The Weekly Screed (#901)

The sandwich with a thousand faces 

By David Benjamin

“Maybe we shouldn’t be eating a hamburger for breakfast, lunch and dinner.”

            — Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

MADISON, Wis. — There are Congresspersons warning us lately that the embryonic and nebulous Green New Deal portends the abolition of the hamburger.

This threat stands alongside such fanciful right-wing perils as the confiscation of every privately owned firearm in the nation by jackbooted government thugs flying hither and yon in black helicopters. There are some things — Kalashnikovs, steering wheels and quarter-pounders, to name three — that Americans will not surrender.

We are an armed, automotive, carnivorous republic. Our national bird could be —more fittingly — not an eagle, but a winged cheesburger clutching, in its left talons a large order of fries and, on the right, a side of onion rings.

Neither the rather self-absorbed vegan minority nor the apocalyptic Freedom Caucus seem to have discerned that the humble burger, rather than slipping into decline, is both proliferating and losing some of its humility, especially in unexpected new territories like France.

France? Yes, I’ve been watching, with a measure of alarm, the burgeoning popularity among hipster Parisians of the “gourmet hamburger.” (Gruyere. Girolles. Bearnaise!) Tempted though I am to deem this trend another victory for American pop culture, I lean toward dismay, partly because these amateurs don’t know how to eat a burger. They insist on using a knife and fork.

And then, there’s the term “gourmet hamburger.” Any sensible linguist would classify this as an oxymoron. Think “jumbo shrimp,” “military intelligence,” “future historians” or — more to the point — “diner cuisine.” This is what I’m talkin’ about here. The hamburger was conceived, in the neon glow of a flashing “EAT” sign, on the cracked red leatherette seat of a four-top booth in a nickel-coffee lunch wagon on the wrong side of the tracks, somewhere in two-lane blacktop cattle country.

To “gourmet” up the burger is the moral equivalent of assuming that the waitress standing over you and tapping her foot, with a name tag that reads “May” (or “Ruby”), a cigarette on her lip, a Guest Check order pad and a two-inch yellow No. 2 pencil, is a virgin working her way through convent school.

Come on, fella! Just tell her what you want already.

Of course, you want a burger, ideally one of those…

Okay, here’s what I remember. Once in a while, Archie, my grandfather, would take me downtown to the Badger Cafe, or maybe the All-State, or — even better, the truck stop on Highway 12 just this side of Camel’s Hump. There, they cooked a burger on a steel grill slick with a smoky film of hot butter that had been percolating inside one of our local Holsteins no more than 48 hours before. An ex-GI short-order cook pressed your raw, fat-marbled beef patty down hard on the hot grill, sending up a sizzle like a treetop full of horny bugs on an August night. The grillman, ideally large and hairy in a filthy white apron, with a vague blue seaport tattoo on his bicep, flipped the patty once and left it there ’til the edges got crispy-black. He’d throw on top a slice of American or cheddar or — if the customer was putting on fancy-ass airs — Swiss cheese a few seconds before rescuing the meat. This burger came on a wilted white Gardner’s Bakery bun, slightly scorched around the brim, that had been warmed on the grill close by the spitting burgers, soaking up a mixture of butter and burger-grease. Two tart pickle slices went inside (and you left them there). Your essential steel-grill, butter-fried, toasted-bun, two-pickle, greasy-spoon luncheonette burger (a slice of raw onion optional) was usually no thicker than an inch-and-a-half (it was always prudent to order two), moist all the way through. But that moisture was dense and heady with flavor. You could add a little ketchup but you hardly needed it. The flavor came from the grill, which never got cleaned ’til the end of the cook’s shift. The first burgers of the day— which every canny patron shunned — were bland and hygienic. As the day wore on, the grill accumulated a pungent scum of burnt butter, refried fat, burger ash, bad cholesterol and a little singed human hair whose fragrance, intensity, savor and sinfulness could not be imitated in any other medium with any other ingredients. You came away glutted, gratified and a little bit guilty.

By the way, fries? Not really. In those days, in those diners, it was coleslaw or potato salad, and maybe a few onion rings if the joint had a deep fryer (but many didn’t).

The last time I found one of those those addictive greasy-fingers steel-grill burgers was maybe twelve years ago at a main-street cafe in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, just up the road from the National Dairy Shrine. It was a mom-and-pop enterprise with a regular crew of locals who hung around, cadged the customers and didn’t spend much. (This is what killed a lot of diners.) But the grill was shiny with hot fat, the stools were round, with chrome rims and vinyl seat-covers and they spun in circles. The counter, of course, was linoleum. I’m tempted to drive down to Fort Atkinson to see if that miraculous joint is still there. But I know it isn’t. It couldn’t be.

Of course, there are still lots of good burgers today. The hamburger is an art form with a thousand variations. Being one of our nation’s pioneer burger-eaters, I prefer simplicity. I regard bacon as gilding the lily. The only reason to throw on lettuce and a slice of tomato is to hide the fact that the meat’s no good. Adding bleu cheese or Worcestershire sauce — or even mushrooms — is simply overkill. But that’s how I feel. The closest any of the hamburger conglomerates has come to replicating the steel-grill classic of old is a regional outfit called Culver’s. But the part-timers, golden-agers and teenagers who take your order there offer you a list of accessories — from fried onions to Ranch dressing — that, if you take them all, leave you mystified about whether you’re biting into a scorched steer or eating a lukewarm salad.

Used to be, you didn’t have to think when you sat down at the counter. Nobody catered to your tastes. You just told May you’d like a burger, maybe two. The biggest choice you had to make was Coke or coffee. 

Besides, look over there. That big, hairy, hung-over guy with the spatula? He don’t take kindly to “special orders.”