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of the Chuckwagon’s lacquered tables, my mother seated to my left and intensely alert. She was like a mother robin watching her young swallowing worms. All was still. When I tasted the fatty-smoky-tender meatiness, I realized that I would never again have to accept the mundane.
All else was forgotten, even the unobtainable Olivia Biggs, a pig-tailed skinny blonde I worshiped, aware that she accepted me as an occasional partner at Friday-night dances only because I came with a Pez dispenser and shamelessly doled out all the candy she desired.
The pastrami taught me to understand life’s infinite possibilities.
Eating was no longer a mildly pleasurable undertaking that peaked with a five-cent box of nonpareils or a six-cent cherry Coke. Although I would not embrace eating as a profession for decades (and never touched Olivia Biggs), I sensed that food offered delights that could not be equaled, not even by the attractions found in the pages of the Playboy magazines I accidentally flipped open while perusing comic books at the drugstore.
Despite its seminal gastronomic importance in my life, I was never that enchanted by the Chuckwagon, only by the pastrami. My first meaningful restaurant experience occurred a few months later, on a family trip across the country. As we drove through downtown Chicago, my father pointed to a sign and said, “We’ll eat there.” I remember the lure, a steak dinner for $1.09, spelled out in neon.
The restaurant was Tad’s, the brand-new flagship of a future national chain. There I learned that dining out represented an entirely different experience from dinner at home. My mother’s consistently excellent recipes offered whatever a guest at her table might desire, except for the unexpected. She could cook, but she could not surprise.
I had eaten full-course dinners in restaurants before, but my parents tended to take my sister and me to places that mimicked my mother’s cooking, whereas Tad’s offered mysterious forms of nourishment—fatty steaks reeking with charred goodness, baked potatoes as big as footballs, an unhealthy breadstuff of indescribable appeal. We were there because it was inexpensive and, I’m sure, because we had come to stockyards territory and my parents believed my sister and I 6
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would benefit from sampling the local bounty. They practiced straightforward parenting and intended to teach us that the beef in Chicago was tops because there was so much of it around. (For a similar reason, my mother joined the Catholics in broiling fish on Friday nights.) Tad’s had a cafeteria line, the better to save on tips. The steak was thin and tough, but it had a quality I can best describe as not-my-mother’s-cooking, the flavor of an open fire in an untamed land. It was black and gritty and delicious, the piquancy of an unfamiliar culture. I believe I shivered at the unfamiliarity of Tad’s greasy sirloin—the basic steak that was the centerpiece of the $1.09 special. My family didn’t do upgrades.
I subsequently learned that the charcoal fire wasn’t real. It was made with tiles painted to resemble glowing embers, a breakthrough by the Tad’s scientific staff. I couldn’t have been more convinced it was charcoal had I carried in the Kingsford myself. The overly thick slice of bread, painted with an oily product and laid grease-side down on the grill, provided a mouthwatering succulence I would later find duplicated only in seared foie gras. Finally, there was the potato. Such tubers were unavailable at the A&P where I often shopped with my mother.
The potatoes we ate at home were tiny and immaterial, but the Tad’s spud was buttery and vaguely nutty, a combination I don’t recall encountering again, even on one of my infrequent visits to Idaho. We carried our trays to a back room done up in some sort of bawdy red velveteen that I figured had to cost a million dollars. I felt like Marshal Matt Dillon, sitting loose and ready in the Long Branch Saloon, waiting for Miss Kitty to sashay in.
Years passed, but my taste in food remained the same. When it came time for college, I stayed close to home, attending the University of Pennsylvania, where I traded in my mother’s healthful cooking for Pop’s, a one-man campus dump owned and operated by a gnomish reprobate with black fingernails, a fat cigar stub in his mouth, and a filthy meat-slicing machine. His fifty-cent, five-inch-thick delicatessen sandwiches were so savory I frequently cut chemistry lab to get to F O R K I T O V E R
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the front of the line, which might have led to my taking an incomplete in the course. When I wasn’t at Pop’s, I’d generally dine on broasted chicken, a newly invented method of poultry cooking that combined, as the name implies, broiling and roasting. The chicken pieces that emerged from the broaster were simultaneously crunchy and soggy.
Philadelphia in the sixties was still a decade away from the dining revolution that would make it, all too briefly, the most creative restaurant city in America. The only remaining reliable food was the renowned cheese steak, best when consumed at three a.m. Cheese steaks possess minimal nutritional value, but they are useful as a remedy for hangovers, particularly those that blossom following a long night quaffing Philadelphia’s very own Schmidt’s beer.
College was followed, as was relatively routine in the pre-protest sixties, by the army. I realize that the youth of today view time in the military and time in a penitentiary as essentially the same experience, but the only aspect of the military I found as dreadful as commonly believed was mess-hall food. I also learned, during my overseas assignments, that the excellence of a country’s cuisine tends to vary in inverse proportion to the number of uniformed men stationed there. In other words, I did not eat excellently in either of the countries
