ROBERT TANNER makes no claim for this find -- he was led there by fate.
(AP Illustration/Peter Hamlin)
Bob Tanner, asap's curator of "American Stomach." (AP Photo/Bernadette Tuazon)
Usually you have to hunt for treasures. Every once in a rare while, you're lucky enough to have one fall into your hands.
This dusty butcher's shop gave me an even greater reward than a deeply satisfying meal. It offered a moment to see anew some of the most faded standbys of the past half-century of American eating.
I can't remember the last time I raved about macaroni salad. Or found a stuffed cherry pepper that actually thrilled me more than my memories of peppers past. Even breaded chicken cutlets, for crying out loud, made me stop and look again at a dish that usually does nothing more than get me through the week.
I can take no claim for this find. I was led to it, forced to get up early on a weekend morning, drive for a half-hour across windy roads in northeastern Pennsylvania, and wait in line without coffee. (My apologies, but I was sworn to secrecy and cannot reveal the exact location).
I wasn't skeptical, not really. The raves had come from good authority, but I didn't expect anything more than nice and tasty. Instead I was transported.
The market and its workers reminded me of some Brigadoon -- except instead of that mythical village that came back to life every century, this is an old-world-come-to-the-new-world flashback to the 1950s that opens its doors every weekend. And just on Saturdays. And only until noon.
The line starts forming before 8 a.m., a full hour before the locks turn.
On one side, the shelves are neglected and sparse, with a haphazard smattering of items. Door-stopper. A few bottles of tomato juice. Two bags of dried corn. On the other, the refrigerated deli counter is jammed to overflowing with freshly made hams, sausages and salads.
It's essentially an Italian butcher, with three kinds of salami, hot and sweet sausage, a promised but sadly unavailable capicola. But it's also absorbed a healthy portion of the Polish tastes of this old coal-mining countryside, with halupki (a fried cabbage and meat dish) and a half-dozen kinds of kielbasa.
The aging, gray-haired sisters work the counter, slowly and methodically filling requests -- a quart of red sauce, a pound of meatballs, a slab of bacon. Don't forget the pickled baloney. Or the pepper salad.
In back are the brothers, big and brawny and gray-haired, too, bringing out one more stunning offering after another: stromboli, sausage boats, fried-cabbage pizza, sausage bread.
Once ordering, it's hard to stop. Each person on line seems to take longer then the next, and the others on line, while impatient, just make it harder, raving about the peppered bacon or the baked ham or the dried pepperoni sticks. And for good reason.
Let me give one example.
For years, I've been drawn to recipes about Italian-style pickled vegetables. I'm pretty sure it was cookbook author Marcella Hazan who first made it sound so enticing -- a jar of lightly blanched cauliflower, peppers, carrots, celery, onions -- whatever's fresh -- preserved in vinegar and a few spices.
It's called gardiniera, sometimes sotto aceti. Every single time I've tried it I've been let down, whether at a grocery or a market stand, a trendy restaurant or an old red-sauce establishment. Sometimes bad, sometimes tasty, it has never been any more than "ehhh." I had told myself I just didn't get it.
Until now. Angela's Hot Mix, the sign said. It didn't promise much. Not too colorful, except for a few red peppers and orange carrots swimming in a faintly murky brine.
I didn't rush to eat it. The penne pasta in vodka sauce called first, the salads, the meatballs. Despite a munch in the car and a big ecstatic lunch, the hot mix was ignored. Unpacking at home, I realized this container had gone unsampled.
And then, finally, thankfully, I got it. A pickled garden, like the name promises. Summery and fresh, a bit of peppery spice tangled amid the clean vinegary sourness, it leaves me wondering why people don't eat pickles every day of their life.
It's easy to overstate the wonders of good food. One person's delight leaves another cold with indifference. A ravenous appetite can skew anyone's judgment. The human inclination to brag, in my experience, can inflate a nice, solid meal beyond justification.
But now I've got a refrigerator and freezer packed with proof. Now if I could just figure out how I'm going to eat six pounds of kielbasa. And two pounds of stromboli. And three pizzas.
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asap columnist Robert Tanner has eaten his way around the world as a national writer for The Associated Press. Hear him introduce himself here: http://tinyurl.com/29zxud .
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Read some of Tanner's previous columns here:
On a Middle East tour: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1752907.s
On food friends: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1683351.s
On lobster: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1653587.s
On pie: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1625617.s
On doughnuts: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1591867.s
On 'Swiss bliss': http://asap.ap.org/stories/1560812.s
On cliff cuisine: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1528428.s
On Asian street food: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1494151.s
On delicacies money can't buy: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1479613.s
On grits: http://asap.ap.org/stories/1461238.s
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