The art of Kevin Blythe Sampson

THE ART OF
KEVIN BLYTHE SAMPSON

4/14/10

Pastrami: Interesting Thing of the Day

Sometimes the ideas for interesting topics come to me in rather roundabout ways. For instance, I was trying to come up with just one more topic that could somehow be construed as involving things that are stuffed. As usual, I asked my wife, Morgen, if she had any ideas. She made a few suggestions, none of which really grabbed me. Finally she said she was stumped and apparently gave up. A few minutes later, however, she handed me a book by Patricia Volk titled Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family. That was, of course, a very promising sign. Then she pointed out that the author’s family had run a restaurant in New York called Morgen’s—spelled the same way as my wife’s name. A lovely coincidence. (Morgen, it turns out, is the maiden name of the author’s mother—and also the name of a beagle that Volk and her sister once owned.) Flipping a few pages ahead, my wife showed me a picture of the author’s great-grandfather, Sussman Volk, whose claim to fame had been that he “brought pastrami to the New World.” Now we were getting somewhere.

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