Though the spelling varied from establishment to establishment and publication to publication, it’s undeniable that a new form of cured beef suddenly appeared on the American market in the late 1890s, and it did so all across the country. On March 14, 1899—in the same year that Sussman Volk’s provisions shop first appears in a New York City directory—Stein’s Grocery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, advertised a list of “Delicacies Received” that included “smoked roulade, smoked breast, knockwurst, pastroma, goose liver sausage” and other products. Just a few days later, on the opposite side of the country, Flourny’s, a grocery store in Macon, Georgia, advertised a lengthy list of items that began with “[s]moked salmon, hard salami, smoked breast, pastroma, bologna.” To write about chili is to court controversy; few subjects in American culinary life are so contentious. Chili is for Americans what paella is for Spaniards, or Bolognese is for Italians. It seems like everyone knows exactly what they think chili should be, and everyone knows that everyone else is wrong.

What people are generally referring to when they say the word “chili” is chili con carne, a dish made by stewing red meat (either ground, chopped, or left in discrete chunks) in a chili-pepper-based sauce that almost invariably contains cumin.

The text of the bill offers other rather convincing arguments as well. Inhofe, who now represents his state in the US Senate, cannot claim credit for this idea; similar joint resolutions had been introduced by other members of Congress in the previous seven years. Representative Manuel Lujan Jr. of New Mexico unsuccessfully introduced several bills in the 1980s to name not only chili, but also “chile,” the country’s official food. In 1988, Representative J. J. Pickle of Texas introduced legislation of his own, calling for “chili without beans” to be labeled the official food of the United States, a bold yet ultimately futile move to impose upon a nation Texas’s preferred chili-and-meat stew.

I’ve not been able to track down Gombright or Gambrecht, but the other two producers named above were large, well-established houses. Moses Zimmerman, a German Jewish immigrant, opened a butcher shop on Houston Street in New York City in the 1870s. By the 1890s, he had a three-story factory that occupied almost an entire block of Houston Street; later, he added production facilities in Philadelphia and Boston. Pastirma was just one of the many items in the portfolio of a firm that advertised itself as “Manufacturers and Dealers in The Celebrated Vienna Bolognas, Sausages, Salamis, Cervelat, etc. Packers of Tongue, Smoked and Pickled Beef.”

Chicago’s David Berg & Co. was a major operation, too, and, like Zimmerman, Berg was a German Jewish immigrant who founded his business just after the Civil War. Billing himself as a purveyor of “kosher meats and sausages,” Berg offered a line at the turn of the 20th century that included bologna, frankfurters, fresh and hard salami, paprika speck, goose fat, smoked beef, and—most relevant to us—what the firm tended to spell as “pastromer.” David Berg & Co. changed hands several times over the course of the century before Chicago competitor Vienna Beef bought it in the 1990s. Its brand of hot dogs and Polish sausages, long a staple at Wrigley Field, is still on the market today.

On May 4, 1897, Louisa Luetgert, the wife of the well-known Chicago sausage dealer Adolph Louis Luetgert, was reported missing. Police began to suspect the sausage-maker himself, and when they searched his factory, they found the following items in the sediment at the bottom of a large sausage vat: a tooth, two corset steels, and two gold rings, one of them engraved with the initials “L. L.” On May 17, Adolph Luetgert was arrested and charged with murder, accused of killing his wife and dissolving her body in lye.

The case became a national sensation, splashed on the front pages of newspapers across the country, and the lurid details of the crime and Luetgert’s pending trial captured the morbid public imagination throughout the summer. On August 6, the Topeka State Journal reported that sausage-makers in Chicago were beside themselves with fury over the case, and not because they sympathized with their fellow craftsman Luetgert.

“The sausagemakers declare,” the State Journal reported, “that when the first alleged discovery of the residuum of Mrs. Luetgert was made public, the appetite for sausage fell off to an extent that nearly bankrupted them. The butchers, their customers, they assert, would make purchases of pastroma, or pepper roulade of beef, but would shake their heads darkly when sausage was mentioned.”

Notices of this sort started showing up in Richmond, Virginia, in May of 1899, and in New Orleans in 1900, many of them in advertisements for Jewish grocers or for department stores that maintained delicatessen sections. Within a few years, a similar slate of sausages, cured meats, and cheese was being sold in dozens of cities throughout the country, including Des Moines; Omaha; Denver; Paducah, Kentucky; and Charlotte. Notably absent from this list are any cities in the state of Texas.

Also noteworthy is that the delicacies advertised were not made locally. Stein’s Grocery in Santa Fe proclaimed that its selection had just been received from “M. Zimmerman” in New York. Phillips Delicatessen in New Orleans called itself the “Headquarters of David Berg & Co.’s Celebrated Kosher Goods,” while Miller Van Ness Co. in Charlotte announced, “Don’t forget we are handling Gombright’s lines,” which included wurst, “pastroma,” hard salami, smoked tongues, and frankfurters. In a later ad, Phillips revised the spelling of its supplier’s name, touting a “[f]resh lot, Gambrechts sausages.”

By this point, American pastirma had evolved from air-dried beef to a brined or pickled product, cured with lots of pepper. It’s very common to see ads parenthetically describe pastirma as “spiced beef” or “peppered beef,” and one 1906 grocery ad hawks “[s]ome more of that delicious pickled beef Pastroma.”

Part of the appeal of the pastrami-originated-in-Texas theory is that pastrami today is a form of smoked brisket, which is, of course, also a staple of Texas barbecue joints. In the early decades of the 20th century, though, this preparation was applied to many different cuts of beef. In 1906, D. Taub’s Delicatessen Store in Bay City, Michigan, advertised “Pastroma breast,” “Pastroma shoulder,” and “Pastroma roulade,” all for 35 cents a pound. In 1921, the Hygrade Provision Company of Brooklyn offered five varieties of “pastroma”: “Smoked Pastroma, Shoulder; Smoked Pastroma, Breast; Smoked Pastroma-Roulade; Smoked Pastroma Payes; Smoked Pastroma, Flank.” This is the first explicit reference I’ve found to pastirma or pastrami being smoked, but all the major dealers carried various smoked sausages and meats, and experimenting with smoking pastirma would have been a natural thing to do.

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.

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.