“our life-support system wasn’t prepared to cope with the high powered aroma of genuine kosher corned beef.”
I was in a deli the other day in Carmarthenshire. If you’re ever passing, you really ought to visit it. I dream often of their focaccia.
My father ordered a Reuben – potentially the best sandwich ever made.
And then I started talking about the unusually interesting history of the Jewish deli.
Jewish people have invented all kinds of great foods including the British classic of fish and chips (look it up) and also, I recently learned, a device which can turn air into water (see also: water to wine by another famous Israeli)
But one other seriously great food invention by the Jewish diaspora is the diner. A key tenet of American social life throughout much of the 20th century, although its cultural significance has been lessened by globalisation, I think it’s fair to say.
I haven’t eaten meat for around two years now. And I rarely miss it, to be honest, but I’ll be frank: when I read Pastrami on Rye by TED MERWIN which paints a vivid picture of the importance of the Jewish deli in all aspects of American culture, I really wanted to eat a lot of salted meat. Many pickles. Much rye bread.
So incredibly mouthwatering and another confirmation that if you have an interest in life, you can write a book about it and people will buy it.
I hope you enjoy it.
Marc
GESHMAK (Yiddish for snippets, obvs)
Hillel the Elder is a great guy for creating stuff, for saying stuff. Like in this example where he invents the schawarma:
Hillel the Elder, who lived during the time of King Herod and the Roman emperor Augustus (and who gave his name to the national Jewish student organization), devised a creative way to fulfill the injunction in the Torah that the Israelites should eat matzoh and bitter herbs to commemorate their enslavement to the Egyptian pharaohs. He enclosed the herbs, along with a goodly portion of paschal lamb, inside the bread, making a lamb-herb wrap. Indeed, the unleavened bread that Hillel used to make that first sandwich was likely not the stiff, fragile, crumbly stuff that is matzoh but rather a thick, soft, chewy flatbread like Indian roti, Mediterranean pita, Mexican tortilla, or Middle Eastern lavash.
See! I told you:
Fried-fish stalls, similar to those in London (which had been opened by Sephardic Jews—from the Iberian Peninsula—who appear to have invented “fish and chips”)
I can’t remember why there is so much about the Kellogg family in this book but I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting my notes on them. Spoiler: they were wyrd :
John Harvey Kellogg, founder of Kellogg’s cereal company, and his wife, the temperance advocate Ella Eaton Kellogg, insisted that the ingestion of spices and condiments led inexorably to a craving for alcohol. The association stemmed, perhaps, from the practice of placing bowls of spices on the counters of saloons; patrons chewed them to mask the smell of alcohol on their breath.
I particularly enjoyed this passage where cornflakes get invented to help people stop doinking.
Following the theories of an influential Presbyterian minister, Sylvester Graham (the inventor of Graham Crackers), the Kelloggs also feared that eating both meat and spicy food with any regularity would lead to sexual fantasies and masturbation; John Kellogg developed Corn Flakes in order, he declared, to promote sexual abstinence.
Yuri Gagarin’s bite-sized salami (chuckles):
This violated numerous rules of space travel because NASA was testing out various kinds of food to see if they could be safely consumed in space without either flying into the astronauts’ windpipes or into the mechanical controls of the spacecraft. The Russians, by contrast, believed that it was important for astronauts to experience some pleasure and relaxation through having good food on board and had already experimented with giving their astronauts toothpaste tubes of pâté, cheese, chocolate, and coffee, along with tiny pieces of bread, candied fruit jelly, and bits of salami. Indeed, the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on his first voyage in space, gobbled a bite-sized salami sandwich.
From now on I’m exclusively reading sentences like the one highlighted in this beautiful snippet:
In the middle of the Gemini flight, Young suddenly inquired if his partner was interested in a corned beef sandwich. After the astonished Grissom took a bite, he noticed nervously that crumbs of rye bread were starting to float around the cabin and that the smell of the beef was beginning to permeate the ship. “It became instantly obvious,” he later recalled, “that our life-support system wasn’t prepared to cope with the high powered aroma of genuine kosher corned beef.” He reluctantly stowed the sandwich away.
On awkward sponsorship of events, I found this entirely without context:
Miss Hebrew National Salami
This is the kind of mantra that I love things semitic for:
Guilt, according to a Canadian rabbi, is a “terrific condiment.”
BONUS
You’re a luftmensch
One of my all time favourite things about Jewish culture is the creation of Yiddish. If you’re not familiar with it, Yiddish is a language created and used by Jewish disapora all over the world.
It first originated in the 9th century. And since then, it has quite literally snowballed across the world, picking up new pieces of language wherever it goes.
It is now a wonderful microcosm of Jewish history and the challenges its people have faced throughout the ages.
I am totally fascinated by it. And so, in no particular order, are some of my favourite words or sentences. How many do you already know?
Golem – denotes an evil creature. Used for a variety of purposes. ‘This man is a golem’
Schmuck – a foolish person. Must be said with a sort of inflection in the words coming before it to be fully effective. ‘He’s a schmuck.’ Literally, it’s the Yiddish word for penis.
Schwitz – A great word because it’s fun to say. Sweat. ‘Sometimes, I squeeze in a schwitz between meetings (true story, lol).’ (Trans: I sometimes squeeze in a steam room visit between meetings)
Luftmensch – air head. See note on inflection of schmuck and reapply here. Use hands for great effect. A weirdly affectionate insult to say to someone or about yourself.
I also own this book of dirty Yiddish phrases. They are genuinely hilarious and no language can do insults or dirty talk like Yiddish.