Arts & Entertainment
Man On A Mission
In a manifesto for sustaining a Jewish mainstay,
David Sax chronicles his search for authentic deli.
Sue Fishkoff
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
li
San Francisco
C
hicago and Cleveland have the best
corned beef. Detroit is tops for rye
bread. The best smoked meat is in
Montreal, and for pastrami, you can't touch
New York and L.A.
When it comes to Jewish delicatessen,
30-year-old David Sax is the go-to guy. A
longtime deli aficionado, the annoyingly
trim Sax spent three years eating his way
through more than 150 Jewish delis to
research Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect
Pastrami, Crusty Rye and the Heart of Jewish
Delicatessen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt;
$24), a wistful, riotously funny paean to
this quintessential slice of American Jewish
history.
The book, which will be published in
October, is a delicious romp through a fast-
disappearing world.
In 1931, Sax reports, there were 2,000
delis in New York City, three-quarters of
them kosher. Today, Sax says, his research
turns up 25 Jewish delis in the city, two-
thirds of which are kosher. A similar pattern
has followed across North America, with
city after city sounding the death knell for
its last traditional deli. Sax guesses there are
just a few hundred left worldwide, most of
them in the United States.
"The Jewish deli is dying': Sax told JTA.
"Each time I hear a deli closes, something
inside me dies:'
German immigrants brought the deli
to New York in the 1820s, Sax reports.
By the 1870s and '80s, German Jews had
made their own kosher modifications to
the traditional treif recipes: schmaltz, or
rendered chicken fat, instead of lard; ptcha,
or jellied calves' feet, instead of pig trotters.
The origins of the first pastrami sandwich
is shrouded in mystery, although writer
Patricia Volk told Sax her great-grandfather
was the first to slap pastrami between two
slices of rye bread at his kosher butcher
shop in New York in the late 1880s.
Sax chronicles the rise and decline of the
"kosher-style" deli, an American innova-
tion that originally differed from its kosher
counterpart mainly in hours of operation
(they did not close on the Sabbath) and
lack of rabbinical supervision. Reaching its
heyday in the 1950s and '60s, the kosher-
David Sax covers Detroit delis in a chapter titled "Deli Blues and Michigan's
Suburban Jews."
style deli eventually succumbed to econom-
ic pressure and popular tastes and began
putting cheese on turkey sandwiches, offer-
ing milk with coffee and using non-kosher
meats. From there, it was an easy hop to
serving bacon with French toast. Today
few such delis use the term "kosher style,'
preferring to call themselves Jewish or New
York delis.
Sax bemoans the rise of glatt kosher,
a stricter standard for kosher meat that
demands round-the-clock oversight by a
mashgiach, or kosher supervisor. He says it
puts financial demands on deli owners that
most cannot meet. That's why most new
delis are not kosher, he claims — it's just
too expensive.
"There's a lot of money in hechsher," he
says, using the Hebrew for kosher certifica-
tion."It's a turf war that uses religion as
leverage'
But most of this book is about food, the
gloriously fatty, heart-stopping Ashkenazi
cuisine that is the signature of the Jewish
deli: braised brisket in wine sauce; pickled
tongue; cabbage rolls in sweet-and-sour
tomato; matjes herring; and, of course, the
litany of "k's," the knishes, kreplach, kugel
and kvetching.
He saves his highest praise for the deli
meats: corned beef pickled and boiled in
vats of brine; pastrami, lovingly rubbed
with secret spice mixtures, then smoked
and steamed to perfection. The way to suss
out a good deli, he says, is to order the mat-
zah ball soup and whatever deli meat the
city specializes in, be it corned beef, tongue,
pastrami or smoked beef, a softer, gentler
Canadian variant.
Although delicatessen originated in
Europe, American Jews put their own
stamp on it. Pastramia, for example, was in
its native Romania a method of preparing
any meat or poultry, and was in fact origi-
nally used most often for duck or goose. In
the United States, Romanian Jews applied
the same technique to beef, which began
pouring in from the great Western plains
and was much cheaper than game poultry.
"The Jewish deli is rooted in the flavors
of the Old World': Sax says. "Some things
are the same, like the chopped liver, the
chicken soup. Others are amalgamations,
like the sandwich, an American thing that
the Jewish delis appropriated."
A big part of Sax's mission is to encour-
age young Jews to take over delis at risk of
closing or open new ones, a goal that might
seem counterintuitive in today's economic
climate. But he insists the market for deli
food is there, as a new generation looks
back nostalgically to a cuisine that repre-
sents an earlier, simpler, more comforting
era.
"People aren't really looking for innova-
tion in deli',' he insists. "The best things I
see in the new delis are a return to tradi-
tion:' His favorite new Jewish delis are tak-
ing advantage of the organic, do-it-yourself
movement that is influencing the country's
restaurant scene. t's 'innovative' today to
pickle your own meat or make your own
kishke."
In his effort to give props to these new-
comers, Sax glosses over the sad but very
real possibility that the Jewish deli may not
survive outside a few key cities. New York's
deli scene has imploded, he says, and new
delis in Portland, Ore., and Boulder, Colo.,
may be just flashes in the matzah brie pan.
His hopes for the San Francisco Bay
Area seem particularly Pollyannaish. Two
of the four Jewish delis he describes in his
book have closed since he visited them, and
of the remaining two, only Saul's Deli in
Berkeley rates as a real destination; David's
on Geary St., near San Francisco's Union
Square, is a dilapidated version of its for-
mer self.
Two delis to serve a region with more
than 350,000 Jews? It's a shanda. I I
September 24 • 2009
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