Let’s Really Do Lunch

We like to think of ourselves as independent and modern. We live here because of something to do with the American Dream and California and how it all ties together. We have left the rest of America, the world even, behind.

We can, if it is legal, have what we want. And sometimes what we want is a nice pastrami sandwich on rye. With a little mustard. Some ice water. Then a little apple pie and coffee. A simple meal. We don’t want to make a lot of fuss. We are independent people who have moved west and stayed.

But remember this: A pastrami sandwich doesn’t just happen. It is a made thing. And a great deal more goes into it than you’d expect.

Want a pastrami sandwich? Two ways to go. Make one yourself from scratch or go to one of the L.A. area’s great delicatessens, such as Victor’s Deli in Hollywood. If you try the former, be prepared to travel to Indonesia. Be prepared to kill a cow that is many hundreds of pounds heavier than you. If you try the latter, think about just what huge, unseen forces made your simple meal possible.

Pastrami: But let us begin with the cow. Well, actually, a steer.

Let us narrow our focus on the Midwestern United States. Ranches small and large employ many thousands of workers and service people in Texas, Kansas and Nebraska. Midwestern cattle are raised mostly on grains grown in the same part of the nation. (Also currently in use are several chemical agents, hormones, vaccines and such that are manufactured in places as diverse as Switzerland, Germany, Canada, South Africa, Argentina and Japan.)

When the time comes, the rancher sells this steer to Iowa Beef Processors (IBP) in Dakota City, Neb., the world’s largest beef processor, which employs more than 34,000 people at 25 plant sites across North America. At one of these sites, probably in Nebraska, the steer is slaughtered. This is a complicated and involved series of actions, and since I, too, enjoy the occasional pastrami sandwich or cheeseburger, I’d rather not get too graphic here. Suffice to say the steer is no longer alive, nor does it resemble one anymore. It is separated into pieces and packaged for shipment all over the world.

One of these pieces is called the navel cut. (Again, it is best not to dwell on why it is called the navel cut. I simply think of it as the naval cut, some obscure reference to the types of meat that seafaring men of yore preferred.)

This particular piece of meat (we have made the transition, remember?) is bought by the Aries Prepared Beef Co., a Burbank firm that employs about 70 people whose task it is to turn the meat into pastrami, and that is not an uncomplicated job.

When asked about the methods they use, Fred Weiss of Aries is vague. There are details, yes, hundreds of them, but company secrets are just that--secrets. He isn’t about to divulge anything but the most general steps to pastrami-making, lest I quit writing and go into the pastrami business myself.

What I gather is that the navel cut is cured for some time in a sort of brine consisting of water, salt and a top-secret blend of spices. It is then seasoned with a liquid smoke made from a variety (again top secret) of woods, among them hickory, a tree grown in, among other places, Tennessee and Georgia.

Aries buys its spices from a Swiss broker referred to as Mr. Hess, who works at the First Spice Mixing Co. When prodded, Hess doesn’t quite reveal the blend that Aries uses, but he’s forthcoming about some of the spices involved--red pepper, black pepper, cumin and coriander from places as far away as India, Italy, Brazil, Spain and Israel.

The pastrami arrives at Victor’s, where the chefs slice it just so and pile it high between two slices of corn rye bread.

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Bread: The corn rye is baked in Los Angeles at Brown’s Wilshire Bakery, which is owned and operated by Oded Tajkef, originally from Israel. Brown’s employs 25 people. Ingredients for the corn rye include rye flour from Montana, clear flour from the Dakotas, cornmeal from Nebraska and caraway seeds from The Netherlands.

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Mustard: Nabisco of East Hanover, N.J., manufactures a type of mustard based on recipes from France. The ingredients are water from the upper Hudson River, mustard seed from India and distilled white-wine vinegar, most likely made from grapes grown in Northern California. Among other things. There is tartaric acid somewhere in there (made by dozens of manufacturers across the country). Again we face the noncommittal ingredient: spices. Could be just about anything from just about anywhere on earth.

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Pickle: The cucumbers are grown in California and are pickled with garlic and spices in Los Angeles. Ingredients include lactic acid, manufactured by Archer Daniels Midland Co. (“Supermarket to the World”) in Decatur, Ill. That firm employs 14,833 people and makes about a million ingredients for food products. Think citric acid and sodium lactate--all those things that go into food that you never take time to consider and yet are safe to eat (because the government wouldn’t let us eat something unsafe, would it?)

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Coffee: Today’s coffee at Victor’s is Costa Rican. Arabica beans are grown and harvested on the Tarrazu Plantation high in the hills of Costa Rica, in the Tarrazu growing region (not unlike the Bordeaux wine growing region of France or the Beverly Center shopping region of Los Angeles), one of the richest in the world. The coffee plantation employs many hundreds of workers and processors. After the beans are picked, they are sorted, graded, washed and dried in the sun. It takes about 33 man-hours of handling to bring 100 pounds of coffee beans from harvest to readiness for export.

Victor’s roasts the beans in a specialty roasting machine, the size of a Geo Metro, manufactured by Diedrich Coffee Roasters, based in Sandpoint, Idaho. Owned and operated by Stephan Diedrich, the company employs 17 people. The original machine for roasting the beans was invented by Carl Diedrich, his father, who received a degree in mechanical engineering in the 1920s in Berlin. The current model of the machine is made from high-carbon steel, much of which is imported from Belgium and Canada. It is run by a motor sold by Dayton Granger, in Dayton, Ohio.

The roasted beans are ground and brewed within 24 hours to keep their flavors and essences. But to make coffee, you need water.

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Water: Victor’s Deli is in Hollywood, considered to be on the west side of town. The San Fernando Valley and the Westside get their water from the Eastern Sierra Nevada mountains. Central and South-Central Los Angeles get theirs from local ground water, mixed with Sierra water. Some parts of the city get it from the Colorado River and Northern California. All of this also depends on statewide drought levels.

It can get complicated.

Let’s look at one possible source of Hollywood water. Melted snow flows into the Owens River and is sent southward through the 338-mile Los Angeles Aqueduct, moving only through the force of gravity down channels, pipes, tunnels and siphons. This water ends up in Sylmar at the Los Angeles Aqueduct Filtration Plant. From there it is pumped to various reservoirs, where it is treated with chlorine and then pumped to trunk lines (giant pipes) crisscrossing the city and finally to smaller water mains that serve different neighborhoods.

All of that work and effort to bring simple water to a place that has little of its own.

Ice: Victor’s ice is made in a Hoshizaki machine, manufactured in Japan. More important, it runs on electricity. And electricity is a whole big thing all its own.

Electricity for Victor’s Deli starts in Oregon. Maybe. Or maybe it is generated in Arizona--or Utah. The power grid in the Western United States is so complex and interwoven that moments after the Northridge earthquake in January 1994, people in Idaho lost power. There are 2,400 miles of underground and 6,100 miles of overhead lines in the L.A. system. There are also 290,000 poles and 18,000 underground vaults as well as 113,000 distribution transformers. The power finds its way to the Department of Water and Power’s pole-top transformers in Hollywood that have connecting lines to the main electrical panel at Victor’s Deli.

Without all this, no ice.

Apple Pie: Jackie Kneze-vich is the baker at Bakeaway Bakery near Culver City, which employs about 14 people. Victor’s most popular item from Bakeaway is the Apple Crumble, a sort of apple pie. The apples are organic, grown in Washington State and provided by L.A. Specialty Produce. The sugar comes from sugar beets grown in Northern California and is purchased through a local food supplier named Miller Distributing, which packages it for commercial use. A company called Superior Nut, a wholesale spice distributor, gets Jackie her cinnamon from Indonesia.

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Cup: Coffee is served in cups made in Pennsylvania by Hall China.

Silverware: Stainless-steel silverware is made from East Asian raw materials and machine-crafted in Taiwan.

Napkin: The napkin is made from bleached wood pulp and fibers in the Pacific Northwest.

Bill: Bill Gotti is a second-generation Italian New Yorker. In 1983 he bought a 50% interest in Victor’s Liquor, which had been operated by the same family, at the same corner, since 1929. In 1990, Bill and his partner Rick built an adjacent restaurant on the site of a disco and started serving pastrami sandwiches on rye. With a nice mustard.