Notable Sandwiches #121: Montreal Smoked Meat

Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where I, alongside my intrepid editor David Swanson, move through the fragrant boughs of the variegated grove that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches. This week, the peak of Canadian-Jewish cuisine: the Montreal smoked meat sandwich.

There’s something peculiarly appealing about a food you’ve never eaten, but only read about. A lot of American kids may have first experienced this with the great ado made about Turkish delight in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and may in turn have experienced a great disappointment at the wretched lump of gummy stuff it turns out to be outside of Istanbul. But someday I will have an appointment with a real Montreal smoked meat sandwich, served in one of that city’s legendary Jewish delicatessens, and I have ample reason to trust it will not disappoint. Until that day, though, I have only literary descriptions to guide me, and luckily the smoked-meat sandwich—Canada’s own quietly thunderous answer to its flashier American-Jewish counterpart, the pastrami sandwich—has its bard, in the form of legendary Canadian-Jewish novelist Mordecai Richler.

Smoked meat, introduced, according to different sources, by either Lithuanian or Romanian Jewish immigrants to Canada in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century in rough parallel to pastrami or corned beef in the US. Like corned beef, but unlike pastrami, smoked meat is made from spice-brined brisket. Like pastrami, but unlike corned beef, the meat is smoked. And like both, the final version is hand-cut, producing not uniform slices but delicately fragrant trembling shards. It’s rapturously beloved by Montréalers, and in latter days embraced even by gentiles as a peak of that city’s many culinary delights.

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I had the good fortune to be introduced to Richler’s work as a teenager, by a smart, thoughtful, melancholic, and gentle English teacher named Simon Fleischer. I’ve been hankering for a smoked meat sandwich ever since. Richler is sort of Canada’s answer to Philip Roth, (although criminally under-read this side of the border, I think), and a meeting between these two titans of Jewish literature in the ‘60s produced an apparently astonishing number of dick jokes (“Richler was making endless jokes about Roth's penis, which he imagined, for some reason, to be enormous… Roth said something horrible about Freud, a retarded child, and a box of clementine oranges, and Richler spit Scotch and water all over their beautiful Jacquard-woven tablecloth”). But where Roth gets so densely into the desires of the body he sometimes, almost accidentally, spills over into the divine, the protagonists of Richler’s novels are always at war between their appetites and their capacities for the sublime, and those appetites don’t always begin or end below the belt. Sometimes they originate and terminate in the stomach.

In Richler’s novel Barney’s Version—which, I think, possibly, made me cry more than any other book—the libidinous, complicated, ultimately beloved tragic bastard of a protagonist, Barney Panofsky, is capable of prodigies of appetite throughout his fictional biography. At the book’s very beginning, we see Barney, in a characteristic mix of sentiment and irreverence, subverting austere rites of mourning: “And this afternoon, on the anniversary of my father's death, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Chevra Kadisha cemetery and, as I do every year, emptied a bottle of Crown Royal rye whiskey over his grave, and, in lieu of a pebble, left a medium-fat smoked meat on rye and a sour pickle on his gravestone."

Later, Barney brings the smoked meat sandwich into the marital bed, telling his third wife Miriam: “You know if you had really, really been intent on entrapping me on my wedding night, you wicked woman, you would not have dabbed yourself with Joy, but in Essence of Smoked Meat. A maddening aphrodisiac, made from spices available in Schwartz’s delicatessen. I’d call it Nectar of Judea and copyright the name.” (Just before delivering this soliloquy, he’s been emptying his snifter of cognac onto her breasts and lapping it up—just in case we miss the food-and-sex mixture of lust, self-awareness, and joie de vivre that makes Barney so compelling and occasionally repellent).

For this column, I reread Richler’s excellent and complex striver’s bildungsroman The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and rewatched the film adaptation, from 1974, starring an impossibly young and appealing Richard Dreyfuss. Here, the Nectar of Judea is less sensuously described—the titular hero spends most of the book engaged in a kind of nervous, twitchy and relentless self-sacrifice, in service of becoming a real estate developer, and eating more benzedrine than bread. Still, smoked meat comes up a rather astonishing sixteen times in this story of a boy from St. Urbain street sacrificing his heart, his soul, and sometimes other people’s cash to try and make it. Smoked meat is a decadent character hanging around Duddy’s Montreal, something something that occasionally draws his tormented soul back into the world of concrete and material things from time to time, out of his whirl of deals and double-crosses and plans. Nearly dying in a blizzard in his eagerness to survey his acquired land, Duddy engages in his sole prayer of the book: “If God pulls me through, I'll give up screwing for two weeks. Smoked meats too."

So how can I have lived all my thirty-five years without tasting the sandwich you promise God to forego—the culinary equivalent of screwing? I’ve only been to Montreal twice—once as a child, with my kosher-keeping family, and all the best Mile End delis are treyf (and also, it may have been Quebec City—I was really little, and just remember a lot of stone, and people speaking French). And once in my freshman year of college for a madcap three-day winter trip with a dorm friend who turned out to be a hotel heiress.

At the time, I was too recently emerged from the bounds of the kosher laws to be anything close to a gourmand, and in any case, all I really recall is the Canadian film board, red wine, and experimenting with just how cold it has to be to keep two teens who can legally drink for the first time out of nightclubs (very cold, yet still not cold enough). I was veal then!, I cry. Now I am aged, a little tough maybe, but marbled generously. Enough to know better than to pass through Montreal and forego its gorgeous little ultra-boiled bagels and smoked meat—enough to bitterly repent the follies of my youth! And to mourn, too, that smoked meat hasn’t proliferated south of the border—having been thoroughly muscled out by Big Pastrami.

So, in lieu of firsthand experience, I enlisted a sandwich field correspondent, Montreal-based performer, music chronicler and writer Shay Spivak, who went to Delibee’s, on the West Island of Montreal in the suburb of Pointe Claire. Delibee’s is the heir to its more famous direct ancestor, the Main, apparently Leonard Cohen (another titan of Jewish Canada)’s favorite place to get a smoked meat. Here’s what Spivak brought back from this arduous field duty:

The smoked meat sandwich, at its best, is simple and unassuming: rye bread cautiously slathered with mustard, and a bulging pile of thinly-cut slices of cured and smoked brisket in between. A blend of peppercorns, mustard seeds, and assorted other spices (known separately as a ‘Montreal-style steak spice’ blend) clings to the edges of each slice, with the pinky-red gradients of meat arrayed against striations of translucent ivory fat. It is not a sandwich that evenly distributes in each bite, but evens out the irregularities of shape and size with its variations in flavour and texture.

The smoked meat is tender and toothsome. It flakes apart on the tongue while still retaining a fibrous texture, lubricated by the anodyne softness of its own fat. The sharp tang of yellow mustard lifts the meat from being overly unctuous, and the pliant, yeasted softness of rye bread with its chewy crust adds textural nuance. For the full experience, the sides in a combo with the sandwich counteract the meat, bringing in further astringency from a kosher dill pickle and vinegary coleslaw. Salt crystals cling onto the browned exterior of the fries, and an almost-medicinally sweet black cherry soda clears the palate from a symphony of salt, smoke, and savour.

I got to talking with the owner, whose father once ran The Main, a now-closed 24-hour deli favored by Leonard Cohen. The Main was an open secret, quietly sitting across the street from the more famous Schwartz's (now so locally famous that there's a musical written about it).

“The wrestlers used to go to The Main, musicians after shows... anyone who wanted the real deal, they ate there. And I still smoke the meat by hand."

How else? From the heart, to the hand, to the mouth, to the belly, to be immortalized by the pen. A cow is involved, but has been sacrificed and elevated into art. To be honest, I’ve written about plenty of sandwiches I’ve never tried, and am not especially keen to devour—the donkey burger, say, or fried brain, or lampredotto. But of all the reasons to regret not being Canadian right now—and, let’s be clear, there are a lot at this very moment—the smoked meat is among them. Surely it is among them, the Nectar of Judea! So, as soon as spring turns, I’m turning my nose north, to where healthcare runs in streams down the yokes of the mountains like meltwater, and the boreal wilderness is full and rich and true, and in the streets of a beautiful city with its own rich and complicated and well-documented Jewish heritage, a sandwich is singing my name, sotto voce, with a pile of meat smoked, all unknowing, just for me.