Lox: An American Love Story

From Moment Magazine

When I was growing up on the Upper West Side in the 1930s, Broadway was lined with “appetizing” stores, that—unlike delicatessens, which sold smoked, cured and pickled meats—specialized in fish and dairy. These were shops where we bought pickles, fresh sauerkraut, dried fruits and candies as well as pickled, smoked and salted fish, and especially what we called lox. At the time, this now-iconic Jewish food was skyrocketing in popularity, and appetizing stores opened to meet the demand.

Most Americans, even Jews, don’t know that lox was invented in America, not Eastern Europe, explains Gil Marks, author of the Encyclopedia of Jewish Food. “Salmon was not an Eastern European fish,” although it was familiar to Scandinavians and Germans, including German Jews, he says. While “bagels were Polish and cream cheese was Native American,” Jews began to eat salmon en masse in early 20th-century America, where the fish was plentiful.

European Jews had long smoked and salted their fish, and they did the same with salmon when the transcontinental railroad opened in 1869. Salmon from the Pacific Northwest was smoked and shipped east in barrels layered with salt, creating a brine that preserved it for months without refrigeration as it made its way cross-country. The result was what is known today as belly lox—the traditional authentic salty salmon cured in brine. It was affordable, easy to keep and pareve, so it could be eaten with dairy.

The word lox itself is evidence of the food’s non-Eastern European roots. “The key to understanding the emergence of the term among Eastern European Jews in America is that lox is a German word,” Marks says. Lox is the Americanized spelling of the word for salmon in Yiddish (laks) and in German (lachs), and also a derivative of the Swedish gravlax, meaning cured salmon. Nova Scotia salmon, known as Nova, gained popularity after the introduction of refrigerated cases; instead of brining, which was no longer necessary, the fish could be lightly salted and then smoked. Today, we still use the term Nova to refer to the more expensive smoked salmon, although eventually, the word lox has come to encompass salmon from both coasts and even northern Europe.

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