Not that being cool confers protection against higher costs.

“Brisket prices have gone up almost 40 percent or more since I opened in 2013,” Billy Durney, the owner of Hometown Bar-B-Que in Red Hook, said. “I think we increased prices a dollar a pound. We put some other products on the menu that are not loss leaders. For us, brisket and beef are what people come to Hometown for. We can’t take it off the menu.”

But back to the beleaguered pastrami.

It began as the food of poor people in a new land. The German and Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the United States in the 19th century made a delightful discovery.

“Beef was more available in America than in any place Jews had ever lived,” Harry Levine, a sociologist at Queens College, wrote in a 2007 article, “Pastrami Land, the Jewish Deli in New York City,” for the quarterly journal Contexts. “In America, the Jews became the people of the brisket.”

A long, tough cut from the breast, marbled with fat, brisket requires slow cooking. Corned beef, which is brisket that has been pickled, was already widely available in the United States. The new immigrants elaborated on it, smoking and spicing the corned beef with techniques used in southeastern Europe to preserve mutton and pork, according to Professor Levine.

Their creation was called pastrami.

“In the 1870s or 1880s, immigrant Jews really did create pastrami in New York City,” he wrote.

They also simultaneously introduced a series of permanent disputes in New York as to which was the best and the most authentic, which bread it should be served on, what kind of soda to drink with it, where the meat was piled highest, machine-sliced versus hand-sliced, and so on. In 1979, Mimi Sheraton of The New York Times collected 104 pastrami and corned beef sandwiches to conduct a taste test.

To this day, no self-respecting pastrami slinger will concede to cutting corners by even a millimeter. And they have all apparently been in the business since birth or close to it as if they, too, were pickled and steamed in lore.