What exactly is pastrami?
If you want to get poetic about it, pastrami is a way of going back in time. So is cheese, for that matter. Pastrami is a technology for preserving meat that our ancestors used before refrigerators. Cheese falls into the same category — cheese is a non-refrigerated technology for storing milk. It turns out that pastrami and cheese both happen to taste good, so they are still very popular even though the preservation technology they each represent is no longer needed. Prior to refrigeration, killing a large animal like a cow or a pig presented a problem. Either you had to have a huge party so you could eat the whole thing at once, or you had to find a way to preserve it. About the only way to preserve meat prior to the 20th century was by salting. If you add enough salt to meat, you kill all the bacte
