Pastrami

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Ben's Best Deli, Rego Park, NY Ben's Best Deli Rego Park pastrami sandwich.jpg
Ben's Best Deli, Rego Park, NY

Pastrami is a type of cured meat originating from Romania usually made from beef brisket. The raw meat is brined, partially dried, seasoned with herbs and spices, then smoked and steamed. Like corned beef, pastrami was originally created as a way to preserve meat before the invention of refrigeration. One of the iconic meats of Eastern European cuisine as well as American Jewish cuisine and New York City cuisine, hot pastrami is typically served at delicatessen restaurants on sandwiches such as the pastrami on rye.

Contents

Etymology and origin

Slices of pastrami Pastrami Flower.jpg
Slices of pastrami

The name pastrami likely comes from the Romanian verb "a păstra", meaning to preserve or to keep, [1] [2] [3] referencing a traditional method of meat preservation popular prior to refrigeration. Ultimately it was probably derived from the Turkish, Greek and Serbo-Croatian pastirma and bastırma meaning "to press". [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]

Pastrami was introduced to the United States in a wave of Jewish immigration from Bessarabia and Romania in the second half of the 19th century, with the Yiddish pastrame. [9] [10] [2] The modified "pastrami" spelling was probably introduced in imitation of the American English salami. [11] Romanian Jews emigrated to New York as early as 1872. Among Jewish Romanians, goose breasts were commonly made into pastrami because they were available. Beef navel was cheaper than goose meat in America, so the Romanian Jews in America adapted their recipe and began to make the cheaper alternative beef pastrami. [12]

New York's Sussman Volk is generally credited with producing the first pastrami sandwich in the United States in 1887. Volk was a kosher butcher and New York immigrant from Lithuania. According to his descendant Patricia Volk, he prepared pastrami according to the recipe of a Romanian friend and served it on sandwiches out of his butcher shop. The sandwich was so popular that Volk converted the butcher shop into a restaurant to sell pastrami sandwiches. [13] [ additional citation(s) needed ]

Pastrami from Canter's Deli Canter's Pastrami sandwich.jpg
Pastrami from Canter's Deli

Preparation and serving

Beef plate is the traditional cut of meat for making pastrami, although it is now common in the United States to see it made from beef brisket, beef round, and turkey. New York pastrami is generally made from beef navel, which is the ventral part of the plate. [14] It is cured in brine, coated with a mix of spices such as garlic, coriander, black pepper, paprika, cloves, allspice, and mustard seed, and then smoked. Finally, the meat is steamed until the connective tissues within the meat break down into gelatin. [15]

While pastrami is more commonly made with the fat-marbled navel or plate cut, Montreal smoked meat is made with variable-fat brisket. [16] This is because "navel is much harder to find in Canada because of its British beef cut tradition". The use of brisket means that smoked meat is "not fattier throughout the cut, but it has a larger cap of fat, and it has a stringier texture, more fibrous. American-style pastrami is more marbled with fat and has a denser texture." [17]

Greek immigrants to Salt Lake City in the early 1960s introduced a cheeseburger topped with pastrami and a special sauce. The pastrami cheeseburger has since remained a staple of local burger chains in Utah. [18]

Brined and smoked pastrami brisket Pastrami (brisket).jpg
Brined and smoked pastrami brisket

See also

Related Research Articles

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Corned beef, bully beef, or salt beef in some Commonwealth countries, is salt-cured brisket of beef. The term comes from the treatment of the meat with large-grained rock salt, also called "corns" of salt. Sometimes, sugar and spices are added to corned beef recipes. Corned beef is featured as an ingredient in many cuisines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Brisket</span> Cut of beef

Brisket is a cut of meat from the breast or lower chest of beef or veal. The beef brisket is one of the nine beef primal cuts, though the definition of the cut differs internationally. The brisket muscles include the superficial and deep pectorals. As cattle do not have collar bones, these muscles support about 60% of the body weight of standing or moving cattle. This requires a significant amount of connective tissue, so the resulting meat must be cooked correctly to tenderise it. According to the Random House Dictionary of the English Language, Second Edition, the term derives from the Middle English brusket which comes from the earlier Old Norse brjósk, meaning cartilage. The cut overlies the sternum, ribs, and connecting costal cartilages.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reuben sandwich</span> Type of sandwich with meat and sauerkraut

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Smoked meat</span> Type of prepared meat

Smoked meat is the result of a method of preparing red meat, white meat, and seafood which originated in the Paleolithic Era. Smoking adds flavor, improves the appearance of meat through the Maillard reaction, and when combined with curing it preserves the meat. When meat is cured then cold-smoked, the smoke adds phenols and other chemicals that have an antimicrobial effect on the meat. Hot smoking has less impact on preservation and is primarily used for taste and to slow-cook the meat. Interest in barbecue and smoking is on the rise worldwide.

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Pastirma or Pasterma, also called pastarma, pastırma, pastrma, pastourma, basdirma, basterma, basturma, or aboukh is a highly seasoned, air-dried cured beef that is found in the cuisines of Albania, Armenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Bulgaria, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus, Iraq, the Levant, North Macedonia, Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kosher style</span>

Kosher style refers to Jewish cuisine—most often that of Ashkenazi Jews—which may or may not actually be kosher. It is a stylistic designation rather than one based on the laws of kashrut. In some U.S. states, the use of this term in advertising is illegal as a misleading term under consumer protection laws.

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Montreal-style smoked meat, Montreal smoked meat or simply smoked meat in Quebec is a type of kosher-style deli meat product made by salting and curing beef brisket with spices. The brisket is allowed to absorb the flavours over a week. It is then hot smoked to cook through, and finally is steamed to completion. This is a variation on corned beef and is similar to pastrami.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pastrami on rye</span> Classic American deli sandwich

Pastrami on rye is a sandwich comprising sliced pastrami on rye bread, often served with mustard and Kosher dill pickles. It was popularized in the Jewish delicatessens of New York City and has been described as New York's "signature sandwich". It was created in 1888 by the Lithuanian immigrant Sussman Volk, who served it at his deli on Delancey Street in Manhattan.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">American Jewish cuisine</span> Food, cooking, and dining customs associated with American Jews

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jewish deli</span> Restaurant serving Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">SumiLicious Smoked Meat & Deli</span> Deli in Scarborough, Ontario, Canada

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References

  1. Kurlansky, Mark (March 18, 2011). Salt: A World History. Knopf Canada. ISBN   978-0-307-36979-6.
  2. 1 2 Saugera, Valérie (2017). Remade in France: Anglicisms in the Lexicon and Morphology of French. Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-062554-2.
  3. "păstra" . Retrieved September 8, 2024.
  4. Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Edition, 2005, s.v. 'pastrami'
  5. Andriotis et al., Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής
  6. Babiniotis, Λεξικό της Νεας Ελληνικής Γλώσσας
  7. "pastırma". www.nisanyansozluk.com. Retrieved December 7, 2017.
  8. Shortridge, Barbara Gimla; Shortridge, James R. (1998). The Taste of American Place: A Reader on Regional and Ethnic Foods. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN   978-0-8476-8507-3.
  9. Benor, Sarah Bunin (2020). "Chapter 1: Pastrami, Verklempt, and Tshootspa: Non-Jews' Use of Jewish Language in the United States". The American Jewish Year Book. 120: 3–69. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-78706-6_1. ISSN   0065-8987. JSTOR   48742390.
  10. Popescu, Floriana (November 7, 2018). A Paradigm of Comparative Lexicology. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN   978-1-5275-2107-0.
  11. Harry G. Levine, "Pastrami Land, a Deli in New York City", Contexts, Summer 2007, p. 68
  12. "Historical Fact – The Origins of Pastrami". Romania Tourism. Retrieved August 31, 2015. "Goose-pastrama" was the starting point for American pastrami. The Jewish immigrants who settled in Little Romania brought with them a traditional technique for preserving goose by salting, seasoning, and smoking the meat. In America, however, beef was cheaper and more widely available than goose, so pastrama was made with beef brisket instead. Later the name became pastrami—perhaps because it rhymed with "salami" and was sold in the same delicatessens. By the time Little Romania dispersed in the 1940s, New Yorkers from every ethnic background were claiming expertly sliced pastrami as their rightful heritage.
  13. Moscow, Henry (1995). The Book of New York Firsts . Syracuse University Press. p.  123. ISBN   9780815603085. pastrami sandwich origin.
  14. Marks, Gil (November 17, 2010). Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. Wiley. ISBN   9780470943540.
  15. Earl, Martin (March 10, 2017). "How to Make Smoked Pastrami" . Retrieved September 27, 2021.
  16. Sax, David (October 1, 2010), Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen, Mariner Books, ISBN   978-0-547-38644-7
  17. "What's the Difference Between Pastrami and Montreal Smoked Meat?".
  18. Edge, John T. (July 28, 2009). "Pastrami Meets Burger in Salt Lake City". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved December 7, 2017.