Notable Sandwiches #110: Lox

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, along my patient editor David Swanson, trawl the waters of Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches for its best catch in alphabetical order. This week, an appetizing classic: lox.

Despite my love of and familiarity with lox, I had an absurd amount of difficulty writing this column, much to David's chagrin—the only thing I had in my head was an old joke that I first heard as a kid: “Why can’t you keep a Jew in prison? Because Jews eat lox.” Mel Brooks claims it was the first joke he ever wrote, back when he was working as a Borscht Belt tummler, and still went by Melvin Kaminsky. I riffed on the joke in my head: Why can’t you trust a Jew in a political science library? Because Jews eat Lockes; Why did the Jew get banned from Scotland? Because Jews eat lochs. This dumb refrain rattled around my otherwise empty brain even though—or perhaps because—it’s not even a particularly accurate joke. When it comes to language, I’m pretty much a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist, so when I point out that much of what we know of as “lox” is actually “nova”—salted and smoked rather than strictly salt-cured salmon, named for its original geographic source, Nova Scotia—it’s purely a point of interest, not some sort of food snobbery.

The truth is lately it’s been a weird time to be a Jew—not that there's ever a non-weird time—and I think my reluctance has quite a bit to do with writing about a food so strongly associated with my people. First of all, I feel a lot of pressure not to screw this up. Second of all, being stuck between near-universal opprobrium abroad and the specter of Christo-fascism at home is a stone cold bummer. Hence the recourse to very bad humor (sorry Mr. Brooks). There is the additional fact that, coming from an Orthodox milieu, there is some scorn in my community for people whose primary connection to their heritage is through food, so that when I forget some minor detail of Halacha or express an opinion contrary to the beliefs with which I was raised, my mother brings out her most withering epithet: “Did I spend all that money on yeshiva so you could be a bagel Jew?” 

I’m not (just) a bagel Jew, I’ve studied Talmud, written extensively about Jewish history, experienced the often nauseating blowback to being a Jew in public. I speak Hebrew. But I do enjoy a bagel, and while a bagel with cream cheese will suffice, a bagel with cream cheese and lox is a delicacy, something to be savored. I’ve eaten them at brises and bar mitzvahs, and it does form an (albeit small) part of my Jewish identity, alongside the ubiquitous smoked whitefish salad in my parents’ fridge, and chicken soup at their table. And yes, lox is strongly associated with Jewry, particularly in the United States. As with so many things closely related to Jewry, we didn’t invent it, exactly; we just, in the process of being driven hither and thither by the winds of persecution, brought techniques from one place to the bounty of another, and made good with what we could get.

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In one way or another, cured salmon has existed for thousands of years (salmon-eating is mentioned in the Icelandic sagas, where in the thirteenth-century Prose Edda the slippery Loki assumes the shape of a salmon but is caught by Thor; Roman consumption of salmon dates back to its conquest of Gaul and subsequent faddish adoption of all things Gallic). The twelfth-century Irish epic The Boyhood Deeds of Finn, part of the Fenian Cycle chronicling mythic hero Finn mac Cumhall, describes the quest to find and consume the Salmon of Knowledge, a fish possessed of all the world’s knowledge whose eater would become similarly wise. (Finn eats the salmon and becomes wise, although this is a matter of sheer luck on his part.)

The reason cured salmon has been so ubiquitous for so long is simply due to the expedience of salting and smoking in millennia before refrigeration, when fresh food was both strictly seasonal and the exception. Entire ancient economies, such as that of Phoenicia, were fueled by dried and salted fish. Smoking and pickling have also been part of that equation, all under the broad umbrella of “curing” and preservation. During the long and lean winter months of cold climes, survival is the name of the game, and salmon—fatty and well-fleshed when returning from the sea—has played its role in that needful dance for a very long time, whether smoked by Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, or pickled in Scandinavia as “gravlax.” In other words, lox isn’t just a delicacy, but rather a representation of the art of surviving, in more ways than one.

At any rate, survival—and the application of techniques from one locale to the new environs to which we were driven by hatred—very much describes the Jewish relationship with lox, as well as the rest of the accouterments of Jewish fish-and-dairy appetizing: matjes herring from Poland, smoked sable (black cod, a Pacific fish which went from Jewish-immigrant salt-cured peasant food to haute cuisine in a few generations), tuna salad, trout roe, et cetera. Bringing the salt, smoke, and spice of the Old Country to America, applying it to a new fish entirely—salmon was cheaper than herring at the fin-de-siecle advent of mass Jewish immigration—and slinging it in populous cities until it became ubiquitous, was our innovation.

As in the case of Jews expelled from Iberia bringing the fried-fish tradition to England and thus “inventing” fish and chips, “lox” was a reapplication of a millennium of knowledge gleaned from Poland (where fish-curing has been evidenced, archaeologically, since roughly the seventh century) to the New World, taking smoke and salt and turning it into tenement-side empires. Few of these original “appetizing” emporia remain, victims of the prosperity of their owners’ progeny; happy exceptions, like Russ and Daughters on New York’s Lower East Side, are temples to a tradition born of precarity, and thus an alchemy of necessary innovation and survivalist genius.

So how did lox transform from an immigrant food slung cheaply over the counters of appetizing shops to a luxury good—one that can set you back a pretty penny, even in moderation on a bagel? The answer has to do with the shifting landscape since the initial Jewish mass immigration in the late nineteenth century, a story of rivers and dams. The salmon is anadromous, a beautiful word that means “migrating from the sea up rivers to spawn,” and it is this characteristic return to their riverine birthplaces to give birth in turn, over thousands of miles of ocean, that is the salmon’s most characteristic behavioral feature. And, when mankind began collectively to absolutely bollocks up our rivers, the one that led to mass die-offs, which, along with overfishing, depleted wild stocks appallingly by the mid-twentieth century. Salmon from Nova Scotia and the Pacific Northwest was no longer the abundant resource it had been since prehistoric times. Blocked by hydroelectric dams as thoroughly as I was blocked on writing this column, the salmon's cycle of exile and return was broken.

There's something transcendent, even beautiful, about the salmon cycle when it's unhindered. As Robert Lowell put it in 1965, it's a continual striving towards freedom and renewal:

"Oh to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall—
raw-jawed, weak fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die."

-Robert Lowell,
"Waking Early Sunday Morning," 1965

I suppose what made me so reluctant to take the mantle of salmon scribe is that lately I’ve felt the itch of that precarity, but without an analogous internal ability to invent, adapt, survive. That I’m a dammed-up salmon in the current of history. Or maybe I’m just sick of delineating my own complicated identity and relationship to it: justifying it, explaining it, insisting on it. There’s a smoky resentment in me at having lived this way for so long.

Still, lox—jewel-pink, semi-translucent, transcendently briny—is a delicate and joyous thing, and should not suffer for this reluctance of mine. It is bright and beautiful and tender, beloved as good things are beloved, a product of fire, time, salt, and need, as all true things are. So let it be celebrated, on good bread to cut the salty tang, and dream of a world of plenty where the rivers are clean, the spawning is unhindered, and everything feels bountiful and delicious and new.