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Pickled (腌制的) vegetables, fish and meat preserved in salt, and bread baked in a circle with a hole in the middle (e.g. bagels), were once the foods for the poor of all backgrounds in central and eastern Europe. But it was Jewish immigrants (犹太移民) who brought these recipes to the West, particularly to America, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Bagels and pickled foods became mainstays of Jewish deli (熟食店) cuisine,which are the subject of an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society called “I’ll Have What She’s Having”. The exhibition implicitly (含蓄地) asks whether a cuisine that has been enjoyed by millions and helped define the taste of New York City continues to be lively today.

There is a distinctly sad tone to it. Though some foods exist over several decades, the number of Jewish delis in America has dropped sharply. Black-and-white pictures of long-gone people eating at long-gone places line the exhibition’s walls. After all, the Jewish deli is a product of a bygone era,shaped by immigration, discrimination and inner-city life. As immigrants’ children fit in with the locals and moved away, the deli became one of many dining choices — less a center of communal Jewish life and more a pleasant place to occasionally cat and talk about the past.

Meanwhile, deli food itself has crossed its limits. For a while, McDonald’s in Germany offered a “Grilled Texas Bagel”. That is a senseless phrase to a deli expert: a decent bagel belongs nowhere near a grill and has nothing to do with Texas. But it suggests that bagels — like pizza, hot dogs and other foods once only consumed by particular ethnicities — now come across less as specifically Jewish than as broadly American.

The most hopeful part of the exhibit is at the end: a case of menus from modern delis across the country. They were founded by young Jewish chefs determined to keep their culinary (烹饪的) traditions alive — not because discrimination left them no other way out, but because the food is delicious, inspiring, and an irreplaceable part of America’s culinary landscape.