by Ted Merwin
Few delicatessen owners were pacified by Roosevelt’s making an exception for delicatessens that had tables in their establishments. But they got a sympathetic hearing from Excise Commissioner Julius Harburger, who fulminated against the Sunday law, informing the delicatessen owners at a public meeting in July 1895 that their stores “are a necessity to the people; they are part of the people; they are the existence of the people.”87 His rhetoric became even more overheated in a speech a month later to his constituents, declaring that “under monarchical forms of government, under despotic powers, the people are not hampered, molested, or coerced, as we are under the restrictive policy of the Sunday law,” which, he said, led to “the discomfort of three-quarters of our city’s population, and the loss of millions of dollars.”88
Sunday closing laws nevertheless continued in effect, with protests continuing for years. In 1899, the editor of the New York Times sympathized with the delicatessen owners, and he penned a series of ringing editorials in their defense. The first noted that Sunday was the biggest day of the week for the delicatessen trade. “Everyone who lives in New York knows that it is the custom of some nine-tenths of the householders of New York, not alone of German birth, to give their servants Sunday evening off, and on that day to skirmish, as it were, for their evening meal.”89
After lambasting the statute that prevented the consumption of delicatessen food on Sundays in the metropolis. the editor spoke up for the “scores, if not hundreds of thousands,” of New Yorkers who purchase food from delicatessens on Sundays. Nor, he pointed out, can city dwellers necessarily buy the food ahead of time, since “Sunday is their visiting day. If unexpected visitors arrive and there is ‘nothing in the house,’ the dispatch of a messenger to the dealer in cooked food is the natural and ready recourse of the host and hostess.”90 An advice columnist declared that a housewife would be appropriately frugal if she would “fit up her reserve shelf against the coming of the unexpected guest, and so forestall the hurried trip to the delicatessen store, which is such a drain on both time and pocketbook.”91
The government also recognized that exceptions needed to be made. A bizarre compromise was worked out February 1899 in which the delicatessens could remain open on Sundays if, like caterers, they sold only complete meals, rather than uncooked food or individual items. Thus, delicatessens would refuse to sell a package of meat by itself, but if a loaf of bread were added to the order, then the sale could take place.92 Furthermore, if customers desired to carry out the food, then they were obliged to pretend that the delicatessen was delivering it to them, agreeing to act as the agent of the store in bringing it home! After considerable wrangling over the next several months, the courts finally relented, permitting delicatessens to purvey cooked food on Sundays. Two hundred euphoric delicatessen owners celebrated their victory in a park in Upper Manhattan.93
Interior of Youngerman’s Delicatessen on Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 1918 (Courtesy of Brian Merlis / Brooklynpix.com)
Nonetheless, the delicatessen raids resumed in 1913 under the direction of Rhinelander Waldo, Tammany’s corrupt police commissioner. These were more successful, since the delicatessen dealers were induced to participate by being made “delicatessen deputies,” which enabled them to spy on their competitors and have them served with summonses. Again, only “prepared” food could be sold; it was left up to the policeman on the scene—who was often obliged to rely more on his taste buds than on the statute books—to decide what constituted this type of edible. But rather than having to close all day on Sunday, delicatessens were permitted to remain open before 10 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., in order to capture the lucrative Sunday-evening dinner trade.
The tide was turning in terms of American eating patterns. The home-cooked Sunday dinner, a staple of American life, especially for rural, churchgoing families, had largely been transformed, in the urban setting, into a take-out delicatessen meal. In 1920, an anonymous social critic in Life magazine satirically compared a typical 1890s Sunday-school picnic to one of his own day; he contrasted the earnest “packing of the [homemade] chicken sandwiches and the frosted cake” in the earlier period to his own generation’s lackadaisical, last-minute visit to the delicatessen.94
Cleanliness, Sin, and the Kosher Delicatessen
Some Jews, however, resisted the incursion of delicatessen food into their diet. While elderly immigrants, by contrast, “frowned on delicatessen and clung to their accustomed boiled and sweet-and-sour meats,” according to Samuel Chotzinoff, the younger generation “took to delicatessen for its spiciness, preferring it to the bland, boiled meats their mothers served at home.”95 Eating delicatessen food could be, for these younger Jews, a rebellious act. The critic Alfred Kazin noted that the pungency of delicatessen sausages carried, for him, an erotic charge. “Wurst carried associations with the forbidden, the adulterated, the excessive, with spices that teased and maddened the senses to demand more, still more.” Only on Saturday nights, when the holy Sabbath gave way to the profane weekday, could this food “be eaten with a good conscience.” Indeed, this was food that was “bought on the sly” and was “supposed to be bad for us”—associated with the fact that it was “made in dark cellars,” far from the light of day.96
While the spiciness of delicatessen meats may have been a boon to some customers, spices had been, since the mid-nineteenth century, the object of opprobrium in American culture. Progressive reformers had found that spices were frequently used to disguise the fact that food was spoiled or tainted. Furthermore, there were long-standing associations between the eating of spicy foods and excessive drinking. John Harvey Kellogg, founder of Kellogg’s cereal company, and his wife, the temperance advocate Ella Eaton Kellogg, insisted that the ingestion of spices and condiments led inexorably to a craving for alcohol. The association stemmed, perhaps, from the practice of placing bowls of spices on the counters of saloons; patrons chewed them to mask the smell of alcohol on their breath.
As Ella Kellogg opined in her popular cookbook Science in the Kitchen, “True condiments such as pepper, pepper sauce, ginger, spice, mustard, cinnamon, cloves, etc. are all strong irritants” that are “unquestionably a strong auxiliary to the formation of the habit of using intoxicating drinks.”97 Following the theories of an influential Presbyterian minister, Sylvester Graham (the inventor of Graham Crackers), the Kelloggs also feared that eating both meat and spicy food with any regularity would lead to sexual fantasies and masturbation; John Kellogg developed Corn Flakes in order, he declared, to promote sexual abstinence.98
Delicatessen owners throughout the country were thus obliged, from time to time, to confront the widespread perception that their fare was both unhealthy and unclean. The social worker Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement House, instructed immigrant Jewish mothers to refrain from serving smoked and salted meat to their children and to feed them fresh fruits and vegetables instead. A dietician who visited a kosher delicatessen in an unnamed western city in 1928 was shocked by the gluttony that she observed, noting that one obese female customer would “make a good addition to the growing army of Jewish diabetics,” and she fantasized about pulling the woman’s son out of the delicatessen and into a healthier, more rural place—where he could be furnished with less salty, sugary, and fatty victuals.99
While the cleanliness of the deli was also highly suspect, these concerns could be allayed, delicatessen owners were told, if they dressed in the proper clothes. In the pages of the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine, the main trade journal for the delicatessen owners in New York, store owners were reminded that anyone handling or serving food was compelled, by municipal legislation, to wear white. An organization called the Sanitation League informed the dealers, quoting a former city health commissioner who had been elected to the U.S. Senate, Royal S. Copeland, that “the man who is slovenly and who makes a poor appearance because of improper uniform or clothing, is sluggish and inefficient mentally and physically.” According to Cope
land, “if you compel workers to wear clean ‘spic and span’ uniforms or outer garments, you improve their morale as well as their disappearance [sic]. . . . It is thus of real importance to all distributors of food or drink to ‘trade up’ in the matter of the appearance of their men.”100
Kosher meat companies and delicatessens competed to offer the products that were seen as the cleanest and healthiest. In a Yiddish advertisement in the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine in August 1931, Barnet Brodie trumpeted its “modern, sanitary factory” that produced corned beef, tongue, pastrami, salami, bologna, and frankfurters that were not just “famous for their taste and quality” but that were supervised by the rabbinical authorities in the city.101 Krainin, the founder of Hebrew National, lamented in an article in a popular magazine, the Jewish Forum, that no rabbi had seen fit to explain to the general public that the kosher laws prohibited the consumption of meat from unhealthy or diseased animals; Krainin defined this as the essence of the kosher system.102 Indeed, the Chelsea Delicatessen, located on Ninth Avenue between Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Streets, advertised itself as providing “Cleanliness, Quality and Service Above All” in the furnishing of “sandwiches and salads of all cuts and preparations”—cleanliness came first, and everything else followed in its train.103
Balancing out the reputedly unhealthy qualities of delicatessen food, along with its fattiness and saltiness, was the drink of choice that accompanied it. Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic was first distributed (according to company lore) in 1869 by a doctor who gave out spoonfuls to children on the Lower East Side to help alleviate their digestive problems. The bright-green soda was sold only in delicatessens until the 1980s, when it became available in supermarkets. (The name was changed to “soda” in the 1920s when the government, which was cracking down on the sale of patent medicines, objected to the use of the word “tonic.”) In addition to the use of celery in treating physical ailments, it was also widely employed to reduce anxiety. A Victorian “guide to life,” published in 1888, recommends that all people who are “engaged in labor weakening to the nerves should use celery daily in the season, and onions in its stead when not in season.”104 The food writer Leah Koenig has pointed out that carbonated beverages, in general, reminded customers of the hot-spring health spas that used mineral water to relieve both physical and psychological distress.105
Popular culture also depicted delicatessen food as unhealthy. A mean-spirited 1920s vaudeville monologue, “In the Delicatessen Shop,” features a delicatessen owner with a very heavy, mock-Yiddish accent who tries to cater to her customers’ needs while attempting to control a brood of children who are playing games with the food, as well as putting both the cat and the baby inside the counter. “Mine gracious! Izzy! Such a poy!” she finally bursts out. “Coome vrum dot counter behind. Vhen papa come he should spunish you vit a stick. How you oxpect your mamma to zell to de gustomers vhen dey seen you rolling dem epple pies on de floor around?”106
This was a routine almost certainly written for non-Jewish entertainers known as “Hebrew” comics who traded on anti-Semitic attitudes.107 The food sold in the delicatessen is portrayed as not fit for human consumption, just as Jews were typically portrayed as unsuitable for participation—unkosher, one might say—in American society. The Jewish deli owner is a laughing stock, her products—and her very personhood—irrevocably tainted. As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has noted, Jews were disparaged as racial outsiders who had the potential to pollute the racial stock of America.108
These stereotypes made Jews themselves unpalatable to “native” Americans; one commentator at Harvard University in the early 1920s justified strict quotas on Jewish admissions by calling Jews an “unassimilable race, as dangerous to a college as indigestible food to man.”109
Fraud in the Kosher Delicatessen Industry
Beyond the kosher delicatessen industry’s doubtful reputation for the healthfulness and purity of its products, it was also tainted by large-scale scandals that erupted around the selling of nonkosher meat as kosher. Since kosher meat was more difficult to obtain and always commanded a higher price than nonkosher (treyf, in Yiddish) meat, meat companies and delis often misled their customers by switching the two. At a time when kosher meat was in tremendous demand—in 1917, the national consumption of kosher meat reached 156 million pounds—there was big money in this kind of scam. Individual rabbis gave their hecksher or stamp of approval to the process under their supervision. Yet in 1925, a study by the state found that fully 40 percent of meat sold as kosher in New York City was actually treyf.110
It is little wonder, though, because until 1916, when the Union of Orthodox Rabbis forbade the practice, it was not uncommon for both kosher and nonkosher meat to be manufactured in different parts of the same factory. But when companies decided to produce only kosher meat, they often cut corners regarding the supervision of the process. Such was the case with Sunshine Provision Company, which switched in 1922 from the production of nonkosher meat to kosher meat but was found using hog casings for its “kosher” sausages; fully 95 percent of the meat that the company was selling as kosher was actually treyf.111
The most egregious case of fraud occurred in 1933, when the owners of one of the most prominent kosher meat companies, Jacob Branfman and Son, were indicted for selling nonkosher meat, which was delivered to the factory late at night, after the kosher supervisor (the mashgiach) had gone home. An undercover investigator testified that he had observed through binoculars as a worker draped oilcloth over the Branfman name on one of the company’s trucks while barrels of nonkosher brisket were being loaded into it. A police raid found two and a half tons of nonkosher meat sitting in the factory.112 When the case came to court, the judge ruled that “to expose for sale” means “to have in stock,” even if the product is not displayed.113 The conviction meant that not only did delicatessens have to discard all the meat they had purchased from Branfman, but rabbis instructed thousands of customers to throw out all the cooking vessels, dishes, and silverware that had come in contact with the offending products.
Delicatessen owners also often tried to trick their customers by passing off nonkosher meat as kosher; they thus saved the hefty price difference between the two types of meat. Some played on the similarity in Hebrew between the words for “kosher” and “meat”—the two words vary only by their initial letter (and even those initial letters look very similar). Rather than offering “kosher meat,” then, some delicatessen owners fooled customers by putting “meat meat” in their windows; they knew that few customers would notice the subtle difference, and they could deny that they had offered kosher meat for sale in the first place. The editor of the Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine defended the practice, arguing that if stores use Hebrew lettering or put a Star of David in their window or print advertising, it is simply because they “mean to advise that Yiddish may be spoken in their places, that a Jewish atmosphere prevails, etc.” To require that Hebrew lettering must not be used in a deceptive manner, he argued disingenuously, suggests that Jews are unfamiliar with their own language.114
A revised law then required meat dealers to label their products “kosher” or “on-kosher” with four-inch signs and to display additional signs in their windows making clear which type of meat was offered for sale. These laws complemented the existing consumer-protection statutes, first passed in 1915 and upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court ten years later, that stated that it was illegal for a food dealer to represent goods as kosher when they were not.115 As an English-language editorial in the Yiddishes Tageblatt demanded in 1922, as yet another bill was proposed to regulate the advertising and selling of kosher meat, “butchers, provision and delicatessen dealers who display the word ‘kosher’ must live up to that sign.”116
Some delicatessen owners kept up the battle; they argued that the word kosher was difficult to define and can admit of a range of meanings, beyond only the strict Orthodox interpretation. For example, many delicatessens remained open on the
Jewish Sabbath, in violation of Jewish law. Even if the meat itself were strictly kosher, selling it on the Sabbath rendered it impure in the minds of traditional Jews. When the state decided to continue to rely on the guidance of Orthodox rabbis and laymen to define “kosher,” more than four hundred kosher delicatessen owners joined in a protest meeting in Brownsville. The owners complained that the new regulations were reminiscent of the despised Russian korobka, and they accused the legislature of kowtowing to a small segment of the Jewish community at the expense of the majority of Jews in the city.
Samuel Caesar, the president of the kosher delicatessen owners’ association, reminded the union men at the rally that most of them were members of the Workmen’s Circle, a fervently socialist Jewish organization. How, Caesar thundered, could the owners permit a “small group of rabbis the right to force Orthodox Judaism” on them? In defining the kosher delicatessen owners as secular Jews battling against the forces of religious Orthodoxy, Caesar insisted on the delicatessen as a place where different understandings of Jewishness could coexist.117
This redefinition of the delicatessen in secular terms foreshadowed the development of the delicatessen into a kind of “secular synagogue” for second-generation Jews—one in which the delicatessen transcended its immigrant Jewish origins. As we have seen, the delicatessen, which had been largely unknown in eastern Europe, was also not particularly entrenched in Lower East Side immigrant Jewish life. At the same time, Jews were themselves marginalized by other Americans. In the next chapter, we will see how Jews began to conquer their pervasive sense of inferiority by turning Jewish delicatessen food from a low-class, suspect item into a high-class one of glitz and glamor.