Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli (7 page)

At the turn of the twentieth century, some delicatessen stores installed tables, either inside or out on the sidewalk. For example, the delicatessen store owned by Chotzinoff’s family had only three tables. At the grand opening, the relatives who were occupying the tables started to get up to let some of the bona fide customers sit down; Chotzinoff’s father waved them back down again, under the logic that the more crowded the store seemed, the better it would be for business. Meanwhile, the delicatessen counter did a booming business.

Was a delicatessen with tables a store or a restaurant? This was a question that even the courts had a difficult time answering. In a case before the New York Supreme Court in 1910, a delicatessen owner on the Lower East Side sued a fellow business owner who opened a restaurant next door to her store; the
new neighbor argued that because his establishment had tables, it was a bona fide restaurant, not a delicatessen. The judge decided that a delicatessen could indeed have tables; he pointed out that delicatessens could come in all types, comparing them, “in their infinite variety,” to Cleopatra!
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This issue bedeviled even the kosher delicatessens that spread outside the city; the owners of one in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1914 were sued by their landlord for conducting a restaurant, in violation of the terms of their lease, because they occasionally permitted customers to sit at the family table at the rear of the store. The judge decided that their establishment could not be considered a restaurant; he found that the “agreement between the parties with respect to conducting a kosher restaurant is not violated by the selling of dried fish, frankfurters, or other articles usually kept in a delicatessen store, even though such articles are eaten upon the premises by the purchasers.” He compared the situation to one in which customers purchase cold snacks in a country store and consume them in the building, cracker-barrel style.
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With or without tables, delicatessens became targets of a nationwide campaign to enforce Sunday closing laws. According to the historian Batya Miller, the last two decades of the nineteenth century witnessed the rise of evangelical and social-reform-minded Protestants, who deemed it their religious obligation to force others to observe the Sabbath.
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This was supported by the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1885 ruled that a Chinese laundryman in San Francisco could be compelled to close his shop on Sundays, under the rationale that the government has a right “to protect all persons from the physical and moral debasement which comes from uninterrupted labor.”
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These laws, which date back to the early seventeenth century in Virginia, required that businesses be closed on Sundays in observance of the Christian Sabbath. (They were called “blue laws” since they were written on blue paper in New Haven during the colonial era.) They posed a significant problem for many Jewish business owners throughout the country; if they
were closed on Saturday in observance of their own Sabbath, then closing on Sunday deprived them of essential weekend business. Even if they were not formally prosecuted, Jewish storekeepers were often the victims of police extortion if they refused to obey the Sunday closing law.
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More than 150 owners banded together in 1895 into a formal association of delicatessen dealers to prevail upon the city to allow them to remain open on Sundays. Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt informed them that they could sell their products until ten o’clock in the morning—when church services typically began—and could fill deliveries throughout the day if they had been received before that hour. This pleased most of the butchers and grocers, who were happy to have the day off; they argued that anyone who needed provisions for the day could purchase them before ten o’clock. But the delicatessen dealers, especially those who owned smaller neighborhood stores, explained that they needed to stay open all day on Sunday in order to serve their less affluent customers who did not own refrigerators.
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Few delicatessen owners were pacified by Roosevelt’s making an exception for delicatessens that had tables in their establishments. But they got a sympathetic hearing from Excise Commissioner Julius Harburger, who fulminated against the Sunday law, informing the delicatessen owners at a public meeting in July 1895 that their stores “are a necessity to the people; they are part of the people; they are the existence of the people.”
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His rhetoric became even more overheated in a speech a month later to his constituents, declaring that “under monarchical forms of government, under despotic powers, the people are not hampered, molested, or coerced, as we are under the restrictive policy of the Sunday law,” which, he said, led to “the discomfort of three-quarters of our city’s population, and the loss of millions of dollars.”
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Sunday closing laws nevertheless continued in effect, with protests continuing for years. In 1899, the editor of the
New York Times
sympathized with the delicatessen owners, and he
penned a series of ringing editorials in their defense. The first noted that Sunday was the biggest day of the week for the delicatessen trade. “Everyone who lives in New York knows that it is the custom of some nine-tenths of the householders of New York, not alone of German birth, to give their servants Sunday evening off, and on that day to skirmish, as it were, for their evening meal.”
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After lambasting the statute that prevented the consumption of delicatessen food on Sundays in the metropolis. the editor spoke up for the “scores, if not hundreds of thousands,” of New Yorkers who purchase food from delicatessens on Sundays. Nor, he pointed out, can city dwellers necessarily buy the food ahead of time, since “Sunday is their visiting day. If unexpected visitors arrive and there is ‘nothing in the house,’ the dispatch of a messenger to the dealer in cooked food is the natural and ready recourse of the host and hostess.”
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An advice columnist declared that a housewife would be appropriately frugal if she would “fit up her reserve shelf against the coming of the unexpected guest, and so forestall the hurried trip to the delicatessen store, which is such a drain on both time and pocketbook.”
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The government also recognized that exceptions needed to be made. A bizarre compromise was worked out February 1899 in which the delicatessens could remain open on Sundays if, like caterers, they sold only complete meals, rather than uncooked food or individual items. Thus, delicatessens would refuse to sell a package of meat by itself, but if a loaf of bread were added to the order, then the sale could take place.
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Furthermore, if customers desired to carry out the food, then they were obliged to pretend that the delicatessen was delivering it to them, agreeing to act as the agent of the store in bringing it home! After considerable wrangling over the next several months, the courts finally relented, permitting delicatessens to purvey cooked food on Sundays. Two hundred euphoric delicatessen owners celebrated their victory in a park in Upper Manhattan.
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Nonetheless, the delicatessen raids resumed in 1913 under the direction of Rhinelander Waldo, Tammany’s corrupt police commissioner. These were more successful, since the delicatessen dealers were induced to participate by being made “delicatessen deputies,” which enabled them to spy on their competitors and have them served with summonses. Again, only “prepared” food could be sold; it was left up to the policeman on the scene—who was often obliged to rely more on his taste buds than on the statute books—to decide what constituted this type of edible. But rather than having to close all day on Sunday, delicatessens were permitted to remain open before 10 a.m. and from 4 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., in order to capture the lucrative Sunday-evening dinner trade.

The tide was turning in terms of American eating patterns. The home-cooked Sunday dinner, a staple of American life, especially
for rural, churchgoing families, had largely been transformed, in the urban setting, into a take-out delicatessen meal. In 1920, an anonymous social critic in
Life
magazine satirically compared a typical 1890s Sunday-school picnic to one of his own day; he contrasted the earnest “packing of the [homemade] chicken sandwiches and the frosted cake” in the earlier period to his own generation’s lackadaisical, last-minute visit to the delicatessen.
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Some Jews, however, resisted the incursion of delicatessen food into their diet. While elderly immigrants, by contrast, “frowned on delicatessen and clung to their accustomed boiled and sweet-and-sour meats,” according to Samuel Chotzinoff, the younger generation “took to delicatessen for its spiciness, preferring it to the bland, boiled meats their mothers served at home.”
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Eating delicatessen food could be, for these younger Jews, a rebellious act. The critic Alfred Kazin noted that the pungency of delicatessen sausages carried, for him, an erotic charge. “Wurst carried associations with the forbidden, the adulterated, the excessive, with spices that teased and maddened the senses to demand more, still more.” Only on Saturday nights, when the holy Sabbath gave way to the profane weekday, could this food “be eaten with a good conscience.” Indeed, this was food that was “bought on the sly” and was “supposed to be bad for us”—associated with the fact that it was “made in dark cellars,” far from the light of day.
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While the spiciness of delicatessen meats may have been a boon to some customers, spices had been, since the mid-nineteenth century, the object of opprobrium in American culture. Progressive reformers had found that spices were frequently used to disguise the fact that food was spoiled or tainted. Furthermore, there were long-standing associations between the eating of spicy foods and excessive drinking. 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.

As Ella Kellogg opined in her popular cookbook
Science in the Kitchen
, “True condiments such as pepper, pepper sauce, ginger, spice, mustard, cinnamon, cloves, etc. are all strong irritants” that are “unquestionably a strong auxiliary to the formation of the habit of using intoxicating drinks.”
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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.
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Delicatessen owners throughout the country were thus obliged, from time to time, to confront the widespread perception that their fare was both unhealthy and unclean. The social worker Lillian Wald, who founded the Henry Street Settlement House, instructed immigrant Jewish mothers to refrain from serving smoked and salted meat to their children and to feed them fresh fruits and vegetables instead. A dietician who visited a kosher delicatessen in an unnamed western city in 1928 was shocked by the gluttony that she observed, noting that one obese female customer would “make a good addition to the growing army of Jewish diabetics,” and she fantasized about pulling the woman’s son out of the delicatessen and into a healthier, more rural place—where he could be furnished with less salty, sugary, and fatty victuals.
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While the cleanliness of the deli was also highly suspect, these concerns could be allayed, delicatessen owners were told, if they dressed in the proper clothes. In the pages of the
Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine
, the main trade journal for the delicatessen owners in New York, store owners were reminded that anyone handling or serving food was compelled, by municipal
legislation, to wear white. An organization called the Sanitation League informed the dealers, quoting a former city health commissioner who had been elected to the U.S. Senate, Royal S. Copeland, that “the man who is
slovenly
and who makes a poor appearance because of improper uniform or clothing, is sluggish and inefficient mentally and physically.” According to Copeland, “if you compel workers to wear clean ‘spic and span’ uniforms or outer garments, you improve their morale as well as their disappearance [
sic
]. . . . It is thus of real importance to all distributors of food or drink to ‘trade up’ in the matter of the appearance of their men.”
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Kosher meat companies and delicatessens competed to offer the products that were seen as the cleanest and healthiest. In a Yiddish advertisement in the
Mogen Dovid Delicatessen Magazine
in August 1931, Barnet Brodie trumpeted its “modern, sanitary factory” that produced corned beef, tongue, pastrami, salami, bologna, and frankfurters that were not just “famous for their taste and quality” but that were supervised by the rabbinical authorities in the city.
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Krainin, the founder of Hebrew National, lamented in an article in a popular magazine, the
Jewish Forum
, that no rabbi had seen fit to explain to the general public that the kosher laws prohibited the consumption of meat from unhealthy or diseased animals; Krainin defined this as the essence of the kosher system.
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Indeed, the Chelsea Delicatessen, located on Ninth Avenue between Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Streets, advertised itself as providing “Cleanliness, Quality and Service Above All” in the furnishing of “sandwiches and salads of all cuts and preparations”—cleanliness came first, and everything else followed in its train.
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Balancing out the reputedly unhealthy qualities of delicatessen food, along with its fattiness and saltiness, was the drink of choice that accompanied it. Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Tonic was first distributed (according to company lore) in 1869 by a doctor who gave out spoonfuls to children on the Lower East Side to help alleviate their digestive problems. The bright-green soda was sold only in delicatessens until the 1980s, when it
became available in supermarkets. (The name was changed to “soda” in the 1920s when the government, which was cracking down on the sale of patent medicines, objected to the use of the word “tonic.”) In addition to the use of celery in treating physical ailments, it was also widely employed to reduce anxiety. A Victorian “guide to life,” published in 1888, recommends that all people who are “engaged in labor weakening to the nerves should use celery daily in the season, and onions in its stead when not in season.”
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The food writer Leah Koenig has pointed out that carbonated beverages, in general, reminded customers of the hot-spring health spas that used mineral water to relieve both physical and psychological distress.
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Popular culture also depicted delicatessen food as unhealthy. A mean-spirited 1920s vaudeville monologue, “In the Delicatessen Shop,” features a delicatessen owner with a very heavy, mock-Yiddish accent who tries to cater to her customers’ needs while attempting to control a brood of children who are playing games with the food, as well as putting both the cat and the baby inside the counter. “Mine gracious! Izzy! Such a poy!” she finally bursts out. “Coome vrum dot counter behind. Vhen papa come he should spunish you vit a stick. How you oxpect your mamma to zell to de gustomers vhen dey seen you rolling dem epple pies on de floor around?”
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This was a routine almost certainly written for non-Jewish entertainers known as “Hebrew” comics who traded on anti-Semitic attitudes.
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The food sold in the delicatessen is portrayed as not fit for human consumption, just as Jews were typically portrayed as unsuitable for participation—unkosher, one might say—in American society. The Jewish deli owner is a laughing stock, her products—and her very personhood—irrevocably tainted. As the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has noted, Jews were disparaged as racial outsiders who had the potential to pollute the racial stock of America.
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These stereotypes made Jews themselves unpalatable to “native” Americans; one commentator at Harvard University in the early 1920s justified strict quotas on Jewish admissions by calling
Jews an “unassimilable race, as dangerous to a college as indigestible food to man.”
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