The regional table / New York
Beef on Weck
Everything in this sandwich exists to carry salt, caraway and horseradish to a piece of beef that has almost no fat and no seasoning of its own.
The document trail here is the roll, not the sandwich, and it runs in that order. New York State Historic Newspapers, the state's own digitised run of its papers, has the word kimmelwecks in The Buffalo News of 30 June 1904, where a man is described as a maker of them, and again in the Buffalo Evening News of 24 October 1910. The sandwich comes much later in the same archive: nothing at all before the Island Dispatch of Grand Island advertised Hot Roast Beef On Kummelweck on 17 October 1957, followed by the Medina Daily Journal of 13 August 1959, whose stand offered roast beef always well done and beef on kummelweck as two different orders. The short form everybody now uses is later still — the earliest the archive will give is a restaurant advertisement in the Lake Shore News and Times of 11 July 1963, running beef on weck after the pizza and the spaghetti, and by 23 March 1975 the Courier Express was calling it Buffalo's own. The bakery advertisements sit in between: fresh kimmelweck rolls sold by the dozen in papers as far from the city as Wellsville and Westfield on 19 April 1961. No inventor and no founding year appear anywhere in that record, so this page names neither. What the record does show is a roll that was ordinary in Buffalo half a century before the sandwich had a printed name.
The name is German and it is two plain words. An 1874 printing of Adler's Dictionary of the German and English Languages gives Kümmel as cumin and caraway-seed, and lists Kümmelbrod as bread with caraway seeds in it. Emil Braun's The Baker's Book, a New York trade manual of 1902, glosses the other half all through its lists of European bakery work — Brotwecken a bread roll, Patent Wecken a patent roll, Kaffeehaus Wecken a coffeehouse roll — and describes the hard salted roll itself in Bohemian bakeries, washed and well sprinkled with salt, some also sprinkled with caraway seed. A caraway roll, then, made by the trade that half of Buffalo came from: H. Perry Smith's History of the City of Buffalo and Erie County of 1884 says there are few Northern cities where the German element forms a larger proportion of the population, and counts the parents of the city's public school children in 1880 at 9,088 German against 4,612 American. The beef is settled by USDA's Institutional Meat Purchase Specifications, which puts the top round under item numbers 168 and 169 and names the muscles in it, the semimembranosus foremost. It is a lean, close-grained, nearly fatless piece of meat, which dictates the rest: roast it low, stop it rare, and shave it thin, because there is nothing in it to forgive a cook who does otherwise. No document prints quantities for this sandwich, so the ones below were worked out for this page.
Why this version works
Shaved thin, across the grain. A lean close-grained muscle eats tough in any slice thick enough to hold its shape. Cut against the grain and thin enough to drape, the same beef goes tender because no single fibre is long enough to fight. This is why the dish belongs to slicers and carving knives rather than to a plate of roast beef.
The roll carries the seasoning. Salt and caraway go on the outside of the roll, not into the beef, so they land on the tongue first and undiluted. That is the order the archive shows too: the salted caraway roll was a Buffalo staple long before anyone put roast beef in it, and Braun's trade book describes exactly that finish on a hard roll in 1902.
Jus on the crown, not on the plate. Dipping only the top of the roll wets one face and leaves the cut faces and the bottom dry, so the sandwich holds together to the last bite while still tasting of the roast. Ladling jus over the whole thing gives you a bowl of bread in ten minutes, which is a different and much worse dish.
Top round, roasted low and pulled rare. IMPS item 169 is the semimembranosus with the muscles around it and almost no intramuscular fat. Fat is what lets a roast sit at a higher temperature without seizing, and this cut has none, so a 250°F oven and a thermometer are not fussiness. Pulled at 125°F it stays red and slices cleanly; ten degrees further and the same roast turns grey and fibrous.
