The historians John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle have suggested that lunchrooms were “the kind of business that many immigrant families could aspire to early in the twentieth century.”70 But they still remained tied to their origins as candy stores. For example, Schrafft’s, which began in Boston in 1898, was a candy manufacturer that opened soda fountains as outlets for its products. In 1915, it had a dozen stores in the New York area; two decades later, it boasted three dozen stores, dispersed along the Atlantic seaboard.

  In competing with all these other options for dining out, relatively pricey delicatessen food was at a disadvantage, even in the Jewish community. The immigrant Jewish woman’s kitchen was her castle. Tenement apartments on the Lower East Side were structured with the kitchen literally at the center.71 It was the accepted role of a wife and mother to cook for her family, not to purchase prepared food. To take out food was a tacit admission of inferior cooking skills. It was also difficult for many Jewish women to trust that prepared food was prepared under kosher auspices. This was a reasonable fear, given repeated scandals, as we shall see, related to the manufacture of kosher food.72

  Nevertheless, immigrant Jews were under pressure to change what they cooked at home to more Americanized fare. Cooking instructors
in the settlement houses, where the immigrants were taught the English language and instructed in American customs, emphasized the importance of relinquishing spicy, dark, odoriferous ethnic foods in favor of bland, white, odorless American ones. Garlic, which was often used in Jewish cooking, came in for particular censure; there were long-standing prejudices, dating back to the Middle Ages, against Jews as being stinky because of the garlic that they consumed.73

  Gleaming white kitchens in the settlement houses, as well as the starched white aprons in which the eager pupils were clad, reinforced the whiteness and blandness of the foods that they prepared. As the historian Sara Evans has noted, home economists working in the settlement houses extolled the virtues of “white sauce,” which she suggests, “found an analog in the concept of the American melting pot, which dissolved the pungent spiciness of diverse American cultures.”74

  These attitudes against the foods of immigrant cultures made delicatessen meats a hard sell. Because the kosher delicatessen was not yet an entrenched part of immigrant life on the Lower East Side, and because the family had little capital to invest, the parents of one young Jewish immigrant, Samuel Chotzinoff, struggled to establish their delicatessen in business. The Mandlebaum Sausage Factory on Houston Street installed them in business, and a soda manufacturer lent them a soda fountain. A relative hand-lettered the curving words “Kosher Delicatessen” on the plate-glass window in the front, while an impromptu window display was concocted of salamis hung by cords from the ceiling, pieces of uncooked corned beef and pastrami, and a basket of artificial flowers. A back room behind the store was equipped with a tin clothes boiler to cook the meats. When Chotzinoff lifted the boiler’s lid, he remembered, “the fatty, bubbling water spilled over on the floor, and the delicious aggressive aroma of superheated pickled beef would mingle with and soon overpower the prevailing insistent, native, musty, dank smell of perspiring, decaying paint and plaster.”75

  Everyone in the family, including the children, worked in the store. When Samuel was authorized by his parents to wait on customers, he became adept at using the slicer so that he could give “paper-thin” slices of meat to the customers and much-thicker slices for himself. But after nine months of ups and downs, including a major setback in the form of a robbery and a subsequent shake-down for protection money, the family was forced to close the store.

  The delicatessen business was so competitive and the profit margin so slim that many delicatessen owners shared the fate of the Chotzinoffs. A perusal of business directories from the period shows many delicatessens going in and out of business in less than a year, as in Moishe Nadir’s short story “Ruined by Success,” in which a Jewish immigrant who opens a delicatessen store receives no customers, despite a floral wreath that he places in the window to wish himself abundant patronage.76 “For Sale—Cheap,” ran a typical classified advertisement in 1888 in the New York Herald. “A fine delicatessen and kosher wurst store, with horse and wagon and outdoor trade.”77

  Rise of the Kosher Sausage Companies

  Isaac Gellis had manufactured sausages in Berlin, where he won a contract with the Union army to supply beef to the troops. He arrived in New York in 1870, more than a decade before the massive exodus of Jews from eastern Europe, and opened a sausage factory on Essex Street. His secret was to use bull meat, not cow or steer as other kosher meat purveyors did. If smaller pieces of meat broke off from the large meats being smoked, he would sell these at retail. Gellis later boasted in his advertisements that he had helped Jewish immigrants to adjust to life in America by providing “good, real, kosher meat products.”78 Gellis was the only major manufacturer in New York—there were midwestern companies such as Vienna Beef, Sinai Kosher, and Oscherwitz that had started in the late nineteenth century—until Hebrew National began to capture an increasing share of the market for processed kosher meat.

  Hebrew National was founded in 1905 by a Russian immigrant named Theodore Krainin, who had arrived in New York in the 1880s. Isadore Pinckowitz (later known as Isadore Pines), a meat peddler, bought the company in 1928 and began manufacturing hot dogs and sausages on the sixth floor of his tenement house at 155 East Broadway. The company soon opened its own retail stores. When Motl, the hero of Sholem Aleichem’s picaresque Yiddish novel Motl Peyse dem Khazns (Motl Peyse, the Cantor’s Son), immigrates with his family to America, he describes how his brother, Elye, gets a job selling “haht dawgz” for the “Hibru Neshnel Delikatesn,” which “has stores all over town. If you’re hungry, you step into one and order a haht dawg with mustard or horseradish.”79

  A corner kosher delicatessen in 1911 in East Harlem, on Lexington Avenue and East 104th Street (Courtesy of Brian Merlis / Brooklynpix.com)

  Hebrew National’s main competitor, Zion Kosher, emerged in the years after the First World War when the entrepreneur Max Anderson, who was peddling meat, pickles, and sauerkraut to delicatessen stores, decided to open up his own meat factory. He and his partner, Leo Tarlow, launched a company called Always Tasty (after the first initials of their last names) that manufactured nonkosher meat. They eventually decided to go into the kosher meat business, first by renting space in an old seltzer factory and then opening their own factory in the Hunts Point section of the East Bronx.

  Hebrew National and Zion Kosher jostled for market share with a growing number of smaller kosher provisions companies. Indeed, by the 1930s there were more than a dozen different, independently operated kosher sausage companies located on the Lower East Side, near the slaughterhouses where they purchased their meat, including Schmulka Bernstein’s, Jacob Branfman, Barnet Brodie, Hod Carmel, European Kosher, Gittlin’s Kosher Provisions, Isaac Gellis, Hygrade, National Kosher, Remach Kosher Meat Products, Mt. Sinai Kosher Provision Supply, Ukor, and 999 Real Kosher Sausage. The delicatessen industry grew fast in order to meet ever-increasing demand for its products. Each company advertised itself as offering the highest quality and most sanitary meats under the strictest rabbinical supervision. As a Yiddish-language ad for Barnet Brodie put it, the company’s products were “made from the best meats,” were “under the supervision of the rabbis of Greater New York,” and were, last but not least, “famous for their taste and quality.”80

  A Store Becomes a Restaurant

  At the turn of the twentieth century, some delicatessen stores installed tables, either inside or out on the sidewalk. For example, the delicatessen store owned by Chotzinoff’s family had only three tables. At the grand opening, the relatives who were occupying the tables started to get up to let some of the bona fide customers sit down; Chotzinoff’s father waved them back down again, under the logic that the more crowded the store seemed, the better it would be for business. Meanwhile, the delicatessen counter did a booming business.

  Was a delicatessen with tables a store or a restaurant? This was a question that even the courts had a difficult time answering. In a case before the New York Supreme Court in 1910, a delicatessen owner on the Lower East Side sued a fellow business owner who opened a restaurant next door to her store; the new neighbor argued that because his establishment had tables, it was a bona fide restaurant, not a delicatessen. The judge decided that a delicatessen could indeed have tables; he pointed out that delicatessens could come in all types, comparing them, “in their infinite variety,” to Cleopatra!81

  This issue bedeviled even the kosher delicatessens that spread outside the city; the owners of one in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1914 were sued by their landlord for conducting a restaurant, in violation of the terms of their lease, because they occasionally permitted customers to sit at the family table at the rear of the store. The judge decided that their establishment could not be considered a restaurant; he found that the “agreement between the parties with respect to conducting a kosher restaurant is not violated by the selling of dried fish, frankfurters, or other articles usually kept in a delicatessen store, even though such articles are eaten upon the premises by the purchasers.” He compared the situation to one in which customers p
urchase cold snacks in a country store and consume them in the building, cracker-barrel style.82

  With or without tables, delicatessens became targets of a nationwide campaign to enforce Sunday closing laws. According to the historian Batya Miller, the last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of evangelical and social-reform-minded Protestants, who deemed it their religious obligation to force others to observe the Sabbath.83 This was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1885 ruled that a Chinese laundryman in San Francisco could be compelled to close his shop on Sundays, under the rationale that the government has a right “to protect all persons from the physical and moral debasement which comes from uninterrupted labor.”84

  These laws, which date back to the early seventeenth century in Virginia, required that businesses be closed on Sundays in observance of the Christian Sabbath. (They were called “blue laws” since they were written on blue paper in New Haven during the colonial era.) They posed a significant problem for many Jewish business owners throughout the country; if they were closed on Saturday in observance of their own Sabbath, then closing on Sunday deprived them of essential weekend business. Even if they were not formally prosecuted, Jewish storekeepers were often the victims of police extortion if they refused to obey the Sunday closing law.85

  More than 150 owners banded together in 1895 into a formal association of delicatessen dealers to prevail upon the city to allow them to remain open on Sundays. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt informed them that they could sell their products until ten o’clock in the morning—when church services typically began—and could fill deliveries throughout the day if they had been received before that hour. This pleased most of the butchers and grocers, who were happy to have the day off; they argued that anyone who needed provisions for the day could purchase them before ten o’clock. But the delicatessen dealers, especially those who owned smaller neighborhood stores, explained that they needed to stay open all day on Sunday in order to serve their less affluent customers who did not own refrigerators.86