la folie pastrami s’implante en France

There are recipes that speak to your taste buds as much as to your memories. Bittersweet flavors that transport you both to childhood and to great history. Take the pastrami, that humble chiffonade of brined pink beef that doesn’t strut around like a thick rump steak: it could win the prize for the most chameleon dish in the kitchen. He is as much at home in the role of the sober, family dish of Ashkenazi Jewish culture as he is in the costume of the ultra-lush sandwich served in New York delicatessens. And it could well become the new darling of French street food.

“Pastrami could just as well be a verb, ‘pastramiser’, because it is an old process of cooking-maceration-conservation”, says Michel Bonnemort, chef of the bistro Le Bouclard in Paris (18th) who worked twenty-five years in the United States and offers a la carte, between blanquette and kidneys. The name comes from the Romanian a pastra (“to preserve”). And the technique consists of putting beef brisket in brine for five to seven days, letting it dry and then rolling it in a spice marinade that every restaurateur keeps secret. “Originally it was just black pepper and coriander seeds, recalls Greg Marchand, the chef of the FTG in Paris who has been making pastrami sandwiches since 2013. I add pink peppercorns, fennel, mustard and juniper seeds…” Then, the meat must be cooked for a long time, at low temperature and at 95% humidity, then smoked: ten days of work to obtain a melting meat with a sweet-acid taste that was originally tasted with large malossol pickles and sauerkraut.

For skyscraper builders in New York

As a traveller, pastrami has traveled thousands of kilometers and known as many versions as there are adopted cultures. This recipe from the frugal cuisine of Eastern Europe was used in Poland or Romania to preserve meat as long as possible, at a time when fridges did not exist. At the end of the 19th century, she crossed the Atlantic: “Pastrami was imported to the United States and then to Montreal in the 1860s with the waves of Jewish immigration fleeing poverty, explains Simon Benitah, of Will’s Deli, a family delicatessen opened in Paris in 2020 with his father William, his mother and his brother. There, traditional recipes have evolved with local meats and spices. » Served between two slices of rye bread, with mustard, pickles and sauerkraut, the first New York pastramis were intended for the workers who built the skyscrapers, fond of this generous sandwich that stuck to the body.

Since then, these sandwiches have been the delight of delicatessens, those grocery store restaurants that are to America what « bouillons » have been to France. And over time the pastrami has become greedy: in a « reuben » classic, there are pickles, cheese, white bread with caraway or rye, a “Russian sauce” sweet (mayonnaise and ketchup) or a thousand island vinaigrette (mayonnaise, tomatoes, paprika, chili…). Flavors that change burgers: the fermented taste of brine and pickles, the acidity of pickles and sauerkraut respond to sweet sauces and the spicy and smoky notes of meat.

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In the world of pastrami worshipers, the best addresses are world famous, such as Schwartz’s in Montreal or, in New York, 2nd Avenue Deli or Katz’s Deli, made famous for an almost culinary and public orgasm: that of Meg Ryan in a scene from the movie When Harry met Sally. And pastrami has cousins ​​all over the Anglo-Saxon world: it is called corned-beef in New York, smocked-meat in Canada, salted beef in London and brisket in Texas…

In France, pastrami is still beginning but seems to have a bright future. It was already found in the traditional shops of the Marais, in Paris, at Florence Kahn or at the Boucherie David. Today, it is on the menu of French delis which are beginning to appear. “I’m a fan of American culture and street food, explains Moïse Sfez, founder of Janet by Homer, which opened rue Rambuteau in Paris in mid-January. For one of my three recipes, I was inspired by Langer’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles, whose recipe number 19 was voted the best pastrami in the world. » In his restaurant Elmer, chef Simon Horwitz seeks to reproduce that of his childhood: “We ate it for breakfast on toast, he recalls. For me, it’s a charcuterie, so I serve it in thin slices. People are enjoying these new flavor markers of smoky and spicy flavors. »

The return of Ashkenazi Jewish gastronomy

After the kebab and the burger, it is therefore the turn of the pastrami to settle in street food, revisited in the French way. In Paris, at Janet by Homer, they serve corned beef made from wagyu meat either with mustard and pickles, or with cheese and coleslaw; at Will’s Deli, we send a “Will’son”, smoked meat with honey mustard, pickles and sourdough bread, or a reuben with aged cheddar and fermented cabbage; at Kaviari Delicatessen, it’s a Danish-style smorrebrod (slice of black bread). FTG offers a version halfway between the croque-monsieur and the reuben (see recipe), and Greg Marchand even serves it in his Michelin-starred restaurant, the Frenchie. You can also find pastrami in Lyon at Banneton or at the Marché Noir in Nantes, a “urban smokehouse” texan.

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At first, some customers didn’t know anything about pastrami, they thought the deli was an Indian specialty or an Italian deli

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“Since the Covid crisis, street food in France has become a habit, notes Simon Benitah. But, at the beginning, some customers didn’t know anything about pastrami, they thought that the deli was an Indian specialty or an Italian charcuterie! » The success of Mediterranean Jewish cuisine, with its leader Yotam Ottolenghi and the opening of restaurants like Miznon in Paris, has brought Israeli cuisine back into fashion. “After the Sephardic recipes, people are getting a bit tired of roasted cauliflower and are discovering Ashkenazi Jewish gastronomy,” notes Simon Benitah. It has everything to please fans of fermentation: it contains many recipes for pickles, brine and lacto-fermentation. In the future Will’s Deli, which will soon be expanded, we should even find a revisited version of the famous gefilte fish (“stuffed carp”), another emblem of this “little cooking” still unknown.