Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (2 page)

I
s anything more emblematic of New York City than the overstuffed pastrami sandwich on rye? The pickled and smoked meats sold in storefront Jewish delicatessens starting in the late nineteenth century became part of the heritage of all New Yorkers. But they were, of course, especially important to Jews; the history of the delicatessen is the history of Jews eating themselves into Americans. The skyscraper sandwich became a hallmark of New York. But it also became a potent symbol of affluence, of success, and of the attainment of the American Dream. As the slogan for Reuben’s, an iconic delicatessen in the theater district boasted, “From a sandwich to a national institution.”

This book traces the rise and fall of the delicatessen in American Jewish culture. It traces the trajectory of an icon—a journey that originates in the ancient world and rockets through the Middle Ages to postrevolutionary France, lands briefly on the Lower East Side, gathers steam in the tenements of the outer boroughs, and is catapulted out to the cities and suburbs of America, with a one-time detour into outer space. Along the way, we learn what happens when food takes on an ethnic coloration and then gradually sheds that ethnic connection when it acculturates into America.

We learn how Jews retained the taste and scent of brine—that of the seas that they had crossed in order to get to America and of the oceans that so many settled along, first in New York and later in Miami Beach and L.A.—in the foods that they ate. Because of the utility of salt in seasoning and preserving food, it has played an enormous role in the history of Western civilization, as writer Mark Kurlansky has found.
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It is little wonder, then, that it became essential to Jewish culture. Indeed, for a substantial part of the twentieth century, kosher sausage companies and delicatessens cured more than just meat and pickles—they sustained an essential part of Jewish culture, enabling it to survive and thrive in America.

Reinvented in the New World, including in ways that were in stark tension with Jewish religious Orthodoxy, the pastrami, corned beef, salami, bologna, and tongue that were sold in storefront New York delicatessens became, for a time, a mainstay of the American Jewish diet, taking on a primacy that they had never enjoyed in eastern European Jewish culture. Indeed, for the scholar Seth Wolitz, the deli was no less than the “epitome of the Jewish culinary experience in New York. It was the first (and most beloved) venue for Jewish food outside the home and a favorite neighborhood institution.”
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These Jewish eateries were known for the staggering amount and variety of food on display; the delicatessen, in the words of the food historian John Mariani, “represented American bounty in its most voluptuous and self-indulgent form.”
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Smoked and pickled meats, from their roots in central and eastern Europe, held a special place even within Jewish “cuisine,” which extended from
kreplach
(dumplings) and
knishes
(savory pastries) to
kishke
(stuffed beef intestines, also known as stuffed derma) and
p
’
tcha
(calf’s-foot jelly, also called
studen
or
cholodetz
), of which the actor Zero Mostel quipped, “no matter what you call it, a pleasant gas stays with you all day.”
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The delicatessen, whether in its kosher or nonkosher variant, was a second home for many American Jews, especially those who were the children of immigrants, who had begun to define
their Jewish identity in a secular rather than religious fashion. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, before even the dispersion of Jews across the North American continent, the cramped, bustling delicatessen became a focal point of Jewish identity and remembrance—a capacious, well-trodden, metaphorical homeland for the Jewish soul. Given the identification of New York City with its large and prominent Jewish population, the delicatessen became an all-purpose symbol of Jewishness. As a delighted customer once exhaled upon entering the Second Avenue Deli, “Ah, I smell Judaism!”
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While the kosher delicatessen symbolized ethnic continuity, the nonkosher delicatessen symbolized the movement of Jews into the mainstream of American society. By the 1930s, the kosher delicatessen in particular became ubiquitous in the outer boroughs of New York, while the kosher-style delicatessen became synonymous with the showbiz culture of Manhattan. This book focuses on New York partly because it was where the majority of American Jews lived until the 1940s and partly because the Jewish delicatessen essentially began in New York and became emblematic of both New York and Jewish life. Gotham’s Jewish delis were “the emperors of all food that is hand-held in New York,” the screenwriter Richard Condon noted, the city that was “the capital of the greatest sandwich-consuming country of the world.”
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New York may be dubbed “The Big Apple” (a term used in connection first with horse racing and later with other kinds of urban entertainment), but throughout most of the twentieth century, a pastrami sandwich was more likely than a piece of fruit to trigger thoughts of New York. Both, however, are about sex: the apple represents temptation in Western culture, and the pastrami sandwich, as we will see, became the ultimate symbol of carnal desire.

In part because of the prevalence of Jewish food in the city, everyone who lives in New York “is Jewish,” insisted the travel writer Daniel Stern in the 1960s, calling Jewishness a “pervading atmosphere, a zest, a style of life.” Even visitors, he averred, become Jewish for the time that they are in New York. If you
are already Jewish, he added, then “while you’re here, you’ll be
very
Jewish.”
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This sentiment jibes with the experience of Hilton Als (a theater critic for the
New Yorker
), who confessed that, as an African American boy growing up in the 1960s in Brooklyn, he felt like an “anxious Yeshiva student” in the company of his father, whom he describes as a “brown-skinned, well-dressed, mustachioed rebbe.” Als fondly recalled his Sunday outings with his father; they would take a bus from their apartment to the Lower East Side, where they would shop for “briny sour pickles, pastrami, brisket, cheesecake, and celery soda: Jew food for the brain.”
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It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the delicatessen—what the food writer Joan Nathan calls “
the
Jewish eating experience in America.”
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A delicatessen owner in Boston disclosed that elderly Jews come to her establishment for their last meal. “They’re practically on respirators,” she whispered, “but they want that last taste of deli before they die.”
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As the essayist Jonathan Rosen writes in
The Talmud and the Internet
, the great German poet Goethe begged, on his deathbed, for “more light”—Rosen’s grandmother, by contrast, pleaded for pastrami.
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Or, as the late comedian Soupy Sales (né Milton Supman) jested, if he had his life to live over, he would “live over a delicatessen.”
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Judaism has almost always revolved around meat. Two thousand years ago, eating meat was a religious activity for Hebrews, since they ate it only as part of the Temple offering that was sacrificed by the priests. This was called the
shelamim
(full) offering, and it was intended to bring joy to all who consumed it, since it represented the expiation of sin for the community. However, the freshly roasted flesh had to be consumed within two days for it to supply what the rabbis deemed to be the proper quotient of happiness.

The question arose: Could freshly roasted meat also be eaten on the somber evening before the Ninth of Av, the fast day that commemorates the double destruction of the Temple, first by the Babylonians and then by the Romans? The rabbis decided,
based on the two-day rule of the
shelamim
, that the meat would need to be cured for at least two days in order not to cause undue joy. They authorized the consumption of only pickled meat, along with new (unfermented) wine, thereby introducing corned beef into Jewish cuisine.
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And is it merely coincidental that the priests were obliged to consume the tasty leftovers of the sacrificial offerings with mustard, foreshadowing the little mustard pot on the table of every Jewish delicatessen?
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The ancient priests were, in a sense, forerunners of the New York delicatessen owners and countermen; by preparing meat, they presided over an activity that was central to the community’s workings and self-definition.

Jews also have a long-standing connection with sandwiches; indeed, it was a rabbi who purportedly invented the first one, although he did not call it by that name. Hillel the Elder, who lived during the time of King Herod and the Roman emperor Augustus (and who gave his name to the national Jewish student organization), devised a creative way to fulfill the injunction in the Torah that the Israelites should eat matzoh and bitter herbs to commemorate their enslavement to the Egyptian pharaohs. He enclosed the herbs, along with a goodly portion of paschal lamb, inside the bread, making a lamb-herb wrap. Indeed, the unleavened bread that Hillel used to make that first sandwich was likely not the stiff, fragile, crumbly stuff that is matzoh but rather a thick, soft, chewy flatbread like Indian roti, Mediterranean pita, Mexican tortilla, or Middle Eastern lavash.

Hillel dubbed his innovation the
korech
, basing it on the ancient Hebrew word
lekarech
, which means “to encircle or envelop”; the term was also used to refer to a book binding or a funeral shroud. The modern word
sandwich
first appeared in an English cookbook in 1773 after John Montagu, the Fourth Earl of Sandwich, asked his servant to bring him pieces of meat between two slices of toast so that he could keep playing cards without taking a break. In 1840, the British historian Edward Gibbon witnessed in London what he called a “sight truly English,” namely, “twenty or thirty perhaps, of the first men in the
kingdom, in point of fashion and fortune” at a café and gambling club called the Cocoa Tree. Gibbon described them as “supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat, or a sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch.”
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A century later, in New York, the overstuffed delicatessen sandwich loomed large in Jewish Americans’ understanding of who they were both as Jews and as Americans. The food historian Bee Wilson has noted that the sandwich lends its structure to everything from sponges to aircraft design;
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it may not be too far-fetched to suggest that the delicatessen sandwich engineered a secular rather than religious way of being Jewish, one that helped to fuel the meteoric rise of Jews in our society.
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Upwardly mobile Jews defined themselves in opposition to delicatessen fare, against its immigrant, low-class, plebeian connotations. By the concluding decades of the twentieth century, they had disavowed the delicatessen, disencumbering themselves from cured beef and pickled cucumbers in favor of a more gourmet, more international, and healthier cuisine.

The delicatessen was a victim of its own success. By flattering Jews’ social and economic aspirations, it helped to propel them into the middle class. A satirical oil painting that hangs in the basement of Ben’s Kosher Deli on West Thirty-Eighth Street depicts the restaurant as, incorrectly, located on the same street as some of the most iconic, four-star restaurants in Manhattan, including the 21 Club, Tavern on the Green, Sardi’s, and the Four Seasons. The whimsical image gestures to the ambivalence that Jews have about forsaking the deli to eat in more gourmet restaurants, trading their traditional “peasant” food for upward mobility—if only they could have their pastrami and eat it too, the painting seems to say.

But when did the delicatessen become an important institution in Jewish life? Although delicatessen meats (or meats of any kind) were not a major part of the eastern European Jewish diet, historians have suggested that the centrality of the delicatessen to the American Jewish experience began with the immigrant
generation on the Lower East Side of New York. The historian Hasia Diner argues, for example, that it was Jewish immigrants who “learned to think of delicatessen food as traditional.”
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But while Diner is correct about the retrospective elevation of delicatessen foods into a pivotal part of Jewish heritage, her timing is off. Smoked and pickled meats were too expensive for immigrants, and the immigrant Jewish mother was typically loath to bring in take-out food; it vitiated her role as the cook for the family. It was not the immigrants but their children who made the delicatessen their own. Even as second-generation Jews were still excluded from the upper echelons of American society, the deli made them feel like part of the “in crowd”—they had became more successful and developed a less religious Jewish identity.

Then again, as Diner emphasizes, eating out was itself an unfamiliar activity for Jews, who were not used to eating in restaurants, whether in eastern Europe or on the Lower East Side; they coined the word
oyesessen
at the turn of the twentieth century to designate this exciting new recreational activity.
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The delicatessen enabled Jews to eat out in a Jewish way, by enjoying
in public
the foods that they associated with their heritage. Furthermore, unlike synagogues and fraternal organizations, many of which were organized on the basis of immigrants’ towns of origin, delicatessens enabled the descendants of Jews from different social classes and different Ashkenazic (eastern European Jewish) nationalities to forge a common American Jewish identity. In the kosher delicatessen, the free-thinker (atheist) and the
frum
(observant) Jew could literally break bread—typically rye with caraway seeds—together, as could the top-hatted capitalist and the leather-capped socialist. The delicatessen was, as the historian Jenna Weissman Joselit has observed, a “neutral Jewish place” that “signaled Jewishness in the public square, transcending traditional divisions between different types of Jews.”
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