HEAVEN :

Burger Heaven (JASON EPSTEIN, June 9, 2002, NY Times Magazine)

A simple hamburger barely a half-inch thick, slightly charred at the edges and rare inside, embellished with only ketchup and a neat slice of Bermuda onion on a four-inch bun, awakens in me memories as compelling as those aroused by Marcel Proust's famous madeleine. My hamburger, however, evokes not the salons of Paris but a lakeside shack in Maine at dusk amid the August hum of crickets. To recall the fragrant pine walls and the hand-lettered sign on the canoe paddle above an immaculate screen door, as if painted fresh every day, fills me even now with vivid longing.

Macnamara's shack occupied a well-lighted grass plot between the lake and the dirt road to Augusta in the village of Winthrop, where I spent a few boyhood summers during the war. That August we toiled until dusk in the hot fields picking snap beans that we stuffed into burlap sacks and tossed onto trucks for the cannery, which shipped them to the soldiers overseas. On Friday, when we were paid, still in our bib overalls and shoeless at the end of the day, we would paddle our canoes into town to spend our wages on hamburgers, Nehi and frozen Milky Ways. Our leftover nickels went into Macnamara's jukebox: Vera Lynn, Artie Shaw, Harry James. We were 14 that summer, our front teeth as yet too big for our sunburned faces, but we were old enough to paddle confidently home across the lake after dark. Convinced of our righteous cause, certain of victory and proud of our war work in the fields, we ate our hamburgers in the hazy twilight, under the bare bulbs strung over Macnamara's counter with its neat arrangement of ketchup bottles and pickle jars.

How could I have known then that my memory of those evenings would survive the century and provoke a lifelong search to recapture the fugitive joys fixed in mind's wandering by those hamburgers, joys that in the coarseness of youth I squandered as indifferently as the few dollars I earned in the bean fields? [...]

The Perfect Burger
3 pounds ground chuck, preferably chicken steak or blade steak, not more than 20 percent fat
6 four-inch Pepperidge Farm Farmhouse white rolls or Amy's Bread rolls
2 large sweet onions
2 ripe tomatoes
6 leaves of Boston or iceberg lettuce.

1. Heat a seasoned cast-iron grill pan over a high flame for five minutes. Meanwhile, place the meat in a bowl and knead lightly. (Disregard experts who warn that kneading will produce a dry burger. Kneading will not have this effect on chuck cooked rare or medium rare, but it will keep the meat from falling apart. Leaner cuts will be dry whether or not you knead them.) Divide the meat into six portions and shape burgers. Do not season.

2. Add burgers three at a time to pan leaving space between them. After four minutes lift burgers from pan with pair of tongs and turn by 90 degrees. After two minutes turn burgers over. The grill marks will form an attractive tick-tac-toe matrix. Meanwhile, toast rolls. In about five minutes meat will be medium-medium rare. Add sweet onion, tomato and lettuce on roll's bottom half. Add burger. Top with other roll half. Serve with ketchup.

NOTE: You may also broil burgers under a medium flame. The timing will be the same but you will sacrifice grill marks.

Yield: 6 servings.

The title's redundant. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 9, 2002 9:52 AM