Twenty years before that commercial hit the airwaves, my mother was sending me off to school with bologna sandwiches. The early ones consisted of one slice of lunch meat between two pieces of white sandwich bread—a local variant of Wonder Bread—lightly coated with a mixture of French’s mustard and Best Foods mayonnaise. (I never understood why my mother would first mix the two condiments together rather than applying them separately to the bread.) That single sandwich, a piece of fruit, and a small Thermos of milk became the sole occupants of my Roy Rogers metal lunch box. When I advanced into the fourth grade, my sandwich quota doubled. When potato chips became available in snack-sized bags, they were added to my daily midday meal.

I don’t remember how old I was, probably in high school, before I realized that bologna was spelled with an “a,” not an “i,” at the end of the word. I also don’t remember my mother’s preferred brand being Oscar Mayer. I don’t remember if the bologna I was served in the early days came from a deli counter or a market shelf, but by the time I was in high school, it always came prepackaged.

Once in a while, for a little variation, my mother would purchase olive loaf or pimento loaf. These were bologna slices with a modicum of sliced green olives or sweet, red pimentos. In both of these lunch meat variants, the flavor of the bologna overpowered the additive so the extra expense wasn’t warranted.

Although my parents had moved to about 35 miles south of San Francisco—I didn’t arrive until the following year—my mother regularly returned there by train to shop. Occasionally, she would shop at a German delicatessen, and there would be a respite from bologna. I don’t know if my mother couldn’t buy lunch meat from the butcher she went to in Redwood City, or simply chose not to. In those early days, the butcher shop, bakery, and a small market were all located within a block of each other on the edge of downtown and within walking distance of our house.

When we moved a little farther south to Menlo Park, the new town had two delicatessens. A couple of the markets had butcher concessions, but my mother only bought fresh meat at those. She started buying lunch meat more regularly from the delis. Gradually, my bologna was replaced with what was then called hard salami—now sold under the protected name of Italian dry salami—and German salami, a fine-grained cooked, salami-style lunch meat. Liverwurst and all of its varieties also graced my sandwiches. The bread moved from white sandwich bread to rye-bread variants and then to a white-bread alternate called Dutch-crunch. The artisan bread movement was still a decade away, but by the time my high school years were drawing to a close, a commercial version of sliced, sourdough French bread was a common occupant of my lunch bag.

Occasionally, my mother would buy some pastrami from the delicatessen. Not for me, but for guests coming for Sunday brunch. I would get a few slices, but never as many as I wanted. Even as an adult, it always seems too expensive, so I rarely purchase it.

Now, if I eat a pastrami sandwich, it will most likely be at a restaurant or sandwich shop. I’ll either order a simple pastrami on rye bread or a Reuben sandwich made with pastrami. I’ve probably eaten some form of a pastrami sandwich at most of the existing old-style delicatessens in Manhattan. In the 1980s, when I travelled often to Baltimore, I’d have the open-faced pastrami Reuben at a small restaurant near the Monument Street entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital almost daily.

A number of times in the past, I’ve attempted to make my own pastrami. These efforts have ranged from disappointing to disastrous. It didn’t matter what the source of the recipe was, the results were never satisfying. I came to believe that part of the problem was because commercial pastrami is often cooked in a steam oven. I didn’t have one of those, and so I couldn’t duplicate its results. Last May, I heard of a new website dealing with modern cooking techniques. Upon investigation, I found a recipe for “sous vide pastrami” that looked promising. There were many details in the recipe that I knew from the start I would ignore or change, but there was enough remaining to inspire a new attempt. My latest dip into the pastrami pool was a reasonable success, and it demanded to become an amuse-bouche.

My pastrami recipe has some roots in the one I found online, but I changed or simplified many details from the cut of meat to the cooking times and temperatures to the spice and brine mixtures. I knew my pastrami would be made from beef shoulder because I had successfully substituted that for short ribs and brisket in other recipes. When one of my local markets put 5-cm (2-in) thick slices of shoulder on sale, my new pastrami adventure commenced.

After cooking, my 900-g (2-lb) piece of meat shrank to about 3-3⁄4 cm (1-1⁄2 in) thick and produced 24 portions, allowing for generous sampling and testing. The whole pastrami preparation process took eight days from starting the brine to vacuum packing and freezing.

In contrast to the time that the pastrami takes to prepare, the time to make the batch of sixteen biscuits was about 30 minutes.

Spread a small amount of the mayonnaise mixture on each of the toasted surfaces, and arrange four slices of pastrami on each bottom piece of biscuit. Cover the pastrami with the top biscuit piece, and place on a serving plate. Serve while still warm.