Exclusive Excerpt from “Save the Deli” in the National Post

Well deli lovers, here’s your first taste of “Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen”

Today the National Post published several pages from the Canadian chapters (14 and 15) on Toronto and Montreal. Enjoy:

Live and Let Rye

While Montreal’s delicatessen still inspires passion the world over, it’s a different story down the 401

David Sax, Weekend Post

Though I was born and raised in Toronto, my parents are both native Montrealers, leaving for Toronto in the late 1970s like so many of their contemporaries, fleeing the unstable politics of Quebec’s separatists. Though her childhood home was just steps from Snowdon Deli, one of Montreal’s finest, Mom rarely ate delicatessen. Her Canadianborn parents, Evelyn and Stanley Davis, were the furthest thing from Bubbe and Zaide.

Grandma cooked from a pantry stocked with cans and powders, often tossing together “concoctions” from leftovers. They ate every meal with a glass of milk. Though they were decidedly Jewish in religion and race, at the table they were basically goyish.

My deli genes came from my father’s side. Though both his parents came to Canada when they were children, they retained the flavour of Romania and Hungary. Long after “Poppa” Sam Sax died at the hands of that fatal sandwich, Daniel and I would visit the apartment of our “Granny” Ella Sax and head straight for her kitchen. On the stove, pots of sweet-and-sour meatballs bubbled.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS AT NATIONAL POST’S WEBSITE

Our favourite treat waited in the oven: her baked rice pudding, a family secret made without any dairy. We’d douse it with maple syrup and chew on the crispy bits of rice while hot raisins burst in our mouths like juicy bombs. Dad would often drive us around his old haunts downtown, through the city of “Poppa” Sam, a garment worker who toiled in Montreal’s schmatte business with limited success, and dressed his kids “sharp as a matzo ball.”

Dad initiated us into the rituals of Montreal Jewish manhood, like the way to ask for the hottest hand-rolled bagels, fresh from the wood-fired oven at St. Viateur Bagel Bakery. It was my father and his best friend, Stephen Rothstein, who first brought me to Schwartz’s Hebrew Delicatessen, Dad pointing out the piled white slices of speck in the shop’s window, saying, “This is what killed Poppa Sam,” while Rothstein correctly demonstrated the way to eat karnatzel, a long, thin Romanian beef salami that Montrealers hang to dry until it literally snaps. Rothstein took a single slice of rye, painted it with yellow mustard, and rolled it around the dark stick of meat. It was the first time I ever ate mustard, and I recall how its sour tinge perfectly offset the garlicky beef.

Even after all the great delicatessens I’ve visited around the world, nothing matches Montreal. It is nirvana for deli purists.

Visiting New Yorkers remark how much Montreal’s delis remind them of all that their city has lost. Montreal’s delis have remained stubbornly original in their decor, food preparation and menus. If the deli is to be saved, a large part of the solution lies in the mysterious Montreal smoked meat.

Smoked meat first appeared in Montreal around 1890, when a Romanian immigrant named Aaron Sanft opened Montreal’s first kosher butcher shop. A large percentage of the Jews who came to Montreal were Romanian, and Romania’s Jewish food traditions specialized in spicing and smoking. For nearly a century, the accepted tale of the smoked meat sandwich’s origins lay with Ben Kravitz, the founder of Ben’s Delicatessen, who had arrived in Montreal from Lithuania in 1899, with fifteen dollars and a bullet wound in the heel, courtesy of a Polish border guard. His wife, Fanny, opened a small fruit stand and candy shop in 1910, and Kravitz claimed to recall the method Lithuanian farmers used to cure and smoke briskets. He pickled the meat in brine and smoked it over hickory bark in the small backyard of the shop, then sliced it, and served it on rye bread with mustard. The smoked meat sandwich was born, so Ben’s legend went.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS AT NATIONAL POST’S WEBSITE

This was taken as gospel until a local historian named Eiran Harris uncovered a potential predecessor, Herman Rees Roth, who had owned a deli in New York until 1908, when he moved to Montreal and opened the British American Delicatessen Store, where he served smoked meat sandwiches, predating Ben’s by over a year.

While Montreal smoked meat’s origins may lie in Romania, Lithuania, or even the Lower East Side of Manhattan, it is now Montreal’s own. Outside the city it is always referred to as Montreal smoked meat, but in Montreal, it is simply called smoked meat or le smoked meat and is eaten with religious devotion. When I spoke about it in the United States, deli lovers gravitated toward each word. “I gotta get my hands on this stuff,” they’d say, to which I sadly informed them that shipping it across the border was impossible. They had to go to Montreal; few did. But when people asked me what, exactly, smoked meat was, I had no satisfactory answer. I found it at Schwartz’s.

Deli, Torontonians are told, is bad for you. Actually, as I was lectured time and again, it will surely kill me. So far as my friends are concerned, this book might as well be the story of a kosher-style Supersize Me. Perhaps in the long run they will be right. If my arteries succumb to the fat and the salt, I owe them all a posthumous apology. But the effect this fearful mentality has had on the deli business in Toronto reflects that of cities all over the continent. Toronto’s Jews are avoiding deli like the plague.

When you walk into Wolfie’s, a small deli in North York covered in Coca-Cola memorabilia, a faded, grease-stained sign declares, “Our Meat is Always Lean. If You Want Fat you Have to Ask For It.” It wasn’t always this way. When he opened in 1975, Dave Gelberman served juicy briskets and pastramis. Back then, 90% of his customers were Jewish. Today, the proportions are completely opposite; gentiles make up 90% of Wolfie’s clientele, with elderly Jews hanging in the minority.

“I must be the only shmuck in the deli business who just keeps trimming his meat until there’s nothing left,” Gelberman said. “I used to carry tongue, baby beef, and chopped liver that my mother-in-law made 40 pounds of every single Friday. We used to have a lineup out the door for that stuff … it was gold.” Wolfie’s is now doing two-thirds the business it did a number of years ago, and the deli has cut back on its hours. To Gelberman, young Jewish Torontonians hardly factor into his business at all. “They come in as often as they go to shul!” he said. Which, believe me, is not often. The supposedly healthy appetites of my contemporaries have migrated elsewhere. Their Jewish food experience is now based on whole wheat bagels and tofu cream cheese. Israeli food has replaced deli, ostensibly because hummus and salads are indeed lower in saturated fat, salt and preservatives. Moreover, while deli is the food of nostalgia, Israeli cuisine is the food of pride. Young Jews today know the past of Jewish Europe mainly from the Holocaust.

But when they eat falafel, they are engaging in a solidarity of sorts with their brethren in the Middle East. They are indulging not in the memory of a lost time and place, but of a proud, courageous, sexy nation. A generation ago, ethnic foods were the occasional treat for Toronto’s Jewish stomachs. Today, it is a safe bet that on most nights of the week the food of Tuscany will feed far more of the Jewish households of Toronto than that of 19th-century Polish Galicia. At Jewish weddings and bar mitzvahs you’ll find more sushi than salami.

- Excerpted from Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen by David Sax. In stores Tuesday, Oct. 20. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

CLICK HERE TO READ THIS AT NATIONAL POST’S WEBSITE

Share This

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 17th, 2009 at 10:10 am and is filed under news, Press. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.