Seltzer, aka "Jewish Champagne," has a fascinating history, so why does this Atlantic writer hate it?
Avoiding unpleasant and painful foods is the essence of our banal society
Remember earlier this summer while everyone was delighting in the uprising by orcas who attacked sailboats named Champagne and dispatched three ships to Davy Jones’ locker, a dope from The Atlantic took the side of the yachting class?
Staff writer Jacob Stern decided to plant his flag on the hill of “Stop rooting for the orcas ramming boats” because they are “sadistic jerks.”
Stern got dragged all over Twitter like a hapless seal in an orca’s jaw. But bad takes seem to be his shtick as another one of his cringe-worthy articles caught my eye: “Seltzer is Torture.”
Stern cried “carbonated beverages … hurt me. They inflict actual, physical pain on my mouth.” But the joke is on Stern. He went full Karen on bubbly water only because he knows little about seltzer.
The history of seltzer is fascinating, which I will explain. Stern’s ignorance is useful as it raises the question, why do humans love foods that are toxic, uncomfortable, and even painful?
My relationship with seltzer began when I moved to New York City in the 1990s. Everyone drank it, it was offered to visitors, and it was sold everywhere. It was fizzy, fun and refreshing, and it seemed to aid digestion. Turns out Jewish immigrants in the Lower East Side, my hood, figured out in the late 1800s that seltzer had an important role to play in cuisine.
The Jewish link to seltzer goes back to the 1500s according to Gil Marks’ Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. In Niederselters, near Frankfurt, Germany, “a naturally carbonated tonic water” was enjoyed by Jew and gentile alike. The town lent its name to the beverage, seltsers wasser. How seltzer became synonymous with Jewish New York is disputed, however.
Another scholar writes in Gastronomica that the adoption of seltzer by Jewish immigrants in America was more happenstance than an import like knishes, kreplach, and bialys. James Edward Malin says New York’s aqueduct system that opened in the 1840s did not reach tenements in which Ashkenazi Jews crowded in the late 19th century. But a robust seltzer industry did exist by the mid-1800s, and it initially advertised to Yiddish housewives not as a Jewish drink but an English one as they were seen as the creators of the finest bubbly water.
Ashkenazis quickly adopted clean and cheap seltzer as their own. By 1890, 112 Jewish-owned candy stores served “two cents plain,” a glass of pure seltzer. It was dispensed at “Street Spas” by two dozen pushcart vendors on the Lower East Side alone and delivered to homes around the city by seltzer men plying routes in horse-drawn carts alongside milkmen and icemen. Orthodox Jews may also have favored seltzer because it was kosher and a substitute for alcoholic drinks they tended to shun.
The thick green and blue glass bottles that held carbonated water at up to ten times atmospheric pressure became a fixture in Jewish, Italian, and Irish homes. The seltzer craze spawned the nostalgic and mysterious egg cream. When it appeared, how it acquired its name, or where it originated, the Lower East Side or Brooklyn, is still being debated. The most contentious question is whether an egg cream ever had egg given it has had neither egg nor cream for generations, just seltzer, milk, and chocolate syrup.
(If you would like to enjoy an egg cream while discussing this, email me at arun.indypendent@gmail.com to join a food tour where we visit one of the last shops in the city making egg creams.)
Among the estimated 1.5 million Ashkenazi Jews who migrated to New York City from 1880 to 1920, their cuisine followed the same trajectory as other immigrants — it was a romanticized ideal. In the shtetls of Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, Jewish food was rough plant-based cuisine — cabbage, potatoes, pickled fish, noodles, and bread. Pottages such as cholent, a lentil stew, or matzo ball used were ways to stretch meat, if there was any. While immigrants to America faced harsh living and working conditions, the industrialization of food and agriculture across a continent cleansed of native peoples delivered a bounty to cities. Italian immigrants would boast in letters to peasant kin back home that while they ate meat three times a year in Italy, they ate meat three times a day in America.
Jews in America could finally eat beef and chicken regularly they enviously eyed on the tables of their wealthy brethren in Europe. Bagels once dipped in goose fat or eaten with pickled herring in Poland became the vehicle for luxurious cream cheese and silken smoked salmon in New York. There was a price to be paid for a diet of pot roast, latkes, pastrami, and chicken liver, however: indigestion. Among Yiddish speakers in the Lower East Side, seltzer water was known as grepvasser or “belch water.” A glass of seltzer, also nicknamed Jewish Champagne, was perfect for relieving heartburn caused by fatty foods.
(Speaking of smoked salmon, if you have never had the classic bagel and lox from Russ & Daughters, try it immediately. It is a revelation, and you can wash away any resulting heartburn with a can of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray Soda invented in 1868, possibly in the Lower East Side.)
Seltzer’s golden age was Prohibition with some 2,000 seltzer companies in the New York area alone. During the Roaring ’20s, soda fountains replaced saloons as public watering holes. Bartenders became soda jerks, concocting thousands of different fizzy beverages and ice cream floats at the estimated 650 soda fountains around New York City. But the relentless pace of technology that birthed the seltzer industry with innovations like carbonating water and bottling inventions to siphon mechanisms and supply chains rapidly undid it.
The prosperity that followed World War 2 was marked by the dominance of processed food national brands. Home refrigerators and Coca-Cola sidelined the seltzer man and Lender’s frozen bagels killed the storied Bagel Makers’ Union Local 338. The seltzer industry was dealt a further blow by seltzer in plastic bottles that infested supermarkets in the 1970s. Like frozen bagels, supermarket seltzer is an inferior product. On top of choking sea turtles, plastic bottles can’t handle the pressure thick glass bottles can. Ever notice how seltzer in a plastic bottle goes flat no matter how fast you drink it? The pressure and siphon on a glass bottle enable seltzer to be squirted out while keeping the remaining liquid bubbly to the last gulp.
The last remaining seltzer factory is the Gomberg Seltzer Factory, founded in 1953 in Canarsie and renamed the Brooklyn Seltzer Boys. They continue the practice of beating triple-filtered chilled carbonated water “with a series of rotating paddles so vigorously that its molecules bind together.”
A spritz from a classic seltzer bottle is a wonder. The carbonation is livelier and longer lasting than the plastic stuff. Kenny Gomberg, a third-generation member of the seltzer family factory, explained to a reporter why good seltzer causes the pain that makes Jacob Stern bawl.
“Good seltzer should hurt,” Gomberg said. “The term we use is ‘bite.’ When you swallow it, you feel the bubbles in your throat and it’s, like, painful.”
What Jacob Stern doesn’t get is that pain is a feature not a bug of seltzer. Though the bubbles don’t cause the pain. When CO2 dissolves in water it creates carbonic acid, which results in the bite and pain you feel. Bubbles do appear to enhance the pain, however.
The idea that something that is unpleasant at first should be forever undesirable is the essence of our dumbed-down society. Movies and novels, music and food are all designed by globe-crushing corporations to be as inoffensive as possible to be as profitable as possible.
To desire soft blandness is to be a child. Almost no one likes alcohol the first time they try it, or the twentieth time. It took me years to acquire a taste for beer, wine, and spirits, one at a time. Same with coffee, home-made yogurt, olives, and a dozen types of organ meat. I hated capsicum as a kid, now I crave chili pepper in most cuisines I eat down to desserts. It took me a hundred times eating kimchi to fall in love with it. Now I seek out various types of kimchi, cabbages, radishes, greens, onions, and savor the sour funky quality aged kimchi acquires.
The list of foods that are unpleasant or uncomfortable on first attempt is endless, and much longer than limp industrial foods. Cuisines are accumulations of thousands of years of social practices and history. The foods handed down result from the human struggle to feed ourselves so we get ingenious on how to coax food from the earth and then transform it with heat and microbes.
The processed food industry would have us believe that our tastes are fixed. That is utterly false. Tastes change constantly and we can acquire new tastes that delight our entire lives. Take cilantro. Do you hate it “because it tastes like soap”? Stern mentions it. Guess what. Cilantro tastes soapy to me. Apparently there is a genetic predisposition to the soapy taste. But I ate cilantro every day growing up. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized it tastes like soap when whole. When it was minced the soapy flavor vanished. But whether whole or chopped I love the flavor of cilantro.
Harold McGee, the renowned historian of the science of cooking, once talked to a neuroscientist who studies the perception of smells and overcame his cilantro aversion. Jay Gottfried of Northwestern University said:
“I didn’t like cilantro to begin with. But I love food, and I ate all kinds of things, and I kept encountering it. My brain must have developed new patterns for cilantro flavor from those experiences, which included pleasure from the other flavors and the sharing with friends and family. That’s how people in cilantro-eating countries experience it every day. So I began to like cilantro. It can still remind me of soap, but it’s not threatening anymore, so that association fades into the background, and I enjoy its other qualities. On the other hand, if I ate cilantro once and never willingly let it pass my lips again, there wouldn’t have been a chance to reshape that perception.”
McGee also confirmed my experience, saying that chopping cilantro seems to transform the offending chemicals so they no longer leave an unpleasant taste.
If Stern had his way, cilantro would probably disappear. His anti-seltzer screed is a manifesto for a dull, bland society. Instead we should take our cue from another manifesto writer who wrote in a preface to Das Kapital, “There is no royal road to science, and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep paths have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
I will try strong and unpleasant foods again and again, struggling with them as I do with writing, literature, and art. Sometimes I abandon the path but many times I reach luminous summits I didn’t know existed.
If you would like to join an upcoming food tour, email me at arun.indypendent@gmail.com.