A Slice of History—on Rye

Growing up on the Lower East Side of the 1900s in an immigrant household where, for a brief spell, his mother owned a kosher delicatessen, Samuel Chotzinoff couldn’t get enough of the stuff. He’d “abandon himself without restraint to corned beef, pastrami and bologna … to sandwiches buried under a thick coating of yellowish mustard.” Even the resulting bouts of “intestinal discomfort,” or, for that matter, the eatery’s short-lived success—it failed after nine months—did little to dent his enthusiasm for the “delicious, aggressive aromas of superheated pickled beef.”