Pickelfleisch, Pastirma, and Beyond: An Overview of the Myths of the Origin of Pastrami
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper investigates the assertion by Claudia Roden that pastrami is an invention of New York City delicatessens, a claim that refutes the accepted etymology of the word “pastrami” as being linked to a seasoned air-dried meat, sometimes referred to as basturma/pastirma, from Romania or Turkey. The probability that the roots of this iconic American delicatessen favourite can originally be found in two similar meats, pickelfleisch and homen, both originating from the areas today known as Alsace, France and the southeastern section of the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate will also be explored. Ashkenazi food culture is predominantly identified as having originated in a wide swathe of territory, encompassing Northern, Central and Eastern Europe but regularly overlooks the fact that the Jews across this expansive area had migrated from the Ashkenaz Valley in the thirteenth century. They brought their food traditions with them, including the methods of preparing these meats. Many other styles of meat preservation existed or subsequently emerged, but pastrami is distinct in that the meat (beef) is brined, cured, smoked and then steamed. These methods were used in Alsace/Rhineland before being transported to Central and Eastern Europe and then onward to the United States and Canada, where the now famous delicatessen version of pastrami was essentially born.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".