[Sca-cooks] OT/OOP NYT Article on Math Formula For the PerfectBacon Sandwich...

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

On Apr 22, 2007, at 9:51 AM, Nick Sasso wrote:

> By default, I assume anything dealing with a deli or pastrami on  
> rye to be
> oringinated in New York City somewhere.

Well, I'd think nothing is ever a done deal without evidence, but  
there's a good chance of it. I remember being surprised to discover  
that Texas has been pretty well stocked with Germans for quite a long  
time, but I hadn't known there were many Jewish people (Kinky  
Friedman notwithstanding).

As I said, it's the Katz's in Houston which is advertising itself as  
a New-York-style Kosher deli, and not the Katz's on Houston and  
Second Avenue advertising itself as a real Houston-style deli, which  
at least suggests something about origins.

But I do think that the concept of the Kosher delicatessen (which is  
distinct from a German delikatessen, or what we now call an Italian  
delicatessen, which is really a salumeria, an Italian charcuterie,  
more or less, in that these are more like shops and a Kosher deli  
tends to be more like a restaurant) was probably designed to  
accomodate the late-19th-century wave of Jewish immigration to the  
US, much of which ended up (if only temporarily) in the Lower East  
Side of Manhattan, centered roughly between East Broadway and Houston  
Streets, East of the Bowery. I believe this is essentially the  
spawning-ground of the Kosher deli.

There are others which probably sprouted either around the periphery  
of the midtown theater district, or unabashedly inside it, perhaps to  
accommodate the great number of Jews in various theatrical trades.  
This can tend to combine healthy appetites with late-night schedules,  
hence places like the Carnegie Deli, Sarge's, the Stage Deli, and the  
venerable Lindy's, now known mostly for its cheesecake recipe, but  
once an extremely popular Jewish-but-not-especially-Kosher deli  
restaurant, and immortalized as Mindy's Restaurant in the stories of  
Damon Runyon.

Junior's, of Flatbush Avenue, Brooklyn, might be placed in this  
category, and has many partisans who swear by it (mostly people who  
regard "Brooklyn" as a religious denomination), but to me it's just a  
diner with a very slight Kosher-deli flare, and known mostly for a  
fairly good cheesecake which has unfairly assumed the mantle of  
Lindy's, now that Lindy's is no more. We're talking about a  
spongecake (!), and not a murbteig-variant pastry, base, and a measly  
2.5 inches high. Heretical fruit toppings. Chocolate. Pfeh! I'm not  
impressed. They're decent cakes, but not what a New York cheesecake  
oughtta be...

Adamantius







"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread, you have to say, let them eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04