Pastrami on Rye

A recipe for how to make a pastrami on rye could start and end like this: Go to Katz’s and buy one. That would work for New Yorkers, anyway. For those not in NYC, it might be, Go to Protzel’s [St. Louis], Go to Langer’s [Los Angeles]; Go to Zingerman’s [Ann Arbor]; and on and on depending on your locale. In every case, the answer is not: Go to your local supermarket and get the plastic-wrapped pastrami in the deli case. No no no, if that’s your best option, let me direct you to the bologna.

Now let’s imagine that you don’t want to buy a fully formed pastrami sandwich from one of these hallowed institutions of Jewish meat, that you’re committed to actually assembling your own at home. Maybe you don’t want to eat it right away and instead intend to fix one up later. That’s understandable, the sandwich doesn’t exactly get better as it sits and the bread grows weary from grease. Then the recipe might reasonably go something like this: Buy pastrami from Katz’s or [insert your favorite Jewish deli here] and put it on Jewish rye with mustard. Don’t forget the pickle. Still not much of a recipe.

See, on one level, there’s a lot to a pastrami sandwich, but it mostly has to do with the quality of the pastrami.* A good pastrami sandwich isn’t possible without good pastrami, and that’s hard to come by. With roots in Romanian Jewish cooking, pastrami is a slab of beef brisket that’s rich with smoke and spice and, unless you’re unlucky, streaked with the melting juices of ample beef fat. When hot and sliced thinly against the grain, then piled to Tower of Babel heights on soft Jewish rye, the fat should seep into the bread, moistening it to translucence without wetting it to mush in the way only animal blubber can. A union happens in that simple construction, the fat weaving the spices and smoke of the pastrami with the bread’s strong notes of caraway. A spicy brown mustard, whether spread on the sandwich or served on the side, cuts through all the richness.

*It also has to do with the quality of the rye, as I learned years ago upon my first visit to Langer’s in Los Angeles. One bite of my pastrami sandwich and my eyes opened wide. “Damn, that’s good rye,” I remember saying as I realized the bread I’d been eating in New York my whole life was nothing close to this stuff.

Lots can be said about the pastrami, but the sandwich? Not quite as much, at least not on a technical level, unless we’re talking about making the pastrami from scratch. Making your own pastrami is a serious undertaking, which means having good premade stuff shipped from a deli is still going to be the way easier option. Now, if you really are willing and able to brine and cure and soak and smoke and steam a big hunk of brisket, then head right this way to Serious Eats’ tested and best-ed recipe for homemade pastrami. No matter how you procure the meat, the rest couldn’t be easier.

But oh, how I don’t want to end it there, because the pastrami on rye deserves more. I don’t eat them often, but as a half-Jewish kid from Brooklyn, I can count pastrami on rye along with the other classic Jewish deli sandwiches as members of a small handful of foods that I consider to be part of my own otherwise fairly weak cultural identity. My mom used to take me to one or another of the city’s iconic delis and we’d eat as much much of a couple sandwiches as we could manage, saving the uneaten portions for what was always the most memorable brown-bag lunches of my life. It was thrilling to unwrap a hulking tongue on rye (my personal go-to, though pastrami is a close second) in my public elementary school’s cafeteria instead of the PB&Js and tuna salads that were the standards most other days.

I loved tucking into those flavors a day after the restaurant visit almost as much as I did eliciting the grossed-out reactions of my classmates: “You’re eating tongue?!” they’d cry while pantomiming a barfing motion as I dramatically bit through the tender layers with a self-satisfied smile. Those kids, despite being raised in the very city that birthed this beauty, didn’t know what they were missing.

The emergence of the pastrami sandwich happened roughly a century before my 1980s lunchroom antics, some time around the turn of the turn of the 20th century, when Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants who’d been hawking Old World preserved meats from push carts on the Lower East Side of New York City slowly transformed their humble businesses into deli counters, and then full-fledged sit-down restaurants.

This transformation partly happened under regulatory pressure from City officials, who wanted to clean up the chaotic and dirty streets by limiting where cart vendors could work and how many would be licensed to do it; one consequence of the widespread ban on roving carts was that some shifted to brick-and-mortar operations that became the modern delicatessen. The Jewish delicatessens we know today also came to be through the natural fusion of foods as they collide in new places. “The turning point for Jewish delicatessen, which catapulted it from an obscure immigrant food to an American cuisine,” writes David Sax in his book, Save the Deli: In Search of Perfect Pastrami, Crusty Rye, and the Heart of Jewish Delicatessen, “was the marriage of this cookery with the simultaneously emerging American obsession with the sandwich.”

Exactly who first sandwiched the pastrami is unknown, though Sax relays an anecdote about a Lithuanian butcher named Sussman Volk whose great granddaughter claims was the first to have put pastrami between two slices of rye at his Lower East Side deli at some point in the years following his arrival in NYC in 1887.

Perhaps he was the first, perhaps not. But he was at the vanguard of an immigrant tradition that’s getting close to 150 years old, and it’s one we can keep going one pastrami sandwich at a time.

Spread the rye bread with mustard (alternatively, you can keep the mustard out of the sandwich and serve it on the side for dipping). Pile with the pastrami, close the sandwich, halve, and serve, preferably with pickles.

Notes

Exactly how much pastrami you put on the sandwich is hotly debated and totally up to you. Some delis will pack upwards of a pound of beef onto one sandwich, which I think borders on the grotesque. The half-pound suggested here is generous without being absurd; you could of course put a little less, but don’t go too skimpy or it won’t be quite right.