I
never met any of my great-grandparents.
In fact, my father’s father had already died years before I was
born. But my mother tells me that her
maternal grandfather was a top-notch German butcher.
The
way things worked back then, people who worked in a trade probably started out
as an apprentice. Back in The Old
Country, that may have meant membership in a trade guild or some other formal
group invented to control access to lucrative employment as well as fulfill important
societal roles.
So
my great-grandfather was a German butcher, his father was likely the same, and
so on and so on back through history to someone who lived in a forest and
butchered wild game for friends and neighbors.
One can imagine a misty medieval scene in which a local hunter-gatherer
dragged the still steaming carcass of a wild boar to one of my ancestors for
“processing,” my forebear extracting his fee in a combination of choice and
not-so-choice hog parts. Hey, it’s a
living.
As
a result, I can accept that my carnivorous tendencies come naturally. Families of butchers almost always ate;
sometimes they ate sausage.
The
entire Germanic race seems to have an ongoing and intimate relationship with
sausages. Big ones, small ones, white
ones, black ones, slim ones, pudgy ones, sausages made from pork, beef, veal,
and blood (yes, blood). Have you ever
checked out a recipe for headcheese?
Oops. Headcheese is, technically,
not a sausage.I
I’m
afraid that in much of my family, sausages enjoy an iconic status. My relatives used to mark their calendars so
that they would be properly attuned to the scheduling subtleties of the upcoming
bockwurst season. Never mind that
“bockwurst season” always came a couple weeks before the start of Lent. No
exceptions. These people wanted to KNOW
precisely when the delicate white, garlic-and-chive-laden veal links, with no
preservatives, would make their annual debut, coiled and curled in stacks on
big white enamel trays or hanging from huge cast-iron wall hooks in the
refrigerated cases at local meat meccas like Schumacher’s or Gutheinz’s.
These
places also enjoyed iconic status. They
were different, but in a way, the same.
If that sounds confusing, be assured that it really wasn’t.
Both
places were retail stores. They served
as places of employment for many people.
They served lots and lots of customers who relied on them for lots and
lots of wholesome, high-quality meat. No
cheeses, no spices, Tasty Cakes or Little Debbies, no frou-frou, no
point-of-sale Tic-Tacs or key chains.
Meat. If you wanted meat, you
knew where to go. If you wanted anything
else, you went elsewhere.
However,
at “retail establishment,” the similarity ended. Gutheinz’s was big, situated on one of the
main commercial avenues on the south (we called it “home”) side of town. Although they sold all types of meat (and I
mean that in every sense of the word – the bristles of a hog were made into
brushes, the hides into footballs – virtually everything else got eaten), they
supplied most of the hot dogs to most of the restaurants, vendors, and homes
within a twenty mile radius of Scranton.
The store was always cool and slightly darkened, with long white cases
and cutting tables dotting the floors covered with small white hexagonal
ceramic tiles. Lots of (mostly) friendly
white men in white cloth hats and coats filled the orders of the white people
who shopped there for red and white meat.
Things were simple. Clean. Life was orderly, in a Germanic sort of way
that was tempered by the bustle of post-War growth and the welcome clamor of
young, growing families.
Schumacher’s
was in many ways the anti-Gutheinz’s.
Their shops (they had two, Gutheinz only one) were small and dark. The floors were wire-brushed hardwood, squeaky-clean
yet covered with scattered wood shavings put there to absorb anything unseemly
that might drip on them. I loved going
there, especially in the summer when the humidity outside would render
everything on your back damp and clingy.
Inside, Schumacher’s was cool, cold almost, partly because it needed to
be that way to preserve the tons of meat standing around and stacked in the
huge cases and walk-in refrigerators, but also because the store was two steps
below street level and shaded by surrounding trees, houses, and shops. Zoning rigor was not a feature of life in Scranton.
Children
always seemed to be welcome at Schumacher’s.
They would gravitate to the eye-level cases full of chops, roasts, and
sausages (ground meat was prepared on demand).
We watched with fascination through the glass of the cases as men’s hands,
protruding from the sleeves of white cotton full-length coats, reached in to
retrieve items for your grandmother’s or mother’s weekly order. And, for your troubles and patience (and
because the Schumacher family appeared to firmly understand that today’s young apprentice
carnivore becomes tomorrow’s customer/carnivore), they would reward their mini-clientele
with a freshly cut slab of rich, moist, garlicky bologna, made on-site and the
best you’ve ever tasted. The slice filled
your little hand. I guarantee a
vegetarian would go over to the dark side after one taste of this stuff, if for
no other reason but to grant them insight as to why some people like and even
fixate on meat.
I’m
pretty certain that my entire extended family bought the bulk of its meat from
either one purveyor or the other, with the possible exception of the stray
pound of ground beef bought on an emergency basis from a corner grocer. This
was partly because supermarkets were not yet ubiquitous. Part was also because rapid worldwide transportation
of goods had not yet made possible the eating of fresh lettuce or beets grown in
Tierra del Fuego.
And
part of it was just healthy, good old local chauvinism. I know for certain that I never even saw a
Hebrew National frankfurter until I went to a baseball game in Yankee Stadium
with my Cub Scout pack when I was about nine.
I wouldn’t have known a “frankfurter” if I had stepped on one if we
hadn’t gotten a television. We were
Americans, and, darn it, Americans ate hot dogs.
My
earliest awareness of Oscar Mayer – the brand, not the person -- was an
encounter with that incredible application of technology in which
food-followed-function.
Yep,
it was the Wiener-Mobile. My sixth-grade
friend Davey and I were walking home from a hard day of annoying our teacher, dawdling
as fast as we could to postpone our daily confrontation with homework. Suddenly, Davey spotted it out of the corner
of his eye. I caught his double-take and
matched it with a few takes of my own. It
was … look at that! A HUGE HOT DOG ON
WHEELS! DRIVING RIGHT DOWN THE STREET!
What
an incredible hoot. We chased the thing
on foot for blocks until it rounded a corner out of view. Afer that, it immediately became Hot Topic
Number One at our respective dinner tables that night. Neither set of parents believed us. There was no such thing as a 15-foot long hot
dog on wheels. Please. Of course, I’ve now come to learn that not
only was the Wiener Mobile a fact of the moment, it was historically
significant, a piece of Americana before we had an inkling of what Americana
was. Having been unleashed upon America’s
highways by Oscar Meyer Company as a rolling promotion in 1936, we were
probably, in 1955 looking on the original, a one-off prototype, art on wheels. After all, there was certainly no every-year-a-model-year
phenomenon in the Wiener Mobile business.
Davey
and I were now gun-shy and hyper vigilant.
Our tale of a big roller-weenie on a bun had been deemed too far-fetched
even for our fertile and over-achieving imaginations. But we were redeemed a few days later through
several other independent confirmed sightings and a newspaper article. However, by then our buildup had rendered redemption
anticlimactic. To us, it was old hat, yesterday’s
meat sighting. Later on, though, the memory
would make me empathetic, at least in a small way, with the army of poor blokes
who have been unfortunate enough to be compelled to tell their tales of abduction
by space aliens. Space aliens, yeah,
right. Hot dog on wheels. Sure.
I
almost forgot. This is about Texas wieners.
Odds
are, unless you’re from Scranton or its environs, you’ve never even heard of
the Texas wiener. Join the deprived
masses with no knowledge of this culinary phenomenon, low cuisine’s best-kept
secret. With more thorough press, the
Texas wiener could, no, make that should, enjoy legendary status equal to that
of See’s candy among West Coast devotees, the deep-fried Ding-Dong, or the
truffle consumed by the truffle dog. Locally,
of course, Texas
wieners were simply taken for granted.
(A sidelight: personally, and
having sampled both, I always thought that West Side Scranton’s own Williams’s
Candies far surpassed See’s Candies for flavor and quality, and did so by
orders of magnitude. But that’s another
subject, saved for another chapter.)
Since
leaving Scranton, I’ve encountered and devoured numerous chili dogs. But the chili dog, my friends, runs a distant
and inferior third to a genuine Texas wiener, and second place is equally
unmemorable. A chili dog is to a Texas
wiener as a button mushroom is to an oyster mushroom, or maybe even an amanita muscaria (look
it up). Don’t overburden that analogy,
though, if you know anything about mushrooms.
Texas wieners may be many things, but they are not hallucinogenic.
I
recently heard a rumor that someplace else in Pennsylvania, maybe Altoona, has
a flock of Texas wiener devotees, probably because some transplanted and
homesick Scrantonian met a market niche by opening a Texas wiener stand. Or maybe some poor Altoonan lost a weekend in
the fleshpots of Scranton and had a Texas wiener or twelve while he was there, gargling
them down with orange Nehi soda (it was Radar O’Reilly’s drink of choice, which
is why Radar’s tastes were never suspect in my book). As a result, this poor Altoonan probably couldn’t
get the damn things off his mind or their distinctive aromatic presence off his
breath or out of his double knit polyester pants. Petroleum-based pants seem to come with the
geographic territory of western Pennsylvania.
Among
its embarrassment of cultural riches, Scranton had two Texas wiener emporiums,
and I use that term because these places sold nothing else, except possibly Alka
Seltzer. One of them, called Coney
Island Texas Wieners, was on the dividing line between Scranton’s decaying
downtown and its similarly decaying south side.
It was near the train station, which may have accounted for the Texas
wiener phenomenon stretching as far afield as Altoona. The place occupied a basement-level space
accessed by a sidewalk that ran down the hill under a railroad trestle carrying
the old DL&W tracks over the first few feet of Cedar Avenue. Coney Island occupied the Texas wiener pinnacle as far as I was
concerned.
Not
far behind was Yankee Lunch, located on a busy South Side (pronounced “sow-side,”
one word, by residents) corner of Pittston Avenue and Birch Street. It fit the Texas wiener formula exactly (see
the recipe below), but enjoyed a somewhat less sophisticated – ha ha --clientele
than did Coney Island.
I
remember that the proprietor of Yankee Lunch drove a late model Cadillac,
bought by way of an endless stream of quarters spent by customers on hot dogs. Either that, or he was a bookie.
In
the day, twenty-five cents bought one of these gut-blasters, completely dressed
with condiments (brown mustard, chopped raw onions, and secret red-fire
chili-and-ground-beef sauce, nothing else allowed). A dollar bought a wiener, a Nehi orange, and
a copy of Mad Magazine packed with a zillion laughs, leaving room for a
generous tip. If you were really hungry,
you had to bump your lunch/laughter budget up to $1.25. If I need confirmation of the aging process,
I need only note that today I can’t buy the little paper insulating collar on a
Starbuck’s coffee for a buck-and-a-quarter.
Anyway,
here’s the recipe (and believe me, the store’s setting is part of the recipe in
so many ways).
·
One
decaying urban building in a heavily traveled location (under a railroad bridge
is good)
·
One
worn Formica lunch counter featuring a boomerang pattern with 10 or so stools
and 10 or so equally worn leatherette booths (please, NO genuine leather, and
they are booths, NOT banquettes)
·
One
middle-aged, overweight counterman (preferably foreign-born) in restaurant
whites
·
A
few assorted layabuts, ne’er-do-wells, and students, if that’s not redundant, strewn
around the place for texture
·
One
huge, sizzling flat-top griddle featuring a minimum of 10 dozen short, fat hot
dogs with skins (no foreign terminology like “bratwurst” or “weisswurst” or
“blutwurst” is allowed – these need to be hot
dogs, unadorned and stacked like
cordwood
·
About
two gallons of recently chopped yellow onions, adding their fragrance to the
surroundings from a stainless steel tank alongside the griddle
·
A
small vat of ballyard mustard, the less sophisticated the better. This mustard is not the bright taxicab yellow
variety, but rather the brown, somewhat grainy mustard like French’s – no
hoity-toity Dijon or whole-grain mustard here, please. One must stick with the program.
·
About
an equal amount of lightly bubbling sauce, made up of finely ground beef
seasoned with garlic and various spices like chili powder, other red peppers,
cumin, oregano, and no doubt several “secret ingredients” known to no man save
possibly the cook. Needless to say, this
sauce was the most distinctive and compelling aspect of the dish.
·
A
flotilla of rectangular soft white rolls.
These are kept in a steamer that gets the bread just warm, soft, and
absorbent enough without ever being soggy.
OK,
now it’s rubber-meets-the-road time.
It’s legal to order less than two, but don’t bother, because you’ll
either want the second one immediately or want to take one with you. Someone worthy might be waiting at home. And two of them, wrapped, fit perfectly in
the pocket of a Central High School letter jacket.
With
a single slashing stroke of a kitchen sword, the counterman cuts the hot dogs
lengthwise, not quite through but through enough so that they’ll lie flat on
the hot griddle like two mirror-image little meat nuggets. The counterman always seemed to have just the
right number of dogs already on the hot surface so that you never waited very
long for your order. About two minutes
was always right. You were always next.
Assembly
proceeds. The roll is split
horizontally, knife blade parallel to the counter. A generous but not too
generous dollop of the mustard is placed on the roll, both sides. The fileted dog is placed on the split
roll. A generous but not too generous portion
of the raw onions is added, followed by a small ladle full of the Red Death chili
sauce. And – drum roll – voila, or some other
more ethnically relevant utterance of the counterman. Another dose of legal heroin, ready for
gulping down counterside or wrapping for mobile consumption. It was possible to wait to eat them at home,
but it was a challenge.
As
a teenager, the desired effect was always and instantly low earth orbit. If you weren’t approaching a date or a school
dance, a couple Texas wieners and a Nehi orange or a birch beer out of the chiller
was a simple, satisfying event. Meeting
a girl after a Texas wiener probably required a hastily prepared apology,
unless she had recently had one or two herself.
If you knew, for sure, that she was also a Texas wiener devotee, you
also knew that she was probably a keeper.
It’s
been said that someone could tell over the phone if you had recently eaten
one. Maybe so. There were only three possible
conditions: you had either recently had
one, you were currently eating one, or you wanted one.
