Montreal’s Jewish food more than just bagels
Museum’s walking tour tells the stories behind the city’s love of a culture’s dishes
MONTREAL— When the question is asked which Jewish food has most defined Montreal, the near-unanimous answer is bagels.
Chewy, seed-covered, boiled in honeywater and delivered warm from a woodburning oven, the distinctive Montreal bagels were first brought to the city by the rush of Jewish immigrants who moved from eastern Europe at the end of the 19th century.
And while the doughy rings may be the Jewish community’s best-known culinary contributions to the city, they’re not the only one.
Bagels and more are the subject of the Museum of Jewish Montreal’s threeand-a-half-hour-long “Beyond the Bagel” walking tour, which aims to tell the story of some of the city’s best and lesser known Jewish foods, and the stories behind them.
As many foodies know, several of the city’s most iconic foods are Jewish in origin.
There’s Schwartz’s smoked meat, still located in the same small storefront where it was founded by a Romanian Jewish immigrant in 1928.
There also Cheskie’s famous babkas, or a grilled salami/baloney “special” at Wilensky’s, heated on a press and served with mustard.
The tour is a mix of historic businesses like Schwartz’s, newcomers like Jewish bakery Hof Kelsten, and long-gone sites such as the original Steinberg’s grocery store and the Rachel Street market.
“Montreal is really well known for Jewish food, especially bagels and smoked meat,” said Katherine Romanow, the food historian who designed the tour.
“We wanted to go beyond, go a little deeper in terms of the Jewish food history in the city.”
One of the most “evocative” stops, in Romanow’s opinion, is a simple alleyway in front of the home where Esther Witenoff, a Russian Jew, convinced her skeptical husband Sam to try selling some of her homemade dill pickles on his bread delivery route.
While he didn’t believe anyone would buy them, Sam eventually gave in — and Mrs. Whyte’s pickle company would go on to grow and sustain several generations of the family before eventually being bought out by a larger supplier.
Montreal’s Jewish population expanded in the 1880s, when waves of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in eastern Europe settled in the bustling, multiethnic neighbourhoods around Montreal’s St-Laurent Boulevard.
Like many immigrant communities, they brought their food with them, running family-owned businesses out of small storefronts or their own kitchens.
While the majority of the original Jewish community eventually moved away from the Mile End, their presence is still felt to this day.
On a recent Sunday, families pushing strollers and young professionals out for brunch rubbed elbows with dozens of Hasidic Jews, who were busily preparing for the holiday of Sukkot, as tour guide Anya Kowalchuk explained.
The art history student cheerfully led a group of four tourists, all American, to the first stop outside Cheskie’s bakery, which she described as “one of the only places you’ll find Hasidim and hipsters waiting in line together.”
There she handed out cheese crowns and kokosh — a slightly denser and more chocolatey version of a babka — which were either eaten on the spot or tucked into takeaway bags.
Next up was St-Viateur Bagel, where Kowalchuk explained that at one time bagels were not only eaten but also hung around the necks of pregnant women as a way of warding off the evil eye.
In addition to smoked meat, bread, pickles and other favourites, tour participants also get a chance to try a second bagel at Fairmount bakery, in order to add their voices to the longstanding dispute over which is tastier.
For a tour titled “Beyond the Bagel,” there’s quite a few of them, as Romanow admits.
“It’s very carb-heavy,” she said with a laugh.
While the bagels and smoked meat have been widely adopted to the point where they’re now considered Montreal foods rather than Jewish ones, she hopes the tour will help remind people of where they started.
“They were small businesses (that were) started to feed their communities and bring a taste of home to a new place,” she said. “It’s often forgotten today because they’re so ingrained in the culture of the city.”