Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
After 14 years of flights to the “Steel City,” we’ve fallen into a routine on our way east from Denver International Airport. On the day of our arrival in Pittsburgh, our daughter Staci always has roast beef, baked potatoes, and salad waiting for us. We always arrive around 3 pm, Adam and the girls, Jayne and Norah, are waiting for us near the baggage carousel. We wait for the luggage to tumble down the chute, then it’s an hour or so (depending on Pittsburgh traffic) east to Markvue Manner in North Huntingdon.
It’s a throwback to Staci’s upbringing in a family that raised its own beef and had it on the menu often.
It wasn’t always that way for me. My father was an excellent cattleman but hated steaks that weren’t burnt to a crisp. I never enjoyed sirloins, ribeyes, or T-bones until I took a prom date to the El Toro one April evening in 1975 and discovered that steak was much more than the curled up, leather-textured pieces of dry meat my dad enjoyed.
While on the topic of the evolution of food in America, and my personal experience, changes have taken place over the last six decades; they are myriad. Changes taste of Americans as a whole.
Pizza is a delight. There are good pizza places and those that need to pick up their game. In Riverton, you have about five choices, and in Lander, maybe four. In the suburbs of Eastern Pittsburgh, there is a pizza place every three blocks or so.
From the kids’ house, you can pick up a pie at 20 different locations within a mile of home.
My first experience with pizza was far from spectacular, maybe you share the horrors of “pizza in a box,” aka a Chef Boyardee “Pizza Kit.”
To describe it as horrible is an understatement. Does anyone remember the little box with a packet of dry cheese, a little can of tomato sauce, and a bag of “just add water” dough?
It created an inedible, cardboard-like substance that kids everywhere… well, they hated it.
It took a long time to convert me to the joys of pizza, but I am now a devoted follower. The breakthrough came in a long-defunct restaurant called “Paisan’s Pizza” in the storefront of present-day Livestock Liquors facing Main Street.
The pies were epically delicious. A couple of years later, Fonta’s Pizza on East Grand Avenue in Laramie, with its strange square-cut pizzas, was another hit. I’m not sure I’ve had a pizza as good as these two shops produced in the 50 years since I last tasted them.
Fonta’s had a hot pastrami sub that was a bargain at $2.08, delivered to your dorm. There will never be a match for it.
Add spaghetti from a can (Chef Boyardee again), and it’s a wonder we even bother with it today.
My breakthrough into the true world of Italian cuisine came at my friend Larry Benedict’s house. Larry was Italian, so were both of his parents, but more importantly, his mom was a classic Italian mother. Her spaghetti was incredible.
As a college kid, a pound of mom and dad’s hamburger, a bottle of cheap sauce, and cheaper spaghetti noodles created a feast for me and a few dozen of my closest friends. A box of spaghetti was 11 cents. Dented cans were half-price at the original Safeway on Grand Avenue, a few blocks from our apartment. My roommate Frank dutifully dented cans on a regular basis, then went back an hour or so later and picked up his damaged prizes. If you want to feed a lot of people for not much money, is there anything better than spaghetti?
My mom created a goulash-style meal she called “Slum Gullion.” She mixed macaroni noodles, kidney beans, and hamburger with bits of onion and celery to create a great meal.
We call that type of meal “depression food” today. I guess we didn’t realize we were poor; it was just a great meal, one I sometimes ate from mixing bowls as a starving teenager.
Do you remember when you ate your first taco? I don’t have an exact date, but it was somewhere in 1967 or 68 when we lived at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield, California.
My dad was raised on squirrel, catfish, crappie, bacon, quail, ducks, deer, and ham. As an Arkansas farm boy, you ate what you could shoot, catch, or what you raised out in the back of the house.
I remember dad’s reluctance to eat a taco when my aunt Ruth and uncle Chris, who lived in San Bruno, California, took us to a taco stand in the late 60s. To his surprise, he loved them.
Who doesn’t love a taco?
When I learned as a history student that the original tacos and subsequent hot sauce were created to make iguana and slightly rancid beef or even horse flesh palatable, it didn’t matter. I’m still a taco fan.
My granddaughter Norah would eat tacos for every meal if her mom and dad allowed it.
Jayne, her older sister, would only eat chicken nuggets and fries if Staci and Adam allowed her to. Such is the taste of the next generation raised on the fat, salt, and “flavor bombing” of fast food.
I wouldn’t describe my palate as sophisticated; perhaps a better world is “evolving.”
Sushi and caviar (yep, raw fish or fish eggs) have grown in appeal. The salty, unique flavor of both is a delight.
Two years ago next month, Sue and I took an 18-day trip to Scotland with our lifelong friends Deb and Tad McMillan. I wasn’t a big fan of Scotch before we flew on British Airways non-stop from Denver to Heathrow in London.
A few days into the trip, I was amazed by the diversity of Scotch offered in the land where it was originally produced. Suffice it to say, I’m a “big” fan of Scotch today. Not the smoky, peat-based Scotch, but what the Scots refer to as the “fruity” version.
On the subject of alcohol, a shout-out to Ten Sleep Brewery and their “Speed Goat.” To my friends at the Lander Brewing Company, you’ve created a masterpiece in “Atlantic City Gold.” Both are ambrosia in a 16-ounce glass.
My taste in beer has evolved slightly as well since that night in the spring of my eighth-grade year when my buddies Jerry Sebastian and Larry Benedict pilfered a six-pack of Jerry’s dad’s warm Olympia beer from the garage.
My first taste of beer at 14 was far from spectacular; I didn’t partake again until I was 18.
Food can be delightful or disappointing depending on the way it’s prepared, presented and produced.
The worst Chinese we ever ate was in Amarillo, Texas. I wanted to go to the Big Texan, but Sue thought it looked too commercial and too crowded. We ended up at a Chinese restaurant, with not a single Chinese person on staff.
The egg foo young was spectacular (not) two fried eggs covered liberally with Sysco brown gravy. It was memorable in its epic lack of oriental quality.
The evolution of food, it goes and should go, beyond a brown paper sack delivered in a drive-through window.