Pastrami: From an Old Empire to the New World

7 MINUTE READ

Author Across Cultures Yang-May Ooi can buy pastrami at her local M&S. But whenever she eats it, she thinks of New York. Curious about how a Jewish deli favourite got there, she follows a trail through Romania, the Ottoman Empire and Central Asia to see how this Eastern European food travelled and evolved over centuries before arriving in the New World.

Pastrami: From an Old Empire to the New World

The other day I was eating a pastrami sandwich, with mustard and gherkins, when it struck me that I never eat pastrami without thinking of New York. It is one of those foods that seems to belong to that city in my imagination, inspired by movies and books: New York delis, enormous sandwiches piled high with peppery beef, jostling New Yorkers briskly and brusquely making their way through life. Never mind that the pastrami I was eating had come from my local M&S!

Following on from my articles about Beef Rendang and Sunday Roast, it seems apt to look into the story of another recipe for beef, Pastrami. My first question was: Why is this version of beef associated with with New York? And where had it come from before it got there?

The Romanian connection

My research showed me that the immediate ancestor of American pastrami is Romanian pastramă, a seasoned preserved meat traditionally made from mutton, pork or beef. The Jewish community living in Romania took this recipes and made their own versions according to Jewish dietary laws, using meats such as goose and beef.

So, when Romanian and other Eastern European Jews migrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they brought their food traditions with them. In America, where beef was plentiful, pastramă evolved into the cured, smoked and steamed beef we know as pastrami. In New York’s Jewish delicatessens, it eventually became the towering pastrami-on-rye sandwich that we know today.

But the trail of my research into the history of pastrami took me further back beyond Romania.

What did the Ottomans ever do for us?

The etymology of words is fascinating especially for an English Literature grad like me. So looking at the origin of the word pastrami led me to first to Romanian pastramă – then further back to Greek pastourma, Armenian basturma, Turkish pastırma.

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The Turkish word is related to bastırmak, meaning to press. Behind pastırma lie much older Turkic traditions of preserving meat by salting and drying. (Interestingly, Google Translate translates pastirma into English as bacon, our Anglo equivalent of salted, dried meat.) While tracing a direct causal lineage is difficult, according to scholarly sources, it can be generally said that from the eleventh century onwards, when Turkic peoples, particularly the Seljuk Turks, moved westwards into Anatolia, they brought with them the languages, customs and food traditions of the Turkic world, which encountered the cultures already established there. 

By the end of the thirteenth century, another Turkic dynasty, the Ottomans, was emerging in northwestern Anatolia. The Ottoman Empire would eventually rule territories stretching across southeastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa for more than six centuries. It was a Muslim empire, but its population included large Christian and Jewish communities as well as Muslims.

What happened to the meat along the way?

In the melting pot (or cooking pot?) of the vast Ottoman Empire, the drying and curing techniques melded and transformed in the mix of different cultural and cooking traditions. Turkish pastırma, particularly associated with Kayseri in Anatolia, is beef cured and dried before being coated with çemen, a pungent mixture of fenugreek, garlic and red pepper. Armenian Christians made basturma. Greek Orthodox Christians had pastourma. Further into the Balkans, Romanian Christians made pastramă.

These communities changed the meat they used as well as the name. Muslims did not eat pork; Christian communities could use pork as well as sheep and other meats; Jewish communities followed kosher dietary laws. There was no standard recipe travelling intact from one place to another. Meat, seasoning and preparation varied according to what was available and who was cooking it.

Pastırma. Basturma. Pastourma. Pastramă. Pastrami.

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Meanwhile, back in modern times… 

The pastrami sandwich is distinctively part of Jewish-American food culture, through the delis that the migrants from Europe opened. These delis offered fast, home-cooked hot food for the bustling metropolis that was New York. Over time, the flavours of one community of migrants became a hit with New Yorkers, all of whom also had migrant origins, whatever their background. The city took the food as their own. Delis and the food they offered were also made famous by writers and film-makers whose creative work eventually reached a global audience.

But there are versions of pastrami that are also Romanian, Armenian, Greek and Turkish – cousins, I like to think, of the more famous New York version.

Cultures sometimes evolve or create foods, traditions and objects from scratch. But we also inherit, borrow and adapt. Something arrives from somewhere else and people adapt it according to their own tastes, beliefs and circumstances. Given enough time, it becomes part of what they view as theirs.

We might also say that of people. Turks inter-marry with Greeks. Armenians may travel towards Romania and their bloodlines become intermingled. Migrants – whether Romanian, Jewish, Irish, Asian and more – arrive in the New World and like their foods that come with them, they become American through the marriage of blood and DNA over the generations. 

Time travel with your own favourite “national dish” 

If we step back and look at the food that we think of as distinctively “our food” – British, Malaysian, Chinese, Italian, American and more – many dishes most likely began somewhere else, or have essential ingredients that came from somewhere else. Perhaps belonging doesn’t require a single point of origin. Something can arrive from elsewhere and become genuinely ours without ceasing to have belonged – in a different form or style – to someone else.

If you followed one of your favourite “national dishes” back through the generations, where might it take you? Who else might you meet along the way?

So, what food would you choose to follow backwards? Do let me know via the comments or an email reply to the newsletter version of this story. Or ask your friends and family what they think the next time you sit down for a meal!

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Sources

Kayseri Mutfağı – Republic of Türkiye Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Kayseri Provincial Directorate
https://kayseri.ktb.gov.tr/TR-55146/kayseri-mutfagi.html

The King of Pastrami: Looking Back at Katz’s Deli – Tenement Museum
https://www.tenement.org/blog/the-king-of-pastrami-looking-back-at-katzs-deli/

Romania and Pastrami – https://www.instagram.com/reel/C4gCp3BpEik/?hl=en 

History of Pastrami – Wikipedia – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastram%C4%83 

What is Pastourma: An Unforgettable Journey in Taste and Tradition – Greek and Pastrami https://mpoumpas.com/blog/what-is-pastourma/ 

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Photo:

pastrami sandwich, edited –  https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-of-a-ham-sandwich-23531331/ 

Turkey – https://pixabay.com/photos/istanbul-turkey-mosque-courtyard-9939687/

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