Burger Heaven, page 2

Consequently, nothing kills the excitement in this kind of eating quicker than when some culinary do-gooder wrestles it out of the gutter and claims to have redeemed it, as if somehow its louche character were an unhappy accident, instead of the reason we are drawn to it in the first place. Such cooks think they are doing the world a favor by urging us to make our hamburgers with round steak instead of fatty chuck, to crank it twice through the grinder to give the meat some extra gloss, to work in wine or cream or fresh herbs, to replace the coating of processed cheese food with a slice of "decent" Cheddar or some other, even higher-toned cheese. When I lived in Boston, the "Best Burger" awards were consistently bestowed on a clean-scrubbed, wholesome place right across the street from Harvard Yard — Bartley's Burger Cottage, which serves what it is pleased to call "the hamburger with a college education." It's a place well worth visiting for the onion rings, sliced thin as your fingernail and fried into a mass of crisp, golden filigree ... but not for its burgers — even though, individually, they taste just fine. No, the disappointment is cumulative. Every patty is made from a thick chunk of lean, juicy beef. It will actually be cooked rare if you think to ask for it that way. And you can have it topped with Cheddar or Swiss or blue cheese . . . even with Bearnaise sauce. They have as many different burgers as Howard Johnson used to have ice-cream flavors, and not one of them anything you'd be ashamed to make at home. I know all this sounds good. The net effect isn't the realization of a burger lover's dream, however, but its domestication — the hamburger made virginally frolicsome. Eventually you come to understand that you don't want to eat a hamburger with a college education. You want one that flunked out of high school — or rather got kicked out, for bad attitude. My own all-time favorite hamburger place was — and still may be (which is why I'm not giving more exact directions) — an authentically seedy drive-in out in the western part of Massachusetts, just a few miles south of Great Barrington. I was a teacher in a small private school, and the moment this drive-in opened in early June, a group of us young faculty members would pile into a car and head down U.S. 7 to celebrate the arrival of summer, the end of classes, and the enduring solace of grilled meat. Part of the appeal then, admittedly, was the pretty college girls the owner managed to round up every year as counter help, but the hamburgers are what I remember now. The chef had to pry each one of them from the grill because he had spent the preceding time mashing it down with his spatula to squeeze out the grease. For another quarter, he would throw a handful of chopped onion to crisp along with it, and you could get single or double slices of Velveeta on the cheeseburger. The fries were fat, crusty, and cut from real potatoes; the burgers themselves had the authentic flavor. That is, they were good but also anonymous, their taste evocative of all burgers past. Each bite teased forgotten synapses of memory into life ... and as they began to fire at random, the mind began its slide down the greasy slope of memory into wordless reverie. Although we sat together in the car, each one of us ate alone, a solitary, silent figure, stroked by the Janus-faced comfort of appetite and satiety, reluctant to return to the present, pick up our cares, start up the engine, and go. The American hamburger is road food. We've been eating them since at least 1912 — but not at home, at least not if we go by cookbooks. As late as the 1950s, the dominant recipe for the ground-beef patty was the Salisbury or Hamburg steak: hamburger served on a china plate with gravy or tomato sauce poured over it, everyone pretending they were eating steak. Such is the true parentage of the homemade burger and, for that matter, the gourmet burger. "If liked, moisten slightly with tomato juice ... A slice of fat salt pork may be chopped with [the] beef to give additional flavor"; these tips come from the 1941 edition of Fannie Farmer in the recipe for "Hamburg Steak." The burger we're talking about didn't get in until the tenth edition, published in 1959.* There they're called, perversely, "hamburger buns," and no reader could fail to note the stiffness of body language behind a recipe that concludes: "For a more piquant flavor, dot the hamburgers with prepared mustard, chili sauce, or both." If you tuned in "The CBS Evening News" on November 16, 1970, you heard Charles Kuralt, on the road, reporting on the hamburger. There was no doubt that he had actually been out there eating them . . . every one of his riffs had got that beat. "We've had grabba burgers, kinga burgers, lotta burgers, castle burgers, country burgers, bronco burgers. Broadway burgers, broiled burgers, beefnut burgers, bell burgers, plus burgers. ..." The moral? Taste a real burger, taste exhaust fumes. Its flavor is that of the stand, the lunch counter, the joint. Who would intentionally make on their own stove a "grabba burger"? No one. And if they so inclined, they'd find that it couldn't be done. The general public is simply not allowed to get their hands on real hamburger meat. It would be too dangerous. I know this because once one of the participants in those burger runs insisted on bringing along his German shepherd, Macho, a dog with a relentless appetite and no shyness in letting you know it. To get some uninterrupted eating time, we passed the hat around to buy him his own burger platter, which we decided — for reasons I no longer comprehend, since he certainly wouldn't have wanted it that way — should be served up raw. We put in our order. The waitress hesitated — then shrugged and wrote it down. When she brought our tray over to the car, she silently handed in Macho's portion. The raw patty was as gray and full of fat as a chunk of tired breakfast sausage. In fact, the lean part looked as if it had been ground in as an afterthought, less substance than seasoning. Appetite all but fled. We still ate, but we were shaken. We had been given a glimpse of what the less charitable find easy to sum up in a homily but what for most of us is just the other side of a truth we lack the courage to grasp entirely — something to do with life and death, the nature of pleasure, the sadness after sex. * On the other hand, the cheeseburger did make the previous edition (1951) but there the recipe is wrong, too: "Make thin hamburg patties. Cook on one side. Put on toasted split buns. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Put thin slice of cheese on each. Broil until cheese begins to melt." From the forthcoming book "Serious Pig: An American Cook in Search of His Roots," by John Thorne with Matt Lewis Thorne (North Point Press). © 1996 by John Thorne. Used by permission of the author. John Thorne's web site, based on his food letter "Simple Cooking," can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~outlawcook/index.html.