Eating - Jason Epstein [9]
TWO
THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY
When William Wordsworth wrote “The Child is father of the Man,” he knew what he was talking about. The warmth of my grandmother’s stove on snowbound days, and the summer days when I read Dickens in her shed with its gleaming jars of pickled beets and applesauce determined the life to come. To these shaping memories was added a few years later a simple hamburger, barely a half-inch thick, charred at the edges, on a toasted bun, and eaten with a slice of sweet onion by a lakeside shack in Winthrop, Maine, at dusk, amid the August hum of crickets. Macnamara’s stand, with its fragrant raw-pine walls and neat hand-lettered sign on a canoe paddle above the immaculate screen door painted white, is long gone, replaced by an access ramp to the new Augusta highway. But the memory of those magical hamburger evenings beside the lake is fixed in my mind as firmly as my own name.
Macnamara’s shack occupied a well-lighted grass plot between Lake Maranacook and the old Augusta Road where I spent some boyhood summers during the War. In August, we toiled from dawn until dusk in the hot fields, picking snap beans, which we stuffed into burlap sacks and tossed onto trucks for the cannery that shipped them overseas to the troops. On Fridays, when we were paid at the end of the day, still in our bib overalls and shoeless, we paddled our canoes into town and spent our wages on hamburgers, Nehi, and frozen Milky Ways. Our leftover nickels went into Macnamara’s jukebox: Vera Lynn, Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller, the Andrews Sisters. We were fourteen that summer of 1942, our front teeth still too big for our sunburned faces. Under bare bulbs strung over Macnamara’s outdoor counter, with its neat arrangements of ketchup and mustard bottles, salt and pepper shakers, and paper napkins, we were proud of our war work. Like victorious warriors after battle, we ate our hamburgers in the hazy twilight, and after dark raced our canoes home across the lake.
The memory of those evenings would outlast the century and provoke a futile quest to recapture the fugitive joys fixed in mind’s wanderings by those hamburgers beside Lake Maranacook.
Later, there were other hamburgers, but none so memorable. In the 1950s and ’60s, at the Hamburger Heaven chain in New York, the hamburger was a plump sirloin pillow, and the bun sturdy enough not to disintegrate in one’s hands, as today’s supermarket buns will do unless the burger is cooked through. In those genteel surroundings, where Holly Golightly might occupy the next seat, one was served at the counter or at seats along the wall with hinged trays, like infants’ high-chair trays, by stately black waiters in white coats who delivered our hamburgers like a sacrament with ketchup and bowls of sweet pepper relish and raw onion. After lunch on days when the Queens or Caronia had landed, I would walk across Park Avenue to the Holliday Bookshop to buy the latest Henry Green or Ivy Compton-Burnett.
The Holliday Bookshop and the original Hamburger Heaven chain are gone, but today hamburger bars sprout up all over New York, and even the old Hamburger Heaven chain remains, under a different name, a pale, sad reminder of its suave old self. Today the ne plus ultra of the genre, at Daniel Boulud’s DB Bistro Moderne, has become a tourist attraction. This ziggurat of prime sirloin, foie gras, and short ribs is a cinch to make yourself if you have a kitchen crew to bake the buns, bone and shred short ribs, combine them with foie gras and black truffles, and add these ingredients to the best sirloin, which is chopped, then roasted and placed on a bun sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, toasted and layered with tomato confit and a horseradish mayonnaise. Then all you have to do is add tomato and fris