by David Sax
Local tastes shaped the palate of different Ashkenazi populations over time. Those living in Polish areas favored sweeter dishes. Those in Hungary relied heavily on paprika for seasoning. The Romanian Jews were fiends for spice and smoke. All the Ashkenazi communities had a proclivity for garlic and onions, and a reverential worship of schmaltz, or rendered fat, most often made by boiling the fat of geese, duck, or chickens. It was a diet forged out of necessity, characterized by poverty, and dictated by the word of God. Some say it was the original fusion cuisine, a taste of forced globalization. With each move to a different land, the Ashkenazi Jews combined a bit of the old with the new. When Ashkenazi Jews became more urbanized after the Enlightenment, their food supply went from what was homemade to bought: bread from the baker, meat from the butcher, and cured meats from the delicatessen, which made kosher-preserved meats and sausages in the local style.
So no, New York didn’t invent Jewish deli. But New York provided the perfect incubator for the Jewish delicatessen to blossom into a vibrant symbol of Ashkenazi cookery and an outlet for the melding of Jewish food and American culture. The first New York delicatessens were likely German (Aryan, blond-haired German), which sold specialties such as sausages, sauerkraut, meatloaf, frankfurters, liverwurst, and pretzels. In the post—Civil War era, Germans were the largest immigrant group in New York. Of the estimated six million Germans that arrived in America during that period, a significant percentage were Jewish.
The first big name in American Jewish deli was that of Isaac Gellis, a Berlin-born sausage maker who came to New York in 1871 at the age of twenty and quickly established himself in the Lower East Side. Gellis soon became the premier kosher meat magnate in America, building up an empire from sales of Germanstyle kosher hot dogs, sausages, salamis, and cold cuts. Later there would be corporate-owned stores, larger factories, and signature Isaac Gellis delicatessens, but in the beginning it was just a whole lot of tube steak. Gellis’s wealth financed the construction of the first downtown Orthodox synagogue, on Eldridge Street. This was the first to be built by Eastern European immigrants, who began to arrive toward the end of the nineteenth century. Their appearance in New York would completely alter the face of that city and transform the Jewish delicatessen into a New York institution.
Between 1880 and 1920, some two million Jews from the Russian empire, the bedrock of the Yiddish world, sailed to America, fleeing czarist persecution. Hundreds of thousands of refugees from other countries such as Romania (which was in the Austro-Hungarian empire) joined them. Most arrived in New York and settled on the Lower East Side. New York’s Jewish population exploded as a result of this exodus. It was as though all the shtetls of Europe had emptied into several square miles in Manhattan. Compared to their urbane and now prosperous German-American Jewish counterparts, these immigrants were poor, uneducated, and religious, and most found work plying the few trades that were accessible in the old country: tailoring, peddling wares, collecting scrap, and food preparation.
Suddenly, the foods of a people dispersed for nearly two thousand years came together in one corner of Manhattan. Romanians tasted the dishes of Poles and Litvaks, Russians cooked for Ukrainians and Germans. Early on, the preferred vehicle for Yiddish food was the pushcart. In many cases, the wife would pickle, bake, or cook in the cramped tenement apartment at night, and the husband would sell the food all day. Soon, enterprising shopkeepers and suppliers began making bulk amounts of foods in their stores, selling them to armies of pushcart peddlers to distribute around the neighborhood. Foods needed to be cheap, preserved (because there wasn’t refrigeration), and easily eaten by hand. Most customers were garment workers, who ate at their sewing machines or on the street. The most popular items were knishes, black breads, ryes and bagels, pickled herring (wrapped in newspaper), salamis, other cold cured meats, and pickles. Hot foods, like pastrami, soups, and briskets, had no way of staying warm on most pushcarts and were sold at shops or made in the home.
By the turn of the century, pushcarts were fading from New York’s landscape. In an effort to control the unsanitary conditions of the Lower East Side that many middle-class New Yorkers abhorred, the mayor’s office imposed strict regulations in 1906. Licenses were issued to a limited number of vendors, who were soon required to remain stationary, in locations designated by officials. As the pushcarts disappeared, they were increasingly replaced by what would become the delicatessens we know today.
Pastrami came to New York by way of Romanian Jews, who were a relatively small minority. In Romania, pastrami is not so much a food as a method of preparation that involves a heavy dry rub of salt and spices to cure and season the meat, and later smoking to cook it fully. Its origins, which may date back as far as Byzantium, can be found in Turkey, where basturma was a form of pressing spiced meat. In some North African countries, one can even eat camel pastrami, though the Moroccan market for a hump on rye has yet to take off. Jews who lived in Romania and Bessarabia adapted the food to kosher norms, most often spicing and smoking duck or geese.
No records exist of who first made pastrami in New York. Likely, the initial New York pastrami was made with fowl, which was the main protein of the Ashkenazi Jewish diet in Europe, where beef was a seldom-eaten luxury. But Manhattan was an excessively difficult place to raise geese, and they were soon replaced by inexpensive cuts of kosher beef raised out on the vast American plains. The turning point for Jewish delicatessen, which catapulted it from an obscure immigrant food to an American cuisine, was the marriage of this cookery with the simultaneously emerging American obsession with the sandwich.
Patricia Volk, a writer in New York, claims that her great-grandfather, a Lithuanian butcher named Sussman Volk, was the first to sell a pastrami sandwich in that city. His tale is certainly demonstrative of how the deli evolved out of necessity and chance. Volk came to New York in 1887 and set up a small kosher butcher shop on Delancey Street. One day, a Romanian friend stopped by and asked Volk if he could hold on to his suitcase while he returned to Romania. In exchange, he gave Volk his recipe for pastrami, which soon became a hit with nearby garment workers. One enterprising customer asked for his meat between slices of rye bread and a legend was born. Whether or not Volk made the first pastrami sandwich, what he did in Sussman Volk’s Delicatessen lit a small fire in the belly of New York. The delicatessen, previously a takeout counter of prepared foods, had been transformed into a sit-down restaurant. The shtetl kitchen met the emerging New York lunch counter, and the foods of the old country were being served in the preferred manner of the new. It was no longer just Jewish, or Yiddish, but American.
Other delicatessens followed suit: Katz’s, Jacob Bronfman’s, Theodore Kranin’s, Schmulka Bernstein’s on Essex, each growing larger and more lavish than their predecessors. The delis at the turn of the century followed a simple formula; they were largely on the Lower East Side, were almost uniformly kosher, and served a limited selection of foods. Chief among these were the holy trio of corned beef, pastrami, and pickled tongue, followed closely by roast brisket, beef salami, and beef baloney. Lox, bagels, cream cheese and other dairy specialties were found in dairy “appetizing” stores, which sold smoked fish and dairy exclusively and never sold meat because of kosher laws. Portions grew enormous. After the routine starvation of shtetl life, a full stomach was the greatest pleasure one could imagine. A Jewish restaurant review consisted of two key questions: “How much does it cost?” and “How much food do they give you?”
Several companies, such as Isaac Gellis, got into the business of supplying meat and other products to delis that wanted to save labor and material costs by outsourcing production. Other established food companies found a niche in the deli business. Gulden’s Spicy Brown Mustard became the perfect accoutrement to deli meats. Dr. Brown’s sodas quickly became the elixir of choice, particularly the strange Cel-Ray tonic, a bright green celery-flavored beverage. In 1906, Butcher’s Journal and Delicatessen Magazine launched, while unions began organizing behind deli
counters and owners reacted with their own trade associations.
By the 1910s and early 1920s, the character of the Lower East Side was changing. The Bronx and Brooklyn offered cooperative apartments, subsidized housing, and even the slight possibility of owning a little green stamp of yard, and much of the Lower East Side’s residents fled to the outer boroughs. By the mid-1920s, the U.S. government greatly curtailed Jewish immigration until well after World War II. In the span of less than forty years, some two and a half million European Jews had come to the United States, largely to New York. Theirs was the delicatessen generation, and the halt in arrivals of new Jewish immigrants marked one of the key turning points in the evolution of the deli. Before it had been a European undertaking created and molded by immigrants. From then on, it would be increasingly American in character.
By the 1930s, almost 80 per cent of the south Bronx was Jewish. In Brooklyn, nearly a million Jews made up half the population of the massive borough. Delis could be found from Williamsburg to the far stretches of Coney Island. As the fortunes of the second-generation New York Jews improved, the once humble delicatessen began splitting off into several different incarnations. The most numerous was the kosher delicatessen, the most common breed of deli before World War II. The kosher delicatessen served hot meats and cold cuts, sandwiches, soups, stewed or braised meat dishes, and baked goods. There were counters and tables and, in some instances, grumpy, scowling waiters.
A 1931 report put out by the City of New York’s Department of Public Markets found 1,550 kosher delicatessen stores in the city’s boroughs (in comparison to only 150 kosher dairy restaurants at the time). “Since most of the delicatessens in that era were kosher ones,” said Ted Merwin, a professor of religion and Judaic studies at Dickinson College who has done the most extensive academic research on the history of the New York Jewish delicatessen, “I think you could safely say that there were a total of around two thousand delicatessens in the city as a whole during that decade.”
Though kosher eating was the de facto diet for the Eastern European immigrants when they first arrived, the business of kosher soon evolved into something far more complex. In the shtetls of Europe, each town had perhaps one rabbi and a shochet (slaughterer), who deemed what was kosher and what was treyf without much fuss. But kosher eaters in New York had innumerable competing kosher authorities claiming their particular seal of supervision was the holiest. By 1934, the kosher industry was supplying over $200 million a year in food to New York alone (that’s over $3 billion adjusted for inflation). During the first half of the twentieth century, prices for kosher meat soared, leading to several violent meat riots. During these, delicatessens and butcher stores closed to protest the slaughterhouse prices, while organized mobs of angry housewives took to the streets, banging pots and assaulting the police. In one 1910 riot, gangs of women roamed Jewish neighborhoods, and if anyone was selling or carrying kosher meat, the meat would be stripped from their hands and tossed into the gutter or doused in kerosene. It all makes today’s kvetching at the cash register seem rather civilized by comparison.
State laws governing who could sell kosher and how it could be labeled had been on the books for years, but enforcement wasn’t centralized, and many passed off treyf meat as kosher, pocketing the profit. “The difference in prices between kosher and non-kosher products is a source of great temptation to substitute non-kosher for kosher articles,” wrote the mayor’s Kashruth Committee in 1932, after incidents of kosher fraud became a matter of public concern. “The struggle to rid the Jewish community of the kosher food cheat is, as a matter of fact, one of the hardest tasks now confronting New York Jewry.” There were fierce battles over territory between various rabbis and kosher authorities.
The results were twofold: first, the New York kosher world began to split, with the most religious orthodox followers becoming more and more stringent. Eventually, the ultra-orthodox would adopt the mark of glatt kosher as their new, supposedly higher standard. Glatt kosher emerged with the immigration following the Holocaust of ultra-orthodox Hasidim, who saw the kosher standards of the large Orthodox Union as too lax. Apart from several rules over the inspection of the cow’s lungs for lesions, the difference between glatt kosher and what I’ll call regular kosher is the degree of rabbinical supervision and observance. Kosher delicatessens will be certified by a particular kosher authority, who inspects the premises regularly, but a glatt kosher deli must have a supervising mashgiach working on site at all times (more on him later). Glatt kosher delis close on the Sabbath, as well as most of the Jewish holidays, major and minor. Kosher delis will stay open on every day except Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah. With the influx and growth of Hasidic communities across America, and their refusal to accept the kosher standard of others, glatt kosher has become the de facto standard of the entire orthodox community. Until recently most glatt kosher meat in America came from the giant Rubashkin slaughterhouse complex in Postville, Iowa. The company’s stranglehold on the market was so complete that when the Postville plant closed in October 2008 (after Rubashkin filed for bankruptcy following the largest immigration raid in U.S. history), beef practically disappeared from American kosher supermarkets.
The flipside of all this was the birth of the delicatessen we find most commonly today: the kosher-style deli, a.k.a. the Jewish deli or New York deli. Even within this realm, there is a spectrum of what owners are willing to serve and what they won’t. Originally a kosher-style deli indicated a place that adhered to kosher principles (not mixing milk and meat, no pork or shellfish), though it was unlikely they used kosher meat, and almost certainly had no rabbinic supervision. They were modern kosher, refusing cheese on a sandwich, declining to even offer cream for the coffee.
Though kosher Jews will say, with unwavering conviction, that the only true Jewish delicatessen is a kosher delicatessen, what predominate in New York today are Jewish-owned, Jewish-operated, Jewish-patronized, non-kosher delicatessens. Among them are some of New York’s best-known delis, including Junior’s, Katz’s, Carnegie, and the Stage. Some kosher-style delis may have stopped being kosher for economic reasons; some were simply never kosher. They were opened by those who wanted no part of the complicated, expensive, and often hypocritical world of kosher certification.
As non-kosher delis grew in number, so too did they expand in size. They were big. They boasted everything under the sun: a full kitchen, deli counter, appetizing section (which sold dairy items like cream cheese and smoked fish), and in-house bakery. Abundance was the name of the game, and each worked to have the whole Ashkenazi food chain wrapped up under one roof. Many delis became famous for specialty items. Both Lindy’s on Broadway and Junior’s of Brooklyn started as delis, but quickly evolved into places devoted almost exclusively to rich cheesecakes thick as a car’s tire. As the Jewish delicatessen gained a tremendous foothold around Midtown Manhattan, close to the heart of Broadway and America’s entertainment industry, the comedians embraced the deli like a mother’s bosom, drawing from the rich trove of shtick within its walls:
“For this record to have the proper flavor, you have to rub a little corned beef fat on top. It’ll be tough, you need those little gree-be-knees, you know, those little Jewish popcorn, eh Max?”
The above is from the comedian Jack E. Leonard. It’s sometime early in the 1960s, and the legendary Stage Delicatessen is packed with the usual roster of Broadway luminaries. At the center of it, Stage’s gravelly voiced Russian-born owner, the hefty, horse-betting Max Asnas, is walking around with a microphone strapped to his body.
The scene exists on a rare vinyl recording dubbed Max Asnas: The Corned Beef Confucius, which offers a time capsule into Midtown’s deli heyday. Already, the place would have been known for towering combination sandwiches named after local customers such as Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe, Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen or Milton Berle. Back then, the Stage was where “celebrities go to look at people,” and in the clubhouse atmosphere of t
he narrow room, one-liners cut quick as the blade of the slicing machine:
Morey Amsterdam: “I was sitting in here and a fellow was eating with his hat on. A fellow called out and said, ‘Hymie, I need mustard!’ and a big glob of mustard fell on this man’s hat.”
Max Asnas: “I offered to clean his hat, and he got mad. He said, ‘Dis is a very expensive hat,’ I said, ‘What do you think we use here, cheap mustard?’”
Morey Amsterdam: “A woman was complaining that cold water was dripping on her. Max said, ‘For these prices, what do you expect, hot water?’”
The equally famous Carnegie Delicatessen was where television writers from Brooklyn and the Bronx—Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner—met and joked around with the hot acts of the Catskills—Jackie Mason, Gene Baylos, Henny Youngman, and the legendary Freddie Roman. “I remember they started building the Americana Hotel, right across from the deli,” recalled Roman, now the dean of the Friar’s Club. “So Gene [Baylos] waits for the first day of construction, when they bring in the big earth movers, and he runs across the street and starts yelling, ‘Where’s the foreman?’ and the foreman comes up and Gene yells, ‘You schmuck! I told you 43rd Street, not 53rd Street!’”