Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli by Ted Merwin (review)

In Pastrami on Rye, Ted Merwin traces the rise and fall of the delicatessen in American Jewish life and culture. The delicatessen reached its peak not with the first generation of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, but with their children. Between 1920 and 1960, the delicatessen offered a bridge between immigrants and their children and between Jews and the mainstream. It also served as a “third place” (neither work nor home) for Jewish communities, serving food that was rich and traditional, if not always strictly kosher. Eating deli food was, as Merwin says, “a secular rather than a religious way of being Jewish” (6). It was also closely linked to New York City, even as delis sprouted in Jewish communities throughout the nation.

One of Merwin’s most useful contributions is to correct the timing of delicatessen’s entry into American life. Although Eastern European Jewish communities had traditions of pickled, cured, smoked, and salted meats (including pastrami, a Turkish and Romanian delicacy, whose origin is traced to Central Asian horsemen who pressed salted raw beef between horse and saddle to cure it), most Jews in Europe were too poor to consume much. The first delicatessens in New York were German delis, selling fine imported groceries and delicacies like sausages and smoked goose. Jewish delis actually arose from the numerous New York kosher butcher shops, which began selling prepared foods, cooked meats, and quick snacks like knishes. But Merwin argues that the first generation of Eastern European immigrants bought little ready-to-eat deli food since it was quite expensive, especially the meats, and immigrant women resisted take-out food as a dereliction of their home cooking duties.

Merwin uses the records of delicatessen owners and kosher meat-packers to tell his story. Kosher meat was a big business, one whose profitability led naturally to crime and corruption. It was tempting for meat suppliers to replace expensive kosher meat with its cheaper non-kosher counterpart, with customers none the wiser. The inability to discern kosher from non-kosher meat, except by guarantee, points to the fundamental difficulty. Jews who were most insistent on kashrut were not inclined to eat out much. Delis became central to American Jewish life when the second generation became more flexible in dietary matters, willing to eat non-kosher food if it was Jewish style, or if it was eaten outside the home.

Delis truly came into their own as community gathering places and as a force in American Jewish culture as New York Jews left crowded tenements on the Lower East Side for new neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Harlem, and the Bronx. The deli became a place to celebrate second-generation success and American abundance, with rich, fatty meats piled high, soups, cheesecake, and Cel-Ray soda. Delicatessen food was embedded in Jewish popular culture: in songs, skits, family gatherings, even in the recurring association of deli meat with eroticism and virility. On Broadway, delis became showbiz hangouts, partly due to the large presence of Jews in the entertainment industries. High and low met at the Broadway delis before and after shows, eating sandwiches (which were the height of urban modernity in the 1920s). Delis were New York creations but branched out to other cities in the first half of the 20^th century–Miami, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago–and formed anchors for the Jewish communities in those cities.

Delicatessen food by the 1920s offered a refuge for the reputedly lazy “jazz wife,” who ran out and got deli food instead of cooking. But delicatessens also fit into the larger early twentieth-century trend in which almost everyone ate out more often, or bought ready-to-eat food to eat at home. By World War II, meat rationing hurt the delis but also encouraged more eating out. Sliced deli meat required ration stamps to purchase, but a deli sandwich did not. A waiter at the Sixth Avenue Delicatessen claimed...