Ted Merwin

An excellent timeline of deli food in America, which, like crab rangoons, is/are fairly unknown in the country of origin. Jews didn't eat deli in the shtetls because who could afford meat? Initially rejected by immigrants due to wives being shamed for not feeding their families with homemade meals, corned beef, pastrami, knishes, derma, and matzo ball soup eventually conquered and overwhelmed New York City for a brief fifty years. Kosher and "kosher style" lived in harmony, sometimes even on the same block.

But in the third generation, delis were beaten back by the forces of Jewish assimilation and over-righteous healthful eating, only to become glitzy tourist attractions like Katz's and the Second Avenue Deli (two remaining locations, neither on Second Avenue).

This enjoyable traipse through the big heavy glass doors and the menus as big as billboards also includes a brief trip to the appetizing store. Now THAT would be a book!… (mehr)

Posin's deli in Washington, DC doesn't get a mention in Mr. Merwin's book but that was my deli. Walking distance. Great sandwiches and pastries. My most indelible deli memory, though, is of breakfast at Lenny's in Clearwater, FL, and the bowl of mini pastries that magically arrived at our table.

Mr. Merwin writes about deli with love and good appetite but his daughter prefers Indian and Chinese. Deli isn't modern and it isn't fashionable, despite the recent spate of books and the excellent 2014 film "Deli Man." But the thing is, good deli food is delicious and the complex question to Mr. Merwin becomes: What are the relationships between the food, history, religion, and the deli experience and how can the deli be reintegrated into modern food, and perhaps religious, culture?

Deli hasn't always meant the same thing and the book follows the delicatessen from neighborhood purveyors of Eastern European kosher food to poor immigrants that became neighborhood meeting places that evolved into non-Kosher celebrity hangouts before dying off. Mr. Merwin's heavily footnoted history book ends with the deli's decline into today's kitschy tourist destination. As an afterthought he then takes a very quick look at restaurants and food shops across the country that are trying to walk back toward an authentic deli experience tuned to the 21st century. (Hence "Deli Man.")

The book is informative and enjoyable. It focuses on US deli shops, and not so much on the food itself or the nuances of Jewish food law. For that you want a companion cookbook and a dictionary.

"Pastrami on Rye" has been edited down to only 256 pages. I would like to see the 2-3 other chapters that have been sliced out.

I received a review copy of "Pastrami on Rye: An Overstuffed History of the Jewish Deli" by Ted Merwin (NYU Press) through NetGalley.com.… (mehr)