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The origin of pastrami remains something of a mystery. Most accounts will tell you it was directly inspired by the preserved meat called basturma, a lean cut of air-dried beef, which was spread throughout Eastern Europe by the Ottoman Empire over the centuries and then brought to America by Romanian-Jewish immigrants who arrived between 1881 and 1914. There’s no doubt the word
pastrami is a cognate of
basturma, but there the resemblance ends.
In contrast with its dry, thinner-sliced cousin which is admirable in its own right pastrami is made with a notably fat-laced beef brisket that’s been brined for several days (a process known as “corning”), rubbed with a spice mixture that often contains black peppercorns, yellow mustard seeds, and coriander, and then smoked. The result is a rich cut of meat with a complex and distinctive flavor, in which smoky notes compete with the sweetness of the spices and the saltiness of the brine. Pastrami in its ideal form is fatty, pi