“Then, you live, swine,” said Odd-Job to Seaweed. He then went back to memorizing the Emily Dickinson poem he had been assigned in English Lit class.
* * *
Belonging to a college fraternity, as playing baseball had done, provided me with wonderful memories, lifelong friends, and even the opportunity to see racial harmony at its best.
As near as I can remember, a white band never set foot in the Sigma Pi house party room between the years of 1964 and 1968. White bands simply couldn’t make a party come alive and turn into a raging inferno of dancing and screaming the way a black band could.
The civil rights movement was at its peak in the early sixties, but when the music was good and the beer was cold, everybody in the party room was in it together.
It was a start to the sort of feelings that eventually led Ray Charles and George Jones to record an album together; that is the very essence of racial harmony, and music was the medium.
Fortunately, this discussion can end on a further positive note. Kids today may be playing a lot of soccer when they should be playing baseball, but I hear that fraternities and the Greek system, much maligned in the seventies, are making a comeback on college campuses. I even hear that the kids are out of Army fatigues and back into Weejuns and khakis, and that many of them are now shunning drugs for beer.
These are good signs, my fellow Americans, good signs, indeed. Not all elements of modern life have gone to hell and rust.
Now, if somebody would just tell me where I could get the sort of French fries that God intended, the kind that are cut fresh in the kitchen and have never been frozen, I might even be able to see a small, twinkling of light at the end of this tunnel. “God Save the French Fry!” Won’t somebody hear my plaintive cry in the wilderness of gastronomic silliness?
13
Romancing the Turnip Green
THE FRENCH FRY is a marvelous creation. I think that perhaps God, Himself, created the French fry, say on about the twelfth or thirteenth day. And it was good. French fries stayed that way for several thousand years, but then modern man started monkeying with them.
I suspect God is quite angry about it, and that may be one reason why the weather has been so loused up lately.
Here is the way the perfect French fries should be prepared:
You take an Irish potato. You wash it and then you peel it. God didn’t leave the peelings on His original French fries. That may be in the Bible someplace. Probably Leviticus.
After washing and peeling the Irish potato, you cut it into slices — not too thin and not too thick. The proper size for a slice of potato soon to become a French fry is somewhere between the size of a felt-tip pen and a baby carrot.
After slicing the potato, you drop the slices into a frying pan that has been filled with cooking oil. You fry the slices until they’re sort of crispy on the outside but still nice and mushy on the inside. Some people drain the grease off their French fries once they’re through cooking them, but in my estimation, the greasier the French fry, the better. And remember, God is on my side in this one.
My mother, a devout Methodist, could prepare wonderful French fries, and so could the cook at Steve Smith’s truckstop, who served them with a hamburger steak that cost $1.25. Today that same piece of meat is called “chopped sirloin” and costs $6.95, and the French fries you get with it are awful. They also serve hard, dark rolls with it, rather than soft, white ones, and if you want a salad, you have to get up and go make it yourself at the salad bar. This borders on sacrilege.
I’m not sure who first loused up French fries, but I hope he’s able to beg forgiveness on his death bed. One day we had great French fries — fresh and crispy on the outside and gushy in the middle — and then the next day they were all gone, and we were eating those French fries with crinkles that had been frozen.
Why would anybody want to put crinkles in sliced potatoes? Isn’t it a lot of trouble? And why freeze something that’s available fresh year-round?
French fries today are hard and have no flavor. All those fast-food places advertise that their French fries are wonderful, but the truth is they’re terrible, a disgrace. I’ll go down the list of fast-food French fries and tell you exactly what’s wrong with them:
—McDONALD’S: Come on, the French fries they serve at McDonald’s probably aren’t even made out of potatoes. McDonald’s probably has devised some scheme whereby they recycle those styrofoam containers the hamburgers come in back into French fries. You know how Ronald McDonald got so ugly? Eating all those styrofoam French fries, that’s how.
—WENDY’S: Wendy’s French fries are not as tasteless as McDonald’s, but they aren’t anything to write home about, either. The only thing that makes Wendy’s fries halfway edible is that compared to Wendy’s chili, the French fries won’t make you think you’re eating something that came from the mop bucket.
—BURGER CHEF AND BURGER KING: Someday, God is going to get Burger Chef and Burger King for what they’ve done to His French fries. I suspect they’re actually crinkle-cut zucchini.
—STEAK ’N’ SHAKE: What is Steak ’n’ Shake trying to do — save a few bucks by cutting their French fries into tiny, thin slices? They don’t think we notice that? Steak ’n’ Shake could take one potato and feed half the state of Missouri. Show me a Steak ’n’ Shake French fry and I’ll show you what is really a potato “stick.” Remember potato sticks? They were awful, but Steak ’n’ Shake is trying to bring them back. They should be ashamed.
—KRYSTAL: Krystal’s home office is in Chattanooga, Tennessee, so they should know better than to serve the frozen French fries they use. I love Krystal cheeseburgers; I can eat a dozen. I hate Krystal French fries. You could put them in Wendy’s chili and it wouldn’t improve it.
—HARDEE’S: Worst French fries on earth. I take that back.
—ARTHUR TREACHER’S FISH ’N’ CHIPS: Worst French fries on earth. So bad they had to change the name to chips. I have heard it said that even the cows wouldn’t claim them.
The demise of the French fry probably began when Americans decided they didn’t care what they ate as long as it was prepared in a hurry. Americans do not like to wait. They would eat French fried hog snouts if they could get them without waiting.
“Hey, Martha, want some French fried hog snouts? They taste awful, but we won’t have to wait for ’em to cook.”
Fast food. It has become an American tradition, like getting a divorce. First, fast food did away with good French fries. Then the hamburgers went. Somebody (probably in New Jersey) started mashing out thin, flat hamburger patties, then they froze them and shipped them all over the country to fast-food hamburger places. Because they were so thin, they took only seconds to cook, and impatient Americans flocked in and bought these mass-produced burgers.
McDonald’s even went a step further and started putting a “special sauce” on their hamburgers. I don’t trust anything that doesn’t have a name. “Special sauce” doesn’t really say what’s in it. It’s like the “mystery meat” Norris Brantley once ate in the school cafeteria.
Why doesn’t McDonald’s say it’s their “special pickle relish” or their “onion-based special sauce with mayonnaise”? They either don’t know what’s in it themselves, or they’re afraid to tell us. I’ve eaten a McDonald’s hamburger with “special sauce” only once, and that was by mistake. It tasted to me like something you’d get if you mixed Thousand Island salad dressing and Wild Russian Vanya.
The way God intended, you don’t put any sort of sauce on a hamburger, special or otherwise. What you put on hamburgers is mustard and catsup, tomatoes, lettuce, onions, mayonnaise, dill pickles, or any combination thereof.
And I’ll tell you what else you do not put on hamburgers — mushrooms. They’ll put mushrooms on your hamburger if you order one in those cutsie places where there are a lot of house plants and they serve salads that cost up to $6.95.
I went into one of those places recently and ordered a simple cheeseburger.
The waitress asked if I wanted it on pita bread. I didn’t have any idea what pita bread was, but I knew I didn’t want it covering up my cheeseburger. I asked for a regular bun like you’re supposed to serve a cheeseburger on, and the waitress went off in a huff. She brought the cheeseburger back on the right bun, but she also covered it with mushrooms.
“My God!” I exclaimed. “Somebody has put toadstools on my cheeseburger.”
“Those aren’t toadstools,” said the waitress. “They’re mushrooms. We always put mushrooms on our cheeseburgers.”
“Do you know, young lady,” I replied, “that these are, in fact, toadstools, and do you know how toadstools got their name?”
She didn’t know.
“Frogs go to the bathroom under them when it’s raining,” I explained to her. “Imagine how awful it would be to have warts on your tongue.”
* * *
As long as we’re on the subject of fast food, I must make mention of biscuits, too. All the fast-food places sell biscuits these days, and they advertise them as “just like your mother made.”
I don’t like for anybody to insult my mother that way. She certainly didn’t make biscuits like those they serve in fast-food places. She made biscuits with an old-fashioned sifter and a rolling pin, and she took each individual biscuit and patted it and shaped it with her own hands. What could McDonald’s know about biscuits in the first place?
As anyone with any sense knows, the only thing you’re supposed to put on biscuits is either gravy or syrup. Ask some sixteen-year-old behind a McDonald’s counter to put something on your biscuit, and she likely will throw on a mess of that special sauce.
Frankly, this entire McDonald’s thing bothers me. Do they really know how many billions of hamburgers they’ve sold? Do the managers call into some central office each night to report?
“Central, this is Topeka. We sold 406 today.”
“Central, Joplin here. We did 382. We dropped three on the floor, but we washed ’em off good and sold ’em anyway.”
What concerns me about McDonald’s and the like is that they’ve brainwashed our children. Kids today have grown up with fast-food food. They don’t know what a real hamburger should taste like. They enjoy going to McDonald’s because they see it advertised on television, because all their friends go there, because of that silly clown, and because McDonald’s serves cute little food for cute little children in those cute little boxes and containers.
The Communists don’t need to bomb us to take over. All they have to do is take over the McDonald’s franchises one by one, and we’ll fall into their hands like a ripe plum.
I have one other complaint about McDonald’s — they serve fish sandwiches. What kind of person would eat a fish sandwich? What kind of fish is it? It could be monkfish or carp, for all we know.
I have never eaten a fish sandwich at McDonald’s or at any place else. The only person I ever saw eat a fish sandwich was an ol’ boy down in south Georgia one night, when they had a fish fry at a beer joint I often frequent during trips into the region.
This ol’ boy walked up to where they were frying the fish, picked up a bream, put it between two pieces of white loaf bread, and ate it, bones and all.
“That’s one of them Dewberry boys,” the man frying the fish said. “They’re hog farmers. Hog farmers will eat anything.”
* * *
There is all sorts of food that confuses me today. Take one of those fifty-three-item salad bars, for example. There’s the lettuce, I know that, and there are those little red tomatoes and the onions and the cucumbers in the back. (Ever notice how they always put the good stuff at a salad bar way in the back where it’s hard to reach? They really don’t want you to have it, that’s why. They’re saving it for themselves to eat after we all leave.)
But what is all that other stuff at a salad bar? Is that yellow dish an egg or scrambled squash? What about the brown stuff? Is it the house dressing or Alpo with water added? I have even seen salad bars where there were anchovies. Now, I ask you, who would put an anchovy on a salad? Have you ever looked at those little things closely? They’ve got hair on them; I swear they do.
The same confusion exists in other areas. I know by now that real men don’t eat quiche, but what is quiche in the first place, and why isn’t it pronounced “Kwi-chie” like it’s spelled?
What are bean sprouts? They look like something that washed up on the beach.
One of the new items that practically every restaurant is serving today is chicken fingers. I didn’t know chickens had fingers. I knew they had toes, but I didn’t know they had fingers. I guess what they’re really selling is chicken toes, but how much meat can there be on one of those scrawny things?
What I secretly have always wanted to be is a restaurant critic. The mistake most restaurant critics make is assuming that we’re all gourmets like they are, and that we know what they’re talking about when they order Coquille St. Jacques. I thought he was a wide receiver at LSU.
I would aim my restaurant criticism toward people like myself, who simply want to know whether or not the food is fit to eat. I would review restaurants like this:
“I walked in and this guy in a tuxedo says to me, ‘Walk this way, please,’ and I said to him, ‘I don’t think I can walk that way,’ which he didn’t think was very funny.
“I had myself a beer before I ordered. It was cold, but before I could tell him to stop, the waiter had poured it into a glass. Beer tastes better out of the bottle, but I suppose they don’t want any bottles around in case a fight breaks out.
“I couldn’t make out a blasted thing on the menu because it was all written in a foreign language. Since I was on expense account, I told the waiter just to bring me one of all the most expensive things on the menu.
“While I was waiting on my appetizer, I noticed there was butter on the table but there weren’t any crackers. I like to eat butter and crackers while I’m drinking my beer. I complained and the waiter brought some crackers, but they were the kind women put out on the coffee table when they have little get-togethers, not the kind you eat with butter or with raw oysters or crumble up in your chicken-noodle soup.
“The waiter brought out the first appetizer. It smelled like the back of the supermarket where they keep the mullet on ice. It didn’t taste all that bad, but I kept thinking about those mullet that still have their eyes, and they just sort of lie there in the ice on their sides with one big eye looking up at you. I was afraid there might be a fish eye in that appetizer someplace, so I just sort of picked at it.
“Then, they brought the soup. The man said it was vichysoisse. I complained that it was cold. The waiter said it was supposed to be. I asked, ‘Well, do you have any still in the bottle?’ He looked at me funny and walked off. I crumbled up some of those crackers in my soup, but it didn’t help. If I wanted to eat cold soup, I’d go down to the Mission and eat what they dish out to the winos.
“Speaking of wine, I had some. It was white. ‘Would you like to smell the cork, sir?’ asked the man who brought the wine. I smelled it. ‘That’s cork, all right,’ I said. Then he poured a little in my glass, and I knew what I was supposed to do then. I tasted it.
“‘Assertive, but not offensive,’ I said to the wine man. That was something I heard a guy in a movie say once. I didn’t have any idea what it meant, but you’re supposed to say things like that whenever there’s no screw-off top on the wine bottle and you aren’t drinking it out of paper cups.
“I had a salad. There wasn’t anything really wrong with it, except they served those little red tomatoes on it. You ever try to eat one of those suckers? If you bite down on one, you’d better put the whole thing in your mouth. I tried biting one in half, and the juice shot all over a fat lady at the table next to me. I apologized and offered her what was left of my cold soup, but she declined.
“The main dish came out. It was chicken with some yellow sauce on it. After I scraped the sauce off to one side, it was passable. I didn’t wan
t to leave unless my plate was clean, so they wouldn’t think I hadn’t enjoyed whatever it was they picked out for me, so I took one of those hard rolls they served and tried to sop up the sauce. It’s hard to sop sauce with a hard roll, I found out, so I put what was left of the sauce into my cold soup. I didn’t taste it, but it looked like egg custard after I did that.
“As far as dessert was concerned, it was cheesecake and it stuck to the roof of my mouth. The whole meal cost $112.17, and I put on a big tip for everybody and said good-bye to the fat lady.
“I wouldn’t go back there again if I had to spend my own money.”
I could understand a restaurant review like that, but you never see them. What has happened to me in food, as in most everything else, is that I have gone back to basics.
I still eat lunch at my mother’s house in Moreland once a week. She always apologizes when I walk in.
“Son, we don’t have hardly anything to eat today,” she says.
So what am I going to get here? A piece of toast and a radish? Then I go to the table and there’s enough food to feed the Chinese infantry: country fried steak smothered in gravy, mashed potatoes with no lumps in them, all sorts of fresh vegetables from the garden, and hot cornbread and maybe even some coconut pie.
People who live in towns where there isn’t a McDonald’s (Moreland is one of the five remaining towns on the face of the earth where there is no McDonald’s. The other four are in Afghanistan) do not realize how good they have it. The dogs that eat the scraps at home eat better than I do in the city.
Elvis Is Dead and I Don't Feel So Good Myself Page 18
