Putting it all together, I think we can lay to rest the idea that pastrami originated in Texas. If it had been born there, it would have been the creation of a butcher or meat-market proprietor who was slow-smoking his own meats, and we could expect to see that innovation advertised first in local papers. Instead, the very first mention of the meat in Texas that both Vaughn and I have found appears in the Dallas Morning News of March 22, 1908, by which time it had already been sold for almost a full decade in many other cities around the country. Even there, the ad is not for a local butcher or meat market but rather for Sonnemtheil’s grocery store, and “Spiced Pastromer” is listed under the heading “Delicatessen Department,” smack-dab between “smoked sturgeon” and “cooked corned beef.”
Is it possible that sausage-makers in Chicago and New York, faced with a depressed market for their sausages after the gory exposition of the Luetgert affair, turned to the pastirma preparation recently brought to America by Romanian immigrants?
It is a bit far-fetched, perhaps. But it makes about as much sense as pastrami being invented in Texas.
