The vanishing delights of America’s Jewish delis

PICKLED VEGETABLES, fish and meat preserved in salt, and bread made from rye flour, or baked in a circle with a hole in the middle, were once staple foods for the poor of all backgrounds in central and eastern Europe. But it was Jewish emigrants who brought these recipes to the West, particularly to America, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bagels, lox, pastrami and pickles became mainstays of Jewish deli cuisine, which is the subject of a small, well-curated exhibition at the New-York Historical Society called “I’ll Have What She’s Having”. (The name comes from a scene in “When Harry Met Sally” in which Meg Ryan exaggerates, but not by much, the deliciousness of the menu at Katz’s Delicatessen on the Lower East Side.) The exhibition implicitly asks whether a cuisine that has delighted millions, and helped define the palate of America’s biggest city, continues to be vibrant today.

There is a distinctly elegiac undertone. Though some stalwarts endure—notably the 2nd Ave Deli in New York, Manny’s in Chicago, Shapiro’s in Indianapolis and Langer’s in Los Angeles—over several decades the number of Jewish delis in America has plummeted. Black-and-white pictures of long-gone people eating at long-gone places line the exhibition’s walls. Among the objects on display are a cigarette machine and a case of matchbooks: items from a smokier, vanished world. On a recent afternoon, more than a few visitors, your columnist included, wandered through the exhibit in a nostalgic fog, eyes moist above their smiles.

After all, the Jewish deli is an artefact of a bygone era, shaped by immigration, discrimination and inner-city life. As immigrants’ children assimilated and moved away, the deli became one of many culinary choices—an option steeped in memory and meaning, perhaps, but less a locus of communal Jewish life and more a pleasant place to occasionally eat and reminisce (not always in that order). That may be sad for deli owners and kasha varnishkes addicts, but it is also something to celebrate. The anti-Semitism that kept Jews out of the suburbs and impelled them to seek safety in numbers had waned.

Meanwhile, deli food itself has escaped its confines, too. Fast-food chains sell (admittedly appalling) pastrami and corned beef. For a while, McDonald’s in Germany offered a “Grilled Texas Bagel”. That is a nonsensical phrase to a deli maven: a decent bagel belongs nowhere near a grill and has nothing to do with Texas. But it suggests that bagels—like pizza, hot dogs and other foods once tethered to particular ethnicities—now come across less as specifically Jewish than as broadly American.

The most hopeful part of the exhibit is at the end: a case of menus from modern delis such as Wise Sons in California and the General Muir, a terrific spot in Atlanta. They were founded by young Jewish chefs determined to keep their culinary traditions alive—not because prejudice left them no other outlet, but because the food is delicious, inspiring and an irreplaceable tile in America’s culinary mosaic. ■

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