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Hamburger Heaven There is only one
real kind of hamburger. You start with a lump of ground fatty meat and press it
flat. Fry it in stale grease, top it with a slice of gummy yellow cheese,
scatter over it chopped raw onion and dill pickle, gob on ketchup, mustard and
relish, crown it with wilted lettuce and When
I’m in the mood for this kind of trash, however, nothing else will do. Bite
into one and succulent juices immediately start dribbling down your chin. The
teeth sink into the yielding softness of the bun, break through the sweet sour
resistance of the pickle, mustard, ketchup garnish and close around a satisfying
mouthful of meat. Melted cheese coats the roof of your mouth and smothers the
taste buds in pleasure. This
is good stuff. Unfortunately, it is good in the exact same way that drinking too
much is good. Not the thin enjoyment of a social drink but the bliss of being
absolutely, car keys confiscated, smashed. This is pleasure impossible to
justify in any civilized company. What
in God’s name got into me? That is the question to which there is no
reasonable answer. We sweetly mean each word when, facing the gastric aftermath
– the stomach voicing its incredulous dismay and sweat still beading the
forehead – we swear it all away. Too bad that intention has nothing to do with
it. Maybe it would, if it were only the mouth that salivated at the thought of
such a feasting, but this isn’t so. Taste is merely the location of the
pleasure. Its source, the origin of the bliss, lies somewhere else … somewhere
that is primal, visceral, perhaps even feral, and certainly as deeply hostile to
the orderings of good behavior as it is to those of good taste. 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 very
reason we are drawn to it in the first place. Such
people think they are doing the world a favour 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, say
Roquefort. I know it all sounds good, but the disappointment is cumulative. The
over all net affect of a gourmet burger isn't the realization of a burger lovers
dream, but its domestication - the hamburger made virginal and wholesome.
Eventually one comes to understand that you don't want to eat a hamburger with a
university education. You want one that flunked high school - or, even better
got kicked out for having a bad attitude. |