The Second Avenue Deli Cookbook (8 page)

When my wife, Mary, and I left New York five years ago to live in Scotland, Abe Lebewohl wondered why. “What will you find to eat?” he asked.

Mr. Lebewohl owns the Second Ave. Kosher Delicatessen & Restaurant, at the corner of 10th Street, and austerity is not his line. He has pursued the good life throughout Western Europe and Israel, and once almost succeeded in catching a waiter's eye in Russia. Never having been to Scotland, he tried to visualize our setting. “It's like a shtetl?” he suggested. “Between one house and the next, it's a half a mile?” For him, our move to Scotland spelled ethnic starvation.

So he began shipping pastrami. The first parcel arrived like manna from heaven, and we ate as if our lives depended on it.

Our home is in the Trossachs, an area of rural splendor and deli deprivation. The closest Jewish restaurant is in Glasgow, 45 miles away. Last winter, we were snowed in for three weeks. At the height of a raging blizzard, the postman struggled to the door bearing a heavy parcel. Inside, we found a brief note from Mr. Lebewohl and a vast expanse of pastrami.

My wife, moved by the sight of lambs at the window, had renounced eating meat, her abstinence reinforced by the spectacle of pastrami on the hoof—lovely Highland cattle, unpickled, unspiced, unsmoked. Obedient to her master's choice, however, she prepared the pastrami, while the Saint Bernard went onto the ice floes with a rush order for mustard and sour pickles.

Day after day, I feasted on pastrami. Eventually, keen on the scent, local friends arrived to lend a few hands and hear wondrous accounts of this and other exotic delicacies. When I returned to New York for a visit in April, Mr. Lebewohl gave me a menu to nourish nostalgia on long winter evenings. Now, between pangs of heartburn and pastrami deliveries that continue to arrive by mail or occasional itinerant customer pressed into service by Mr. Lebewohl, rise visions of charms remote and inaccessible: boiled beef flanken, potato knishes, noodle pudding, gefilte fish, Yankee bean soup and the penitential half sandwich at half price after buying a whole one at full price.

As I nibble à la carte, my wife labors in the kitchen, indulgently permitting the lambs to trample our shrubs while she bakes shortbread and oatcakes to ship to the Second Ave. Deli, just to show Mr. Lebewohl that ethnicity bites both ways.