Welcome back to Notable Sandwiches, the feature where David and I invite you to pull up a table at the moveable feast that is Wikipedia’s List of Notable Sandwiches, in alphabetical order. This week, we preview our next entry with pastrami-adjacent columns on corned beef, the deli, and Montreal smoked meat.
It’s become clear, as we’ve worked our way through over 100 sandwiches, that some are more notable than others, and our next entry is among the most notable of all. You could be forgiven for thinking we’ve already covered pastrami; in some ways we have, so long is the shadow cast by this king of cured meats. In previous essays—on corned beef, the deli, and Montreal smoked meat—Talia and I have danced around this history, and as we approach the real thing, I figured that a little homework was in order.
My own pastrami bona fides are modest, mostly developed in the early 2000s, when I lived on New York’s Lower East Side and Katz’s Delicatessen was the neighborhood cafeteria. (Not literally, but… well, almost literally.) The pastrami-on-rye at Katz’s is arguably the most iconic sandwich in the city. According to Pete Wells of the Times, “Pastrami ordered and eaten at Katz’s is both a meal and a ceremony, one that can turn tourists into New Yorkers and New Yorkers into tourists.” I don’t know what that makes me. In certain respects, learning to love pastrami at Katz’s has served me poorly—beginning my journey at the top of the mountain was always going to lead to a lifetime of disappointment. How could it be otherwise?
Talia remains under the weather, and I know I’m not alone in hungering for her personal take on a sandwich so laden with history, both culinary and cultural. So we’ll be back next week with a proper column on pastrami. For now, we offer this triple-tiered club sandwich of cured, spiced, smoked content. Brush up on your history, then head to your local delicatessen, and get yourself a sandwich.
— David Swanson
The Sword and the Sandwich is a newsletter about deadly serious extremism and serious sandwiches. Please consider supporting this work with a paid subscription.
On December 16, 1923—99 years ago today—the New York Times published a story asking, “Is there no jazz in corned beef?” Writing at the height of the Jazz Age, the anonymous author bemoaned the dish’s decline as a staple of American life. “We have come to the last pages of a tale which reaches back through the era of plainsmen to log cabins in the eighteenth century colonies. A tale that has dried beef for a prologue and pemmican for a footnote. A story of wars and expeditions and land clearing, leading to the hardy squatters of Harlem and so to the kitchenette. Corned beef is a mirror (though now cracked), of American social conditions.”
The author needn’t have worried. As the Times reported just two years later, a poll of 1,000,000 restaurant patrons named corned beef and cabbage as New York City’s favorite meal, beating out sugar-cured ham, chicken fricassee, and lamb stew. Today, any doubters that New York is the capital of corned beef should visit Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side, where they serve 8,000 pounds of the stuff every week. But if corned beef is emblematic of New York, this is particularly true when it comes to two ethnic groups that—traveling parallel paths from poverty and persecution in the Old World to promise and possibility in the New—reached the heights of society in America, fueled in part by corned beef. I speak, of course, of the Irish and the Jews.
Before I continue, a few notes on etymology. The art of curing beef in salt goes back thousands of years, and goes by many monikers: “pickelfleish” in Yiddish, “salt beef” in Britain, “chipped” or “bully beef” among military vets, and “corned beef” all over (this is due to kernel-sized “corns” of rock salt and saltpeter used in the curing process; the saltpeter kills bacteria and gives the meat its deep pink color). But it’s more complicated than that, as “corned beef” connotes both the juicy, tender cuts of cured brisket familiar in any good Jewish delicatessen or St. Patrick’s Day dinner, and the minced stuff that comes in cans, with a consistency closer to dog food than to pastrami. We’re not here to discuss the canned stuff, which is most familiar in America as the foundation for diner-style corned-beef hash, and is produced almost exclusively in South America. This is a sandwich column, so we’re here to talk about the corned beef that’s best served (with mustard) between two slices of rye bread, with a pickle on the side.
The New York Times—founded the same decade as both the flood of famine-ravaged immigrants from Ireland, and the explosion of the commercial American meatpacking industry—offers a fascinating lens into America’s relationship with the dish. The first mention, in 1857, recounts the poisoning of a Massachusetts family by corned beef, just one of countless horror stories over the next fifty years documenting the dangers of bad meat. An 1862 article reported on the arrest of Julia McDonald and Eliza McCartney for attempting to pass a counterfeit $5 bill “in exchange for a piece of corned beef.” By 1901—in a story that sounds like the setup to a bad joke—the Times was reporting on an argument over the variable virtues of sauerkraut, spaghetti and corned beef between a German, an Italian, and an Irishman. And in 1913, they published a story with the headline: “He Wanted Corned Beef: Irishman Fights When He Gets Spanish Omelet in Hungarian Cafe.”
One of the themes of those Times stories is the extraordinary lengths the Irish were willing to go for corned beef. With or without cabbage, it’s among the foods most indelibly associated with the Irish—but it’s a complicated love affair. The Irish connection to corned beef goes back millennia. In ancient times, Greek and Roman accounts tell of the Celtic affinity of salted meat, and the eleventh century Irish text Aislinge Meic Con Glinne (The Vision of Mac Conglinne), tells of “perpetual joints of corned beef” fit for a king.
By the Middle Ages, as Mark Kurlansky notes in his book Salt: A World History, the Irish were trading for salt with the European mainland, primarily for the curing of beef and pork: “Their salted beef, the meticulously boned and salted forerunner of what today is known as Irish corned beef, was valued in Europe because it did not spoil.” Although corned beef appeared on aristocratic menus, it was never peasant food. In fact, though it became one of Ireland’s biggest exports, corned beef was never fundamental to the local population, whose diet leaned more towards pork, and later, the potato. Nevertheless, the beef from cattle raised on English-owned Irish estates, and then cured and packaged in Cork City, would go on to feed the British Navy in its pursuit of global empire.
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So by the nineteenth century, corned beef and Ireland were linked on the global stage. But it would take the potato famine, and the subsequent mass migration to America, for the dish to become an actual staple of the Irish—or, rather, Irish-American—table. There are various theories as to how this happened. While corned beef and cabbage was a rare meal in their homeland, bacon and cabbage was a favorite. In America, according to some authorities, the newly arrived Irish couldn’t find (or afford) their preferred type of bacon, but corned beef—beyond their budget back home—was cheap, filling, and a reasonable substitute.
Which brings us to the other group most associated with corned beef. Like the Irish, the Jewish immigrants who soon filled New York’s tenements had a history with corned beef going back long before they fled their arrival in America. “Cured meats and sausages entered the Jewish diet during the tenth and eleventh centuries, when Jews were living in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France,” writes Ted Merwin in Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli. When the Jewish population moved East at the invitation of the Polish kings, they brought their expertise in curing meats with them. But, while “pickelfleish” became a standard item on the tables of wealthier Jews, as in Ireland, endemic poverty made beef prohibitively expensive for most.
That wasn’t the case in America, however. As Roger Horowitz writes in Putting Meat on the American Table, the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848 opened up the vast Western prairies to American cattle, launching the nation’s commercial livestock industry, and making beef cheaper then ever before. Now even the Irish and Jewish poor could afford a dish they might once have only dreamed of. And it quickly became clear to one and all that kosher butchers had a way with corned beef that appealed to their new Irish neighbors on a visceral level.
Lindy’s delicatessen in New York, made famous by Damon Runyon
By the end of the 19th century, the kosher delicatessen was a fixture of New York cuisine, and the sandwich had achieved a heretofore unimagined ascendancy. “It may seem odd that the humble sandwich epitomized life in New York during the opulent, ostentatious Jazz Age,” writes Merwin. “But sandwiches were all the rage.” In 1926, the critic George Jean Nathan reported over 5000 establishments in New York specializing in sandwiches—almost 1000 different kinds, “made from ingredients ranging from snails to spaghetti.”
The connection between the Jewish and the Irish goes far beyond an affinity for corned beef, of course. “Others have a nationality,” observed Brendan Behan. “The Irish and the Jews have a psychosis.” No wonder that in writing Ulysses—arguably the greatest novel in Irish (and modern) history—James Joyce made the Jewish Leopold Bloom his central character. “From humble beginnings in America, these two ethnic groups rose to prominence by the middle of the 20th century,” Rory Fitzgerald noted in 2010. “By the time of president John F. Kennedy’s election in 1960, Irish and Jewish Americans were the two wealthiest and most successful ethnic groups in the U.S.”
In the United States, Irish and Jewish leaders helped establish the labor movement (the Irish have Mother Jones, the Jews have Emma Goldman). Political leaders from both groups had to overcome vile prejudice and accusations of divided loyalties before achieving the heights of power. In New York, they both went from running the city’s criminal underworld to running city hall.
Katz’s rush
That they did so fueled by corned beef is as much an American story as it is an Irish or Jewish one. There is something distinctly American in the way the commingling of New-World frontier culture with Old-World ethnic influences resulted in something special and new. As that anonymous author from 99 years ago observed, in addition to feeding New York’s 19th century immigrant population, corned beef helped sustain the nation’s pioneers, its slaves, and its soldiers. It was served at Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural dinner in 1860, and was smuggled by American astronauts into outer space just over a century later. And today, on the Lower East Side, the Katz’s staff is still hand-slicing luscious strips of corned beef. Only now, instead of old Jewish men feeding their hungry Irish Americans neighbors, those wielding the carving knives are primarily Latino immigrants, and the diners hail from the world over. How American is that?
Notable Sandwiches #55: Deli
Fifty-five sandwiches in, this freewheeling culinary chronicle has begun to curl back in on itself: it’s become self-referential, playing the hits. This is partially a function of subject matter: as is true of every one of us, no sandwich stands in isolation. Instead, it exists in a world that cross-references and melds and creates recursive loops that nonetheless taste pretty good on an onion roll. Very few things can survive in proud isolation; even those strange barren peaks that rise out of the sea are home to the wheelings of birds, the lap of water that will someday course against a bather’s skin.
All of this is to say that this week’s subject—the “deli sandwich”—has already been largely covered, most recently in an entry on “corned beef.” There, we delved into the history of the delicatessen in America, and its representation in Jewish, Irish, and German-American cultures. So there is some familiar ground to tread, and a risk of redundancy; it’s hard to cover the history of corned beef without offering some substantive detail about the delicatessen.
A good deli offers more than corned beef, of course—and the modern version is heir to a number of cultures transposed and affixed behind counter glass. The Germans have braunschweiger and bratwursts, potato salad and schmierkase; the Italians, capicola and sopressata and mortadella; the Jews, in their wanderings, have picked up the odds and ends of any number of cultures, and come out with a Teutono-Slavic hash of brisket, tongue, chopped liver and soft unctuous mounds of pastrami. Add pickles, assorted cheeses, rounds of robust sourdough or caraway-flecked rye and you have yourself a meal that announces itself with panache on your tongue, and settles in for the afternoon in your belly.
The delicatessen, first introduced to the U.S. by German and German-Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century, had exploded in popularity by the roaring ‘20s of the twentieth. The novel, well-spiced commodities on offer—coupled with the convenience of grabbing a pound of this and a half-pound of that for ready meals with minimal preparation required—made the corner deli a Jazz Age phenomenon.
“By the 1920s, delicatessens had broken the boundaries of ethnic neighborhoods and entered the mainstream,” write authors Andrew Coe and Jane Ziegelman in A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Great Depression. “With Prohibition and the decade’s time-means-money economic boom, office workers turned to sandwiches as a perfect quick and inexpensive lunch.” It was a time of Model Ts rolling their efficient way down assembly lines, the pulsing beat of Mammon growing ever louder, “gobble-and-git” lunch joints replacing the elaborate eateries of yore, and America boldly striding into full industrialization, fueled by cured meats, mustard, and carbs.
By the middle of the twenties, contemporary pundits were wringing their hands at flapper wives spoiled by the convenience of the deli, neglecting their husbands’ need for sustenance. This led to a related phenomenon—the “delicatessen divorce.” One 1926 journalsympathetically chronicled the delicatessen divorce of a hapless San Francisco husband, who “informed the court that his ‘nervous system became seriously deranged’ because for eight years his wife had given him nothing more substantial than dill pickles, ice cream and chipped beef.”
A century later, in the thoroughly post-industrial era of one-tap food delivery, this much marital angst over a corner deli feels comical—and one wonders why the husband could not simply make himself a snack. (That being said, antediluvian attitudes about female autonomy have made a full and unwelcome comeback in recent years, much as I wish they could be ribboned to bits on the meat slicer of history.)
Mike’s Italian Deli, Arthur Avenue, the Bronx
Sodium-addled spouses aside, the delicatessen has been providing convenient and delicious protein to the American people for over a century. Cold cuts and cured meats—salted, pickled, smoked and sliced, commingled and condimented and served on a bun—is a constant from Sarasota to San Diego. That constancy can be a unifying force, poignant as the tears drawn forth by too-sharp mustard. Like a great triple-decker, the best of humanity is found not in isolation but in joyous communion; no man is an island, and no sandwich is an island either (except the Sandwich Islands in the South Pacific, but that’s just semantics.)
None of us can abide on our own entirely, nor are we innocent of what has shaped us; as the author Robin Hobb puts it, “We are the sum of all we have done added to all that has been done to us.” Each steeped in the brine of our individual lives, we nonetheless create marvels when we come together, and in that union is satiety enough for any feast.
Notable Sandwiches #121: Montreal Smoked Meat
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 vivrethat 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."
Richard Dreyfuss and Jack Warden in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, 1974
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.
Photo Credit: George Ross
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.
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Montreal smoked meat is truly Canadas best kept secret, and long may it stay that way.