It took less than 10 years for pastirma (or pastromer, or pastrami, or whatever we want to call it) to spread across the country, but the speed and breadth of its transmission aren’t actually all that surprising. In this period of American culinary history, as industrial food production, national distribution networks, and mass marketing were rapidly maturing, it was quite common for a newly introduced product to appear on the scene and almost immediately become a trendy national hit (see also, for instance, the popularization of pimento cheese).
Those German-American sausage-makers were certainly behind pastrami’s wide distribution, but why did their companies see the need to add yet another cured meat to their already-broad lines?
The answer may be simply that pastrami is delicious. But I’d argue that there’s more to it. The very first reference that I could find to pastrami (using any of its spellings) being sold on the American market appears in August 1897, and it does so in an odd and somewhat gruesome context.
