I have been conducting exhaustive, and often exhausting, field research into New York delis for 35 years. The Carnegie was my first, and its Brobdingnagian chopped liver sandwiches sufficient for two Brits - perhaps one-and-a-half British Jews- were my introduction to noshing, US style.
I then got more into Katz's, but it became a bit touristy after the Rob Reiner film, When Harry Met Sally, and that scene, which is now celebrated in the restaurant with a big arrow hanging from the ceiling and indicating the exact table at which it was filmed. Katz's also has a complicated, Soviet-style bill payment system which makes even that at the erstwhile Bloom's in Whitechapel seem as slick as Apple Pay by comparison.
I've been to the 2nd Ave Deli, lately on 3rd Ave just to confuse tourists, and famous for the 1996 murder of its owner, but wasn't so keen. Dozens of everyday, not particularly kosher delis in Manhattan where you could rely on a chopped liver on rye and a matzah-ball soup have disappeared in my time of going regularly to New York.
My current favourite is an outlier even New Yorkers often don't know and I found by chance, Eisenberg's Sandwich Shop on 5th and 23rd. It's the real deal, with an on-the-premises owner who, from the kaynahorah look of him, eats there several times a day.
Ted Merwin, a professor of religion and Judaic studies at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, has now written a definitive but, thank God, not overstuffed, history of Jewish delis in the US, principally New York.
Professor Merwin burbles on entertainingly and informatively - although with plenty to remind you it's the work of an academic. So, in one sentence, you'll read of structuralism, Roland Barthes and semiotics. But he's canny, too, and when he has something pretentious to say, he generally puts it in the mouth of other academics.
For example: ''The food writer Arthur Schwartz has pointed out that, in Yiddish, the word for overstuffed is ongeshtupped; the meat is crammed between the bread in a crude, sensual way that recalls the act of copulation.'' Course it does. It is, however, Merwin himself who writes: ''The deli is a lieu de memoire in many senses.'' This is exactly what I was thinking when I was last at Myers Famous Kosherie in Harrogate Road, Leeds.
But his book - Pastrami on Rye - is no dialectic – you can dip in and out without missing anything crucial to the argument. It's a buffet rather than a sit-down dinner with a beginning, a middle and an end.
And a remarkably well-catered buffet it is, too. Merwin radically asserts that originator of the sandwich was not John, Earl of Sandwich, but Hillel the Elder, whom I've always known as the inspiration for, the eponymous Houses. Hillel apparently described the sandwich as a korech, based on lekarech, meaning to encircle or envelop.
And where else other than at Mr Merwin's buffet table could I have learned that the idea for pastrami (barely known in British delis but iconic in the States) came from Turkish horsemen in central Asia keeping meat under their saddles to tenderise in the animal's sweat, something I can never now un-know? Or that cured meats entered the Jewish diet in Alsace-Lorraine in the 10th and 11th centuries?
The first delis in New York in the 19th century were more German and Alsacienne than anything we would recognise. Katz's, we learn, opened in 1888 as the first true Jewish deli. It was known as Iceland's Delicatessen, opened by two brothers of the Yiddish poet Reuven Iceland. The Katzes, Willy and Benny, took it over in the early 20th century. There's political and legal history in Prof Merrin's deliciously readable work, too. The then New York City Police Commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, helped deli owners get round Sunday closing restrictions in the late 19th century.
The tendency, now a universal convention, but also largely unknown in Britain, to put tables in a deli, and whether or not this made it legally a restaurant, also became a political hot latke in Roosevelt's pre-White House day.
Later, in the 1920s, deli owners clashed with New York state over the right to sell kosher food on Shabbat. The state relied on the guidance of Orthodox rabbis, who were unsurprisingly against the growing practice; but a meeting of deli owners in Brooklyn to protest the right to sell fully kosher food, but on Saturdays, attracted more than 400 deli owners. It is hard to imagine anything like 400 Jewish deli owners existing in the UK, even back in the day.
Also in the 1920s, the saltiness, fattiness and sweetness of our not so delicate cuisine began to concern health campaigners. Normally conscious of our health, we as a people tend to leave such worries in the umbrella rack at American delis. Eisenberg's motto (my favourite place doesn't make the book, sadly) is proudly printed on the menus: "Raising New York's cholesterol since 1929".
Kashrut, too, is discussed in fascinating detail. There was a scandal in 1933 when a kosher meat company, Branfman, was found sneaking non-kosher brisket into its factory in the middle of the night. Rabbis insisted that thousands of hapless customer restaurants had to dump all the pots, dishes and silverware that had been in contact with the treif.
Comedy is lavishly covered, with the contribution to deli folklore by the likes of Woody Allen, Rob Reiner and Larry David paid ample tribute.
The book is mostly about New York delis, but there's plenty on other US cities; nothing, though, on Montreal, which is, for many the real mother-load of Jewish food. I would love to have learned more about the Canadian cousins of our American cousins.
For anyone not familiar with the American deli, even though there are some decent New York deli-style restaurants in many British cities now, Professor Merwin's book may be a little off target.
The sandwich that is extravagantly spherical and impossible to eat in a seemly way is as alien to British Jews as to British Gentiles.
It's not particularly familiar to Israeli Jews, come to think of it. It is not exactly Ottolenghi cuisine - but then the American deli is very much an Ashkenazi party.
But if you know the American deli just a little, that salt beef is corned beef and pastrami is not a dried up meat in plastic packets but a rip-roaring, fat-laden, freshly carved delight, that knishes, babka, and whitefish are a thing, but Viennas aren't, this book will make you extremely hungry. It's a rich dish, which leaves you ongeshtupped with fascinating facts.
Jonathan Margolis is an FT columnist. 'Pastrami on Rye' by Ted Merwin is published by New York University Press (£18.99).
