Cold Cuts

My new favorite sandwich these days is dried cappacollo with sweet roasted peppers and some of that hot Philippe's mustard on a Kaiser roll. So, I am at the deli counter at my local Ralph's Supermarket and I am watching the guy slicing up the meat. And he is laying out the meat side-by-side on the cellophane. I look at the others and they are all doing the same. And I think to myself that, when I was a kid, cold cuts were sliced and then stacked in very neat piles prior to being wrapped up in brown paper for sale. One more mental note that life has changed.

I amble down the deli showcase and my mind wanders to another nagging debate for the ages. It was really never an issue until I hooked up with my writing partner and it became a point of contention.

Call it The Great Genoa Salami Controversy.

When I was a kid, I hated the green peppercorns you might find in processed meat. Not just hated them. They actually made me violently ill and nauseous. It was my personal express lane to gagging. And, as a result, I despised Genoa Salami because it was loaded with these little green buggers. When I mentioned this to my partner, he told me that Genoa Salami did not contain the dreaded green peppercorns. It was Hard Salami which was the culprit. And, given that he had once spent a lot of time working in his father's Italian catering business, there was no point for me to argue. But, everytime I ordered Hard Salami from then on, there were no green peppercorns.

Which salami do you think has those nasty peppercorns? Feel free to tell me. But, I digress...

Cold cuts were as much a staple in my house as milk and butter. Back when I was a youngster, Saturday mornings were the time where we stocked up on sodium nitrate for the upcoming week. My dad and I would venture down to Klemm's Pork Store on White Plains Road near 222nd Street in the Bronx. In fact, every single offshoot of my family did the same thing and it was a weekly family reunion down there as the counter workers weighed our weekly allotment of bratwurst and olive loaf. As a matter of fact, Klemm's would put out an annual calendar and it was pretty much the official calendar for my family. No matter whose house you went to, there was the Klemm's calendar with a big picture of some pig innocently waiting to become your spiced ham.

My father pretty much ordered the same stuff every week and he covered the entire house. He always liked Klemm's homemade kielbasie, but, for a sandwich meat, he opted for the HARD salami (with NO peppercorns). My mom was not a sandwich person, but did occasionally enjoy Klemm's homemade liverwurst. It was my grandparents' choices that made me scratch my head. My grandmother loved Klemm's bologna, but she would eat it with grape jelly and it looked just gross. But, my grandfather outdid everybody on the weird-o-meter. His favorite cold cut was head cheese. For those not in the know, head cheese is made up of a lot of junk meat that butchers would scoop up from the floor. It gets tied together with some gelatinous substance and it essentially looks like somebody blew chunks in the dumpster behind the A & P. My grandfather would take one single slice of this pig autopsy and put it in a dish. Then he'd cover it with straight vinegar. That would be his lunch. I just know that, somewhere in the bowels of Germany, this is a common meal. On 15th Avenue in Mount Vernon, it was something right out of the Addams Family.

As for me, I had two favorite luncheon meats which would wind up on my sandwich either when I was eating lunch at home or brownbagging it at school. Years before I realized that Taylor Ham should optimally be enjoyed after frying up a slab in a pan, this popular pork roll was sitting inside my sandwiches most days. When I was home for lunch, my mom would make me a Taylor Ham sandwich with mustard. On the plate right alongside, there would be six small pimento-stuffed olives. Not five, not seven. Exactly six. I never understood why. I never asked. I worked under the assumption for years that most jars of olives had quantities divisible by six and my mom didn't want to be one olive short at the end of the week.

The other cold cut on my hit parade was Klemm's homemade cervelat. Yeah, I was probably the only kid in the school cafeteria with a couple of cervelat slices sitting on his rye bread. It's like a salami, but it's a bit milder. Cervelat is a sausage that used to be made in the German speaking part of Switzerland and I couldn't get enough of it. I didn't have it for years until I moved to Los Angeles and found a German pork store that actually sold it. And, from time to time, I enjoy it all over again without having to worry about a biology quiz the next day.

A trip to Klemm's with my dad always provided me with some other eternal questions that I never got answers to.

---Why was it that people always ordered American cheese "sliced thin?" No matter who the customer was, the American cheese always had to be customized in this way.

---What the hell is mortadella? Is it a bologna? Is it a ham? Is it a cheese? Whatever the answer, it looks disgusting.

---There is honey ham, Virginia ham, and Black Forest Ham. I always contended that if you took a blindfolded taste test, you could not tell the difference between the three.

My entire family stopped going to Klemm's suddenly and, as I look back on it, the decision was totally reflective of the times and one that I am not proud of. Back in those days, the deli counter workers didn't wear the plastic gloves you see food handlers wearing today. And nobody really blinked an eye.

Until my father and I ambled into Klemm's one Saturday morning to discover the guy slicing our luncheon meat was...Black. I still can recall the look of horror on my dad's face. And that news spread through my family that day as if it was Pearl Harbor all over again. Almost instantaneously, no one with my last name or one remotely related was ever seen in Klemm's again. The pork store closed a few years later and, to this day, I wonder just how much of their income was based on my love of Taylor Ham.

Dinner last night: Evelyn's Favorite Pasta at the Cheesecake Factory.