The Lunch Encounter

Lord have mercy, butter is the dairy queen in Milwaukee! As in, ooooh, a pool of melted butter on a small plate with a deep well. Oozing cheeseburger atop and served while hot.

Have I mentioned that Milwaukee is a great town for eating? One crisp tenner will get you a top notch lunch. Hold the pretension.

Did a weekend slide-in, stand-up to Solly’s in Milwaukee last week.

The sides are nice at Solly’s. Hadn’t had a malt in eons. Used to eat malt powder off the spoon when I was a teenager and always in dire need of calories. Malt is weird, but it sure is good. Who ever thought of adding it to ice cream?!?

Solly’s is not splashy, thank the heavens above, unless you drop your butter burger into the yellow puddle on the plate, sploosh. Eight tablespoons of butter, that would be one whole STICK!, has tsunami potential. That number eight? I did not make it up. That is, PER burger.

Heavens to Betsy (H2B), scootch up to the double loop counter and slip through a lunch with me! Slip and slide and open wide. Yikes, stripes, what a spot. What a SPOT on my shirt. Big ole spot of liquid butter, or hamburger grease, hard to know which. Oh who cares?

Grilled onions on this baby? Oh slay me now.

Buns and butter everywhere and still tidy as a tack. I’m from Wisconsin and I’m PROUD.

Cowgirl Creamery on F Street in DC. Quite decadent for this buttoned up and pressed down town.

The location could not be better. Central Liquors has been around a long, long time, and for good reason.

Cowgirl’s not just for cheese anymore.

Up front there are two baskets of sandwiches. No distant blackboard menu to squint at, no combinations to consider. No silly sandwich names to confuse you. Do you really want to order an AbraHam-on-Rye Lincoln? Or a Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Daschle on Wheat? Hell, I could never bring myself to order a Double R Bar Burger. Too silly. Anyway, I don’t want to do the reading.

These nice cheese people do the thinking for you. How lovely. Meat and no meat. We took one of each.

These are pared down, minimalist, tastefully simple, relying on the quality, European type sandwiches. Chew slowly. Pay attention. Where’d they get those nice flat, rosette-esque rolls? Nice crackly tops. Fra’ Mani Salumi salami. Mmmm. With mustard. The arugula was a bit sad, but that’s ok. The no meat wich? It was missing something, a certain je ne sais quois. Oh yeeaaahhhh, meat!

See the shirt? Cool Yayhoos T from their site. Know the band? If you don’t, you oughter.

YEEHAW! and YAYHOO!

A tiny taste of what they do at Yeehaw Industries in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Jones Soda is darn good. This Seattle outfit bends the boundaries of typical soda pop preferences. Candy Corn is a current fave, sweetened with pure cane sugar. Aiiiieee, makes me teeth hurt to think about it.

Aaaaw. But. The pimento loaf fits on it so nicely.

When am I going to stop about tomatoes? This year those red devils have gone on and on and on due to weird, hot, August-in-October weather. At least for folks who grew them. That would not be us. I just read about it.

I’m tired of tomatoes. Tomatoes as symbol. Tomatoes as the poster vegetable for all that is wrong with food in America these days. Lousy tomatoes. Them are the ones I have been encountering lately.

Homegrowns? Different story. I looked around the yard though, and didn’t find any.

“We don’t need any extra people around this house, Mom,” said my seven-year-old astutely and recently. “Just you and me is enough.”

I feel sorry that our household is not more lively, that he doesn’t have any siblings, that it isn’t bustling around here like it might be. Much of the stuff that qualifies as “family life” in my terms, is not happening.

And we didn’t grow tomatoes. For example. Gardens need TLC and we are a little short on that. We may not need any extra people, but we sure could use a gardener.

Speaking of the yard, we have kind of a big one. Could someone come play in it? Would someone like to plant it?

You can’t just send your kids out to play these days. Cause if you do, the neighbors will frown. And your kid won’t find any free electrons looking for a molecule to join. This is old news, of course, and I’m not going to reiterate the griping.

Tomatoes to eat, ripened on the vine? Of those I will never tire. Enough is never enough. Maybe one of these years we will try it. This was the year for watermelons. So easy. They are huge. You harvest five and everyone applauds.

We didn’t share. (Come to think of it, we don’t need any extra people around this house.)

But we might get some chickens!

Asked my New York friend James, a man with a good appetite and an adventurous one, what he thinks about meatloaf sandwiches. His response was,

Don’t eat the loaf. If I’m gonna eat meat, I’ll opt for a rare steak or burger.

And I wrote, Funny. Don’t eat the loaf sounds like a command. How bout choppped liver? Thinkin he must eat chopped liver now and then.

And he answered,

Only once a year at a Passover seder … and only from a known source, like my Aunt Harriet or Artie’s Deli.

Why do we need to know what is in meat mixtures and want to know the source, but are unconcerned about other unknown mixtures? Is this primordial?

I too eat chopped liver, but I eat meatloaf as well, and other mixtures that might put fear in your heart.

Used to make chopped liver, pretty often, from my friend Joanie’s recipe, but it’s been a while. Who around here would eat it now? Well, me.

Here’s what’s in it:
JOANIE’S CHOPPED LIVER
2 pounds chicken liver, floured lightly
2 medium onions
4 hb eggs (hardboiled)
S & P
My instructions are typed with a typewriter. I believe it was a baby blue Royal Safari. I loved that typewriter.
Mince onions.
Sweat one onion in butter.
Add liver and cook until done but not overdone.
Grind all together in a meat grinder; not a food processor (I have one of those, a meat grinder that is, around here somewhere.) Season well.

I corrected the typos, charmingly antique as they were.

That’s it. Good on a corned beef sandwich. Good on a cracker.

Count your blessings, this recipe has no shmaltz so you don’t have to wrangle any. Nothing wrong with schmaltz, I just think it is not a standard pantry item. Joanie goes for butter, fine Wisconsin gal that she is. Butter is so nice in a skillet.

This chopped liver thing brings to mind a recent self-revelation.

I’m a closet JAP. Not anymore. Not since I started typying this. Now I can stop fighting it and embrace my stereotype. Had dinner with a first cousin recently who said, “She could not afford herself”. Bingo! The hair, the nails, the clothes, travel and jewelry, the granite foyer and Mercedes. Well, not the granite foyer, that’s not me. I cannot afford myself, and have sentenced myself to a lifetime of hard work to support my (very optional) lifestyle choices.

Aha, I have cracked my code. Primordial indeed. Took me long enough.

Oil of Oyvey

An Allen Sherman, of Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh fame, classic here, Shticks of One and Half a Dozen of the Other

You gotta listen for quite a while before he gets to corned beef, liverwurst and rye. Gives you a chance to work up an appetite.

Discography, silly songbook and great snaps here.

Betty Crocker’s New Boys and Girls Cookbook, 1957

These images look fresh to me in this anti-garnish, seriously-simple, painfully tasteful food era. The paperware is so mod and fun. Dare to squirt mustard in curlicue squiggles! Make your burger happy and sassy! Round up your franks! Serve on warm, buttered buns, as suggested.

Photo by Renee Comet
Foodstyling by Lisa Cherkasky

My favorite lunch when I was about 8 was a peanut butter and banana sandwich, slogged down, glug, glug, glug, with egg nog. Used to walk home from school for lunch – this was Wisconsin, mind you, and kind of a long time ago. The lunch break was from 11:50 to 1:00. Why I remember that I do not know. The egg nog recipe was/is in the Betty Crocker Blender cookbook, spiral bound and cheery. Made you want to just tear into it and blend up a storm.

The sandwich was a proper sandwich, neither open-faced nor on an English muffin. English muffin indeed! Nevah. At least not for lunch.

The nog recipe is 1 cup milk (must be full fat, yeah!), 1 egg, 1 tablespoon sugar, dash nutmeg. That’s it. An everyday, unfancy nog. That I will never forget. Course now I’m terrified to give it to anyone. Hate to have to haul the body out after salmonella-induced expiration. Guess that’s not funny. Clearly I have never had salmonella or I wouldn’t be making fun. Hand slap.

Good popover recipe in that book too, particularly if you view popovers as primarily a hot-butter-ferrying system.

That lunch sounds really thick to me now. Wonder if I could choke it down. Bet I could. Especially in front of an 11-inch black and white in my mother’s Appleton “breakfast nook”.

The Breakfast Nook

Afternote: Dang it all. Got the book wrong, but hate to think of that cause it loosens the mortar of my childhood memories. The popover/blender book is/was The Blender Cookbook, by Ann Seranne and Eileen Gaden. No happy young adults on the cover, no egg nog recipe between the covers. My brain has combined this book, much used and loved, with the Betty Crocker Boys and Girls Cookbook, and a phantom source for the nog recipe.

This may require some deep digging for recovered memory. Guess what though, don’t wanna go down that dark alley, who knows what my be lurking? A memory mugger, eager to knock me down and snatch my precious childhood. Naw, I’ll stay on the sofa and lounge in blissful delusion.

Cafe Parisien Express Croque Monsieur

I picked up a slippery-on-the-outside, crunchy-on-the-inside sandwich at the Cafe Parisien Express and took it to the park for lunch. Un pique-nique sur l’herbe, so to speak. Although the l’herbe was crunchier than the croque, seeing as it has rained a mere 4 times since May.

When I got up all the grass under me was snapped in half. A pile of wispy toothpicks.

The magazine was too slick to recycle, kinda like a greasy pizza box.

Not a drip or crumb left. The croque was superbe.

Visiting celebrity Dan Epstein, originator and sole proprietor of La Vie en Robe has a few choice words about meatloaf sandwiches, which he eats, I presume, in his bathrobe. Lucky guy, he has a custom made Levi’s terry-denim (60/40) robe.

As fer meatloaf, my all-time favorite ‘loaf is the bacon-wrapped, ketchup-and-brown-sugar-glazed recipe from Cook’s Illustrated, as lovingly prepared every few years by my wife. My preferred mode of consumption is to eat said ‘loaf on top of a pile of homemade mac and cheese (the latter preferably slightly burned); but when it comes to meatloaf sandwiches, give me cold (or room temp at most) meatloaf on hearty rye with a chunk of iceberg lettuce and a dab of russian dressing — nothing else. The tang of the rye and the sweetness of the ‘loaf and dressing are a heavenly match, and the cold lettuce cleanses the palate for the next delicious bite. Any additional ingredient would just get in the way…

Goddamn, my salivary glands are starting to kick into gear just thinking about it…

(What I want to know is, what’s a nice boy named Dan Epstein doing with ketchup on his loaf. This bucks my numbers.)

~Su-Per Iceberg~
And I say,
Iceberg? Yes! Wet and crunchy. You can feel the cells bursting when you bite. Is that Russian dressing a staple in your household?

And he says,
And yes, Russian dressing is indeed a standard fridge item ’round here. Iceberg lettuce, not so much; my wife handles the groceries, but that’s one of those things that — like Colt .45 malt liquor — I have to go out and buy myself if I feel a hankerin’ comin’ on…

Dan and I were introduced by a mutual fab friend who is not above eating meatloaf. She may have a chic mid-century modern in Palm Springs, but she can polka with the best of ’em. Jenn eats her meatloaf with “mustard – not ketchup thankyouverymuch.” And she prefers, “‘elevating’ it with a crunchier, fancier bread or roll instead of the run-of-the-mill Wonderbread.” Look out!