Smoking meat was invented independently, over and over, by people who had never heard of each other. That is worth saying out loud.
There is a version of the smoked meat story that treats it as one culture’s property, handed down and guarded. It is a warm story and it is not quite true — and the true version is better, because there is room in it for more people.
Everyone figured out smoke
Preserving meat with smoke is nearly as old as controlled fire, and it appears wherever people needed protein to outlast a season:
- In the Amazon, Indigenous communities built wooden racks over low fires to keep fish from spoiling in punishing humidity.
- In the Andes, Quechua communities wind-dried and lightly smoked llama and alpaca to make charqui — the word that became jerky.
- In China, smoked meats like la rou date to the Zhou Dynasty and were part of ritual and ancestral offering. Pine in the north, bamboo for a milder smoke, camphor wood in Hunan and Jiangxi.
- Mongol nomads salted and dried strips of horse and camel meat for the steppes.
- Polynesian cultures used earth ovens like the imu to steam and smoke pork and fish underground on hot stones.
- In Alpine Austria and Germany, whole villages shared a Selchhaus — a smoking hut with an external firebox feeding cool smoke into a wooden chamber for weeks at a time.
And then Montreal happened
What arrived in Montreal was a specific branch of that enormous tree: pastrama, as practiced by Jewish butchers in Romania, Hungary and Lithuania, carried across the Atlantic by families leaving pogroms and poverty at the turn of the twentieth century.
It then landed in a French-speaking city, adapted to a British butchery tradition that cut beef differently, and became something that existed in neither Romania nor Britain nor France. Montreal smoked meat is a hybrid from the first day. It could not have happened anywhere else, and it could not have happened without all three of those inputs.
A food built out of other people’s traditions has no business being precious about who is allowed to enjoy it.
Which brings us to now
Southern Ontario is one of the most diverse places on earth. At a single office lunch Ryan will feed people whose families came from Guangzhou, Lagos, Karachi, Kyiv and Kingston, plus three people from Côte-Saint-Luc who want to tell you about a specific sandwich they had in 1992.
Almost everyone in that room has a version of this in their own food culture — cured, smoked, hung, dried, preserved by someone’s grandmother against a hard season. Recognising that is not a marketing angle. It is just accurate, and it makes the lunch better.