The regional table / New York
Pastrami on Rye
Pastrami is four processes in a row — a cure, a crust, a smoke and a steam — and the one people skip is the steam, which is the one that makes it tender.
The word gets to New York before the sandwich does, and it can be followed in dictionaries. Sir James Redhouse's A Turkish and English Lexicon, London 1890, prints basdirma with the note "vulg. pastirma" and defines it as meat flavored with spices and garlic, and cured under pressure; the verb underneath it, basdirmaq, is to press, and the lexicon gives basdirmaji for the man who makes or sells the stuff. Three years later Frédéric Damé's Nouveau dictionnaire roumain-français, a Romanian dictionary of 1893, has PASTRAMA as "viande salée et séchée à l'air" — meat salted and dried in the air — and thinks the trade around it worth two entries of its own, pastramar for the maker and pastramagiŭ for the seller, that last one still carrying the Turkish suffix. The people who brought the word are in the record too. The Savannah Tribune of 18 June 1892 reprints a special census of the Jews of New York's east side sweaters' district — something more than 111,000 people, of whom it says "All of these were foreigners, most of them Russian, Polish and Roumanian Jews". Ten years later the Macon Telegraph of 18 September 1902 leads its front page with Secretary Hay's appeal to the European powers over Romania's treatment of its Jews and the emigration it was driving. The Immigration Commission's Dictionary of Races or Peoples, 1911, counts Roumanians and Hebrews as two separate races, puts Roumanian immigration for 1890–1910 at 82,704 with 76,755 of those arriving from Austria-Hungary and comparatively few from Romania itself, and lists, in its table of Romania's own population after Reclus, 300,000 Jews among 4,700,000 Roumanians.
For the earliest dated appearance of the food itself, the open archive that answers is Georgia's, which carries syndicated and local advertising from everywhere. Searched under every spelling, it puts the word on an American counter in 1901: the Macon Telegraph of 30 March 1901 runs a grocer's line of bologna, ring, frankfurter, liver wurst and pastroma; the Brunswick Times-Call advertises through that August that there is "Fine pastrama and spiced beef on ice, fresh every Monday at Nussbaum's Delicatessen store", and by 29 September the same paper's list of the store's meats reads "Spiced beef, Smoked beef, Smoked tongue, Rolat, Pastrami" — the modern spelling, in Georgia, in 1901. The Brunswick News has it among the sausages in November 1906, next to knackwurst and corn beef; the Athens Banner of 6 January 1916 goes further and sells "Pastrama Raulade Flanks", which puts the cut in the belly of the animal where it belongs. These are advertisements and not origins: nothing opened here names a shop, a man or a year as the beginning of the dish, so this page names none. What they do show is a word nobody thought needed explaining in 1901 and that American print was still translating half a century later — the Atlanta weekly The Southern Israelite prints "Pastrami — lb. 90c (Spiced Beef)" on 1 April 1938 and "HOT PASTRAMI SANDWICH ON TWIST (Peppered Beef)" on 12 December 1958, and a Georgia menu of 5 February 1959 offers "Kosher Salami or Rumanian Pastrami on Rye" for sixty cents. No pre-1930 printing gives quantities for any of it, so everything below was worked out for this page.
Why this version works
The steam is the step people skip. Smoke gets the meat to 160°F and then stalls, and a navel at 160°F is still a chewy, collagen-bound piece of beef. What turns it is hours between 195°F and 205°F in wet heat: the connective tissue goes to gelatin, the fat between the muscle layers renders, and the crust softens just enough to slice instead of shattering. Push it to that temperature in the dry smoker instead and you get the same number on the thermometer with a dried-out, sooty slab attached to it.
Nitrite does three jobs and has a legal ceiling. It fixes the colour that makes pastrami pink instead of grey, it gives cured meat its particular tang, and it is the thing standing between a week-long cure and the bacteria a long low smoke would otherwise suit. 9 CFR 424.21(c) sets the terms: for a dry cure, 1 ounce of sodium nitrite to 100 pounds of meat, and in no case more than 200 ppm calculated as sodium nitrite in the finished product. The same regulation orders that supplies of it be kept under the care of a responsible employee and their nitrite content clearly marked, which tells you what sort of substance it is. Weigh it, never scoop it, and use only the diluted curing salt sold for home use.
The crust goes on dry meat, after the cure comes off. Coriander and black pepper cracked coarse and pressed onto a rinsed, air-dried slab make a shell that smoke sticks to and that survives hours of steam. Ground spice does not: it dissolves into the wet surface, goes bitter over a long smoke and washes off in the steamer. The cure is rinsed and the meat soaked first because a slab salted for a week has a rim far saltier than its middle, and an hour in cold water evens that out.
The cut is the belly, and the federal papers say so twice. USDA's Institutional Meat Purchase Specifications for fresh beef, Series 100, make item 120A — the brisket flat — the M. pectoralis profundi alone, trimmed practically free of fat, which is exactly the wrong piece of meat for a week of curing and a day of heat. The plate items, 121 and 122, are the belly: the full plate is the short plate and brisket intact. And 9 CFR 319.100, the corned beef standard, spells out the cuts cured beef is made from — "beef briskets, navels, clods, middle ribs, rounds, rumps, or similar cuts". Navel is a curing word: the purchase specification for fresh beef uses it exactly once, in its glossary, as a direction marker for which way is up.