The Gospel of Deli, According to Caplansky (and Goldin)

Spring comes into Québec from the west. It is the warm Japan Current that brings the change of season to the west coast of Canada, and then the West Wind picks it up. It comes across the prairies in the breath of the Chinook, waking up the grain and caves of bears. It flows over Ontario like a dream of legislation, and it sneaks into Québec, into our villages, between our birch trees. In Montréal the cafés, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montréal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, “The winter has not killed us again!”

--Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers

Ah, Leonard. His rendering of a sense of place and the change of seasons in this passage is beyond lyrical. You can almost catch the scent of viande fumée and rye bread drifting from Schwartz’s along the boulevard of the Main, the late afternoon sunlight slanting through budding trees.

I tasted Montréal again recently, on a visit to Caplansky’s Deli.* Zane Caplansky’s light-filled restaurant on College, at the border of Kensington Market and the Annex, is one of the few places in Toronto to get real Montréal smoked meat: deli-style beef brisket (fat, medium or lean), cured in a spice mix, smoked, then steamed until meltingly tender and served—always, for the purists—on a sandwich of rye bread with tangy yellow mustard and a sour dill pickle. Zane, to his great credit, didn’t flinch when I asked for mine on challah instead of rye, with tomato slices and onion rings on the side. No Terroni-style dictatorship, this: as I ate my sandwich and we chatted, Zane told me that I had just invented “the Abi”. Despite its willingness to cater to whims, though, Caplansky’s is old-school Jewish deli reincarnate. From the paper menus doubling as placemats, to the careful design of those throwaway menus, with their gorgeously retro logo, the Star of David scattered here and there, and the fifties-style fonts (hallmarks of what you might call deli-design), the place wears its Jewish deli roots on its sleeve.

Naturally, it’s what on those carefully-designed menus that counts. It’s limited—Caplanksy’s aims to do a few things well. Smoked meat, of course, features prominently—in sandwiches, on burgers, in a knish, as “bacon” with the house breakfast (no pig here, thank you), and in the smoked meat and split pea soup that was a special the last time I visited. There’s also chopped liver—Caplansky’s mother’s recipe, something I’m planning to try next time, along with versht (a kind of salami, cut thick and grilled, and served on rye).

So what about this famous smoked meat? How does it measure up to Schwartz’s? I make no claims of expertise, but to me, it tasted like the real thing. It’s thickly sliced, rich, and tender, with complex flavour. The meat is beautifully coloured—a smoky ruby red. The fat realises itself as a soft and unctuous counterpart to the sturdy heft of the meat proper. The thick slabs of challah bread (again, I’m no expert, and I realise a smoked meat sandwich on anything other than rye is sacrilege for some) were astoundingly good—eggy yellow, soft yet substantial, and perfect (in my opinion) for the purposes I asked it to serve. It didn’t overwhelm the meat, or allow itself to be overwhelmed. The spear of pickle was tartly perfumed, with satisfying crunch. Even my side of onion was sliced just right. In fact, everything was just the way I would have done it, had I a Jewish mother and deli smarts.

I watched an old timer come in and sit down; “It’s a chilly day,” he said to the waitress. “A chilli day,” he went on, “or a beef stew day.” She proposed, in turn, that it was a cabbage borscht day. I think they were both right. In the end he ordered the all-day breakfast—I could smell the fragrance of the fried eggs three tables away, and he greeted it with small sounds of familiar appreciation. As I was leaving, the lunch rush had died down and I was able to overhear the conversation at the bar between the waitress and a regular. “I just think if you’re the host, you gotta be gracious, nice, polite, you know. That’s just how you do it,” said the waitress. They were talking about Canada’s hosting of the Olympics, but it seemed to describe the Caplansky’s ethos perfectly.

Some time later, I mentioned my Caplansky’s experience to a friend, who, on seeing that I had become a deli disciple, gave me an email address. This put me in contact with one Adam Goldin, and a week later I had one of his 2-pound, medium-fatty briskets sitting in my refrigerator. Goldin’s Smoked Meat has become something of a phenomenon of late—you can’t buy his meat in any stores, but business is so good that he can’t keep up with demand. The only way he takes orders is by email, and you pick it up from his house. The friend who let me in on this (increasingly public) secret assured me Goldin’s brisket was the real Montréal deal—no chemicals, no additives, no fake smoke. He also said it was as good as, if not better than, Caplansky’s. Naturally, I was intrigued.

We had some friends over for the taste test on Friday night. I bought in a beautiful, shiny loaf of rye from our local Sri Lankan baker, who learnt his craft over twenty years in a Jewish bakery, and who makes both the best challah and the best roti in the neighbourhood. (That’s Toronto for you.) The brisket in its vacuum-packed bag went into a pot of boiling water for three hours, gradually filling the house with its savoury scent.

I made a creamy coleslaw, and we ate the meat, warm and fragrantly melting, between pillowy-soft slices of rye, with lemon cheesecake to finish. It was one of the best meals I have eaten in Toronto yet.

E.N. Anderson, in his book Everyone Eats: Understanding Food and Culture, observes that “Where once the old-fashioned deli communicated familiar messages of home and ethnicity, it now communicates powerful nostalgia. It is now a voice from a vanished world”. This, too, is what literature does—it allows us to hear the voices of the long-gone, to momentarily reclaim the unreclaimable past. The era of diners and delis, and of smoked meat made with nothing but salt, spices, time, and effort, is disappearing in many places. But when people like Caplansky and Goldin dedicate their lives to preserving culinary traditions, to ensuring that recipes and methods that have been in existence for hundreds of years live on and are made by real people, not machines—we are allowed, briefly, to taste a vanished world.


*Note: I pay for all the meals I review. See the Literonomy Code of Ethics, right.