By Jim Duncan CVFDude@aol.com

Late in the 20th century, the art of sandwich making entered the Dark Ages. First we lost many small-town lockers and butchers, along with their old recipes for preserving meats. Nationally branded products cornered the market, first in grocery stores, then in so-called delis. Finally, the food police convinced Big Ag that a paranoid public wanted their lunchmeat tweaked in reaction to the latest findings of nutritional detectives.
However, the sandwich art didn't truly bottom out until pseudo-delis replaced briskets with rounds in both corned beef and pastrami. This allowed them to advertise lower fat, but they tasted so bland that now the best deli in downtown Des Moines doesn't even offer pastrami. When wisdom becomes taboo, the keepers of knowledge go underground. If you wanted to read Aristotle in the Middle Ages, you had to go to an obscure monastery and ask for hidden manuscripts. If you want good corned beef today, you must go to a Jewish deli and ask for the stuff that isn't on the menu.
For 4,000 years, piety has protected kosher foods from the fickle winds of fashion. Glatt, the most pious of kosher distinctions, forbids the use of the dreadful rounds, in all foods.
"We don't eat anything behind the 10th rib," explains Rabbi Yosef Jacobson of Maccabee Deli, where sandwiches come with marvelous pickles and engagement in the issues of the day. Jacobson wants his deli to be a community forum, a Hegelian cross section of opinions and self-examination. That ambiance has been slow in coming.
"I love New York for its diversity. It's so healthy to be surrounded by differences of opinion. I miss that here," he says.
We visited Maccabee recently for "second-cut" corned beef, and to ask about a prickly food issue. This corned beef is the best in town, though most people prefer "first cut," which comes from the leaner ("flat") part of the brisket. But Jacobson's "second cut" is reserved for fans of the fatter side of life.
"At the end of the day, we're all going to hang, so for now, let's get the marrow," he says, laughing.
This cut is called "fatty brisket" in Texas barbecue, and "point" in butcher shops. It's also mistakenly called "deckle," which is actually the layer of fat that separates the point from the flat.
"Cardiologists seem to prefer the second cut," the rabbi says.
Jacobson prepares the second-cut corned beef himself, from cured briskets that are processed, like all his meats, in Postville by Rubashkin's, the only kosher processor in America permitted to export to Israel. Maccabee's other lunchmeats include first-cut pastrami, roast beef, turkey, plus turkey pastrami and turkey salami. Good tuna salad is also made here.
In addition, you can get kosher, whole turkeys, veal chops and brisket, lamb chops, beef and gefilte fish. The deli, though, is about far more than food. Ideas come here for pickling. Its bulletin board has "Work Wanted" notices and an array of community activities and speaker announcements. We had to ask about People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals' (PETA), whose undercover videotapes last fall showed cows staggering and bellowing for minutes after their throats had been slit at Rubashkin's. The rabbi told us that business actually increased after the videos became public and he commended PETA's work. He also told us that the kosher plant is moving into organic beef.
"Normally, organic is more expensive, but with glatt it's different," he says. "Only about 20 percent of kosher qualifies as glatt. (Glatt means "smooth" in reference to the lungs of the
slaughtered cow, which can have no spots.) But they are
finding that with organic cattle, the percentage is far
higher, so the added cost is negated." CV

Maccabee's Deli
1150 Polk, 277-1718
Tues.: 11-5; Wed.-Thur.: 11-6 Fri.: 10-2:30; Sun.: 11-4.

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