In 1922, a box of Washburn’s Whole Wheat Flakes (later known as General Mills’ Wheaties) called it “A Perfect Food; Ready to Eat.” Post Toasties dubbed itself a “4 Star Breakfast Treat,” combining flavor, nourishment, vitamins and “economy” in one box. More than anything, these cereals promised ease for the American housewife. She could make her life more convenient while still nurturing and providing for her family. And the idea was catching.

Anyone who bought two boxes of Corn Flakes would receive the Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures Booklet, a colorful book of animal illustrations, either from their grocer or through a mail-in order. The campaign persisted for a whopping 23 years—Kellog’s had discovered that children could be just as valuable of a market as their parents, and soon competitors were following suit. By the middle of the 20th century, especially in the post-war years, advertisers were catering to children and teenagers as a distinct and profitable demographic. With radios, and then televisions, in the household, products could be advertised to them directly, which they in turn requested by name.

But Post beat Kellogg to the wider market with his ready-to-eat Grape Nuts, developed in 1897. On this box (apparently made in the US but marketed to an English audience), Post claimed that consumers would get more “nourishment from 1 pound of Grape Nuts than from 10 lbs of MEAT, WHEAT, OATS OR BREAD.” Another advertisement from 1903 promised that Grape Nuts were the key to kicking your liquor habit. These claims were largely accepted since, unlike other more straightforward cereals, no one knew what the hell a Grape Nut was. “Grape Nuts was people eating advertising,” Carin Gendell, senior brand manager in the 1980s, told The Wall Street Journal.

By 1906, Will Kellogg had pried the rights to both Corn Flakes and the Kellogg name from his brother, following a dispute over ingredients—namely, Will’s desire to add sugar to their original recipe. The first boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were surprisingly simple, and their campaign focused on flavor (honestly, not all that much has changed in the last 100 years). They promised flakes “deliciously flavored with sugar, malt and salt,” and so “delicious, and distinctive in flavor” that children would beg for it. But there were no screeds about health benefits, perhaps because Kellogg didn’t need to advertise; at that point, their nutritionally-minded reputation preceded them. Kellogg also focused on ensuring customers bought the “genuine” product, as numerous competitors with their own corn flake cereals began to crop up.

At this point, Americans were buying cereal because they were intrigued by notorious figures like Kellogg—it was, first and foremost, a popular curiosity. To achieve real legitimacy, the industry still had to wage a war on two fronts. The first, against competitors; the second against the deeply entrenched idea of what really constituted a hearty American breakfast. It was one thing to have a product on the shelves, but another entirely to make consumers see it as a daily necessity. Many package designs, then, focused on the completeness of a bowl of cereal; how, Fannie Farmer be damned, this one box contained everything you needed. To be fair, there had been earlier innovations in porridge, such as Granula, “The Cereal You Have To Soak Overnight,” but that catchy tagline didn’t exactly communicate convenience. Then, in 1895, C.W. Post, a former patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, became so impressed with Kellogg’s grain experimentation that he founded his very own cereal company. His creation was Postum, a “cereal beverage intended to replace coffee in the morning,” explains Tony Shurman, General Manager of Post Foods. Early ads warned consumers of the “evils of caffeine,” assuring them that their children would benefit from a steady diet of Postum in its place.

“In 1949, Sugar Crisp had the distinction of being the first cereal to have an animated television commercial,” says Shurman. It featured three bears—Handy, Dandy and Candy—though years later, the cereal’s mascot would change to the affable Sugar Bear. It was also one of the first cereals to come substantially pre-sweetened, though Shurman explains that’s just because technology finally caught up to what everyone was already doing at home—dumping sugar on their grain flakes. With this new development, you didn’t even need milk. Sugar Crisp boasted “It’s fun to eat plain—right out of the package!” Even without their mascot, Sugar Crisp demonstrated how advertising was switching gears from focusing on parents to focusing on kids. “Ask your mom to get a package of our favorite cereal, Post Sugar Crisp,” says Roy Rogers in this ad at the end of his TV show. Original box designs, advertisements, and supplementary nutritional inserts were geared toward adult concerns like health, cost, and convenience—nobody saw the value of marketing to children. That changed in 1909, when Kellogg’s introduced the first-ever cereal box prize aimed at younger demographics.

Other brands were deploying the same techniques, with Kellogg introducing Corn Pops in 1950 and Frosted Flakes in 1952, and General Mills unveiling Trix in 1954. Early boxes of Corn Pops made sure consumers knew about these new developments, emphasizing “Pre-sweetened” and “No sugar needed.” Many of these new flavors also came with their own cartoon mascots, though they were more likely to grace kids’ TV screens than the boxes of cereal themselves. TV was where the kids could get hooked, with Tony the Tiger (debuted in 1952), the Trix rabbit (1959) and Sonny the Cuckoo bird (1962). They didn’t care what the box looked like yet, as long as what was in it was what the mascots were telling them to eat. The boxes were still aimed at parents, concerned more about the health of their child than the cartoons they wouldn’t shut up about. This box of Cocoa Puffs from the late 1950s still highlights that it’s a corn cereal, as does this 1964 box of Trix, even though the rabbit was there, too. And Lucky Charms’ original box advertises the “goodness in toasted oat cereal.” They didn’t even coat the oat bits in sugar until 1967.

Cereal consumption was going strong; cereal was so ubiquitous that it no longer had to sell itself as “a perfect food.” There was a range of different markets, and brands were beginning to diversify. Cereal could appeal to kids by being sweet and colorful, like Cocoa Pebbles or Sir Grapefellow, and include toys, giveaways, and games right on the box. Children were told not just about the sugary taste, but the figurines they could win, the sweepstakes they could enter, or the athletes and celebrities who graced the box. The ad copy may have told parents about its vitamin content, but that information was increasingly obscured by other advertising campaigns and flashy designs. A 1971 box of Cap’n Crunch doesn’t even say what it’s made of, just that it “stays crunchy even in milk.” Cereal had to be as fun as the mascots made it look in the ads, and sometimes even the healthy cereals couldn’t resist getting in on the promotions. For a while, you could send away to Cheerios for Confederate money.

Healthy cereals seemed to double down on their efforts to convince consumers they were full of vitamins, protein, fiber, or whatever else they were seeking. Sugar Crisp was renamed Golden Crisp. Kellogg’s and General Mills both introduced granola cereals as more interesting and flavorful alternatives to the grain flakes and puffs that had dominated the healthy cereal market. In the early 1970s, Cheerios let consumers know that it was made of “the grain highest in protein,” and in 1977 Wheaties proclaimed that it provided 25% of your daily vitamin needs, while continuing its long association with sports. In 1984 they had their first female athlete on the box, and by 1986 they had their first NFL player, a huge jump from the golfers and Olympians of the past. The End of an Era
By the 1970s and 1980s, our belief that a bowl of cereal—any cereal—could suffice as a complete breakfast began to crack. Sugar that had once been a selling point was increasingly vilified as a dietary enemy. Then, in 1972 Dr. Atkins and others began preaching the dangers of carbohydrates, and low-carb diets became increasingly popular. Suddenly, those grains weren’t looking so healthy anymore. We had ceased to believe that a bowl of Grape Nuts could cure your alcoholism, or that a bowl of Lucky Charms had enough oats in it to counteract all those marshmallows.

Silver’s book is stuffed with anecdotes and historical notes that show just how important it was to Jewish life in New York. In its prime, she writes, the knish was a must-eat on the city’s political circuit, a flag for any candidate to rally behind to demonstrate his support for the Jewish community. It was a Jewish pop culture muse, from Yiddish theater to comedy, where it was sometimes used as slang for women’s genitals. It’s all part of a tradition, Silver explains, that began with Jewish female comedians in the 1950s and continues to this day in the raunchy routines of Sarah Silverman.

New York still has its knisheries, but compared to the bagel and bialy, the knish just never made it big as a culinary icon. It appears in few guide books as a must-eat dish. Few people, these days, will kvell about a knish. That’s a shame, as it deserves to be more than a historical footnote.

Migration from Eastern European countries, including Romania, began to pick up in the 1880s and accelerated through the early 20th century. Between 1881 and 1914, in particular, some 75,000 Jews left Romania and settled in New York City. As these immigrants arrived on the Lower East Side, they began to open delicatessen stores that resembled those of their German predecessors, but featured kosher products alongside some of the more popular delicacies from their homelands. If you adjust the timelines to match historical records, both Volk’s business and Iceland & Katz were established not ahead of the curve, but rather right alongside a slew of other Jewish delicatessens that were then popping up on the Lower East Side—and a few years after pastrami started making a nationwide splash. Sussman Volk appears to have been in the game earlier than Iceland & Katz, but perhaps not as early as has been claimed. The first record of Volk operating any business is a city directory entry in 1899, which lists “Volk, Sussman, provisions” at 86 Delancey Street, a location he maintained until 1907, when he apparently moved next door to 88 Delancey and sold bologna, frankfurters, and “spiced meat.”

These crucial distinctions, however, remained irrelevant through much of the 19th century, since it doesn’t seem that any of the pastirma exported during that period was actually destined for the United States. In fact, I’ve been unable to turn up any advertisements or other references to anything similar in name being sold in this country any earlier than the closing years of the 1890s, when a large wave of Eastern European immigration brought the pastirma-makers themselves to America.

Until the 1870s, the majority of immigrants in the United States had arrived from Germany. German-language New York newspapers were filled with advertisements for grocers or provisioners, listing a wide array of cheeses, sausages, and pickles under the heading “Delicatessen.” “‘Deutsch Delicatessen’ is the sign over a Second Ave. shop,” the New York Tribune noted in 1877, adding, “The window is heaped with huge bologna sausages.” Until the early years of the 20th century, these were known as “delicatessen shops”—retailers of fancy foods, chief among them prepared meats.

Texas-style beef brisket barbecue is currently enjoying a period of nationwide vogue. So it was both timely and compelling when Robert Sietsema advanced a somewhat novel theory of pastrami’s barbecue-bound origins in his 2015 book, New York in a Dozen Dishes. The longtime Village Voice restaurant critic, now senior critic at Eater New York, admitted that his argument was “far-fetched, perhaps.” But he made it nonetheless: “Maybe New York pastrami as we know it—corned beef rubbed with spices and smoked—might have originated in Texas via Jewish butchers.”

Pastirma Comes to America
One problem we face when tracing the history of pastrami is that there was absolutely no agreement on how to spell the name of that particular meat product until well into the 20th century. “Pastrame,” “pastromie,” “pestrame,” “pastromi,” “pasturma,” “pastromer,” “pastroma”—all are variants found in early newspaper ads and other sources.

One of those delicacies, it seems, was pastirma, and it didn’t remain an isolated immigrant specialty for very long. Established German-American sausage companies quickly picked up on the preparation and added it to their nationally distributed lines, taking it all across America—including all the way down to Texas.

But it is safe to say that modern pastrami couldn’t exist without a form of preserved meat known by at least one of the aforementioned names, the most common of which was “pastirma.” Trade journals from the 1850s indicate that the area known today as Romania was exporting “pastroma, or jerk beef” from Brăila, one of the primary ports on the Danube River, by the mid-19th century, if not earlier. In his 1878 text, A Handy Dictionary of Commercial Information, Edward T. Blakely described the preparation as “ox, sheep, or goat’s flesh salted, with garlic and spices, and dried in the sun for winter food.”

Many accounts of pastrami’s history claim that the original Romanian version was made with goose, but that its makers adapted the preparation to cheaper, more plentiful beef after moving to the United States. This idea seems to derive from a single source, Marcus Eli Ravage’s 1917 book, An American in the Making: The Life Story of an Immigrant, in which the Romanian-born author recalls an early-1900s New York City where “on Rivington Street and on Allen Street the Rumanian delicatessen-store was making its appearance, with its goose-pastrama and kegs of ripe olives and tubs of salted vine-leaves.” But, as trade journals and many other sources make clear, Romanians were making pastirma from all sorts of different meats back in the old country, primarily beef.

Sietsema, who lived in Texas himself before moving to New York, was drawing upon research by Daniel Vaughn of Texas Monthly, who had turned up several examples of grocers and butchers selling pastrami in Texas in the early part of the 20th century. Nick Solares, also at Eater, picked up on the thread recently, interviewing Vaughn for a video piece called “How Pastrami Arrived in New York City,” which repeats the same conjecture about pastrami’s Texan roots. “Pastrami, as we know it in the New York City deli, actually came from Europe through Texas, and then to New York,” Solares proposes. “Czech and German butchers migrated to Texas and brought with them the way that they prepared meats, cured meats, in the Old World.”

Dig deep enough and it becomes clear that pastrami first established its foothold in large northern immigrant centers, like New York, Montreal, and Chicago, and was then taken across the country by a group of national-scale meatpacking companies. And—wait for it—it may have even gotten a little boost from a scandalous murder.

It’s a form of preserved meat that can be found today across the eastern Mediterranean, from Turkey around to Egypt. But the real question is how it got to the United States, became defined as a cut of beef brisket (or the fattier cut adjoining it, known as the navel), and started being piled atop rye bread in delis. Though Middle Eastern pastirma and American pastrami are both forms of cured beef, the preparations are quite different.

Pastirma is rubbed in salt to cure, dried in the open air for several days, and covered in a thick spice rub of fenugreek and cumin. The resulting meat has a vivid deep-red color and is typically sliced very thin, much like bresaola. Modern pastrami, on the other hand, is cured in a liquid brine, cold-smoked, and then boiled. And, unlike with pastirma, the spice coating—which is applied just before the meat goes on the smoker—is dominated by black pepper and coriander.

Don’t let the simplicity of this recipe fool you. It has very few ingredients, but once they are reduced and seasoned with salt and a touch of maple syrup, the result is a rich and nutty soup with a clean and deep flavor. Pick the garnish that appeals to you more: hominy corn, the more traditional option given it’s indigenous to the Americas, or roasted sweet potatoes, a non-native option that’s popular today.
12 ounces (340g) raw shelled hickory nuts or pecans (see note)
1 teaspoon kosher salt, plus more as needed
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1 cup cooked and drained whole or cracked hominy, or 1 large sweet potato (1 pound 6 ounces; 625g), peeled, cut into 1/2-inch dice, and roasted (see note)

As a Southerner and barbecue lover myself, I would be delighted to claim pastrami as a legacy of the long, proud Southern tradition of slow-smoking meats. But, unfortunately, I can’t: The historical record simply doesn’t hold up.

In a food processor, process nuts, scraping down sides once or twice during processing, until they form a thick paste, about 3 minutes. Scrape nut paste into a medium bowl.

Divide paste into 3 even portions. You only need one portion to make this recipe; you can save the rest for future batches or use it as a nut butter in other preparations. To save the extra nut paste: If the paste is thick enough to hold its shape, form the remaining portions into balls, wrap tightly in plastic and then aluminum foil, and freeze for up to 3 months; if the paste is too loose to hold its shape, transfer portions to small zipper-lock bags, press out the air, then seal and freeze for up to 3 months.

Transfer remaining portion of nut paste to a 3-quart saucepan and add 1 quart (1 liter) cold water along with the 1 teaspoon kosher salt. Set over high heat and bring to a boil, whisking to incorporate nut paste. Reduce heat to maintain a simmer and cook uncovered, stirring occasionally, until reduced by half, about 30 minutes.

Add maple syrup, then increase heat to high, allowing soup to boil until any separated fats on the surface have emulsified back into the soup. Taste, adding more salt if desired.

To serve, briefly reheat hominy or sweet potato. Ladle hot soup into bowls and garnish with hominy or sweet potato.

Special equipment
Food processor, instant-read thermometer

Notes
Hominy comes precooked in cans and sold dry; if dry, boil in ample water until tender, about 1 hour (though cooking time will depend on the size and type of hominy). If roasting sweet potatoes, preheat oven to 400°F (200°C). Drain sweet potatoes and transfer to medium bowl. Toss with just enough oil to coat and season with salt. Spread sweet potatoes on a rimmed baking sheet and roast, turning sweet potato pieces once or twice during cooking with a thin metal spatula, until lightly browned and tender, about 30 minutes. Set aside until ready to use.

A rich and creamy nut soup of Cherokee origin, kanuchi has few ingredients but a world of deep nutty flavor. Simmering the nuts while the liquid reduces softens the nut paste while thickening the soup.
A hard boil at the end emulsifies any separated fats into the soup.
Kanuchi is a creamy Cherokee soup traditionally made from hickory nuts that are crushed by hand into a thick paste. That paste is then formed into large balls and stored until ready to use for this soup. Because hickory nuts aren’t farmed commercially in the United States, pecans, which have a similar flavor, can be used instead.

In this recipe, adapted from one provided by Taelor Barton, we use a food processor to transform the nuts into a paste, but depending on the power of your machine and how long you allow it to process the nuts, it’s possible your paste will end up too smooth and loose to form balls. This is fine, in that you can still make a delicious soup regardless of the final consistency of the paste.

“I kind of concluded early on that [knishes] weren’t for me, and left them alone,” Wells told me. “I have no use for the turmeric-colored ones sold out of hot dog carts, and this is coming from a man who at one point in his life ate a single hot pretzel with mustard for lunch every day.”

Though Wells enjoyed the ones from Yonah Schimmel’s more than the street cart knishes, he said he never craved them enough to make the store into a regular stop when he lived on the Lower East Side. But what if, I asked him, you had discovered a knish like the one at Russ & Daughters earlier in life? Or had took the subway to Knish Knosh in Queens, Ms. Stahl’s, or had even met the famed Ruby, whose specter haunts the internet and inspired a devoted Facebook group? Would you be singing a different song?

“Oh for sure,” Wells responded. “If I’d met a knish like that in my formative years there’s no telling what might have happened.”

“Since ur-knishes hadn’t penetrated American mainstream consciousness to any serious extent, it was easy for most people to link the name to the Gabila objects,” Leff added. “If they were delicious, you’d hear no objections from me. But they’re not delicious. They’re a convenience item invented by some dude trying to move product.”

Fortunately, some rustlings in the knish underground signal the beginnings of change. Like pastrami and bagels, knishes have migrated with Jewish expats and popped up in nouveau delis out west. In San Francisco, King Knish sells decidedly non-traditional, very treyf flavors like curry beef and chocolate.

In his review of the Russ and Daughters Café, New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells praised their knishes as “light and fluffy specimens” that stood out from the crowd of dense, flavorless carb bombs.

Make-Ahead and Storage
The soup base can be refrigerated in an airtight container for up to 1 week; reheat before serving. The extra nut paste can be tightly wrapped and frozen for up to 3 months.

There might’ve been something else, though, that held the knish back. I reached out to Leff because of comments he made for a 2003 New York Times article about the disappearance of street knishes. The knishes in question are popularly known as the Coney Island knish, square-shaped and deep-fried specimens that are turmeric-yellow in color. They were invented on Forsyth Street on the Lower East Side in 1921 and continue to be produced by the family company, Gabila’s, in Copiague in Suffolk County.

The company was very successful and their knishes became widespread in delis and at hot dog carts, so much so that when many modern New Yorkers say “knish,” they mean Gabilla’s. When the company’s factory caught fire in 2013, alarmist headlines declared a knish shortage and famine.

But some, including Leff, just don’t care for Gabilla’s. As he tells it, these mass-produced knishes are pretenders to the throne, which by right belongs to the one true knish: the baked, handmade variety with far more delicious fillings, which he calls, for lack of a better term, the ur-knish.

Like Silver, he grew up with Ms. Stahl’s, because his mother was from Brooklyn. After his mother died, he returned there for the first time in years only to find the knishery had disappeared. He felt like he lost a part of his mother, the way one might if a family home is torn down. “That was how she fed me. Feeding me part of her own childhood, it connected us—I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but now that it’s gone it’s so glaringly obvious.”

“Is there an expectation that foreign traditions ought to permeate our culture?” Leff asked back. “When something does make that jump that’s the exception rather than the rule. But it’s not like football play-offs; the worthiest don’t make the cut via a series of trials. Stuff just sneaks in. One can trace why tacos did make it, but there’s no explaining why knishes didn’t. Yes, they’re delicious, when right, but a great many things are delicious when right.”

“People used to say, ‘the streets in New York are paved in gold,'” Laura Silver said to me over the phone. “No they’re not. They’re paved in knishes.”

Born in Brooklyn and bred in Queens, Silver is the world’s leading authority on the knish. And as the author of the authoritative and charming Knish: In Search of the Jewish Soul Food, she knows just how vital it is to Jews’—and New Yorkers’—culinary heritage, even if everyone else forgets about the poor thing.

A bomb of starchy fillings like nutty kasha groats or mashed potato with caramelized onions, wrapped in a thin sheet of dough and baked, the knish is claimed by Russians, Poles, and Ukrainians, and came to New York on the backs of Jewish immigrants. The way Silver sees it, the knish is a quintessential New York food, one that filled stomachs for pennies on the dollar and granted immigrants an economic opportunity to build a future for their children’s children.

No, the knish is not sexy. It’s brownish and rotund and anything but elegantly shaped. But it is food that will make you feel good, fill you up on the cheap before a long day of work, or sop up the pain of loss or an unexpected breakup.

Some New Yorkers believe that it’s no longer easy—or possible—to get a good knish. Silver disagrees, and she makes a strong case with her “Where To Eat A Good Knish” map, which includes Judy’s Knishes, established in 2014, among her growing list of 16 approved sources in the five boroughs. So why isn’t the knish more popular?

Growing up, Wildman thought every American household stocked knishes. “It had never occurred to me that this wasn’t something that was common from here to California and beyond,” he says.

People like Wildman and Silver attach a profound importance to the knish. To see why more people don’t, I turned to Jim Leff, the founder of Chowhound and a retired food obsessive who once catalogued outer borough eats.