Door County Essay: Ring Bologna

Bologna – i.e. baloney, as in ring bologna – is not an item often featured at a restaurant. Even one visited by our own favorite gastronome Jimmy “The Spoon” Schuh. I am bothered by this oversight. In our very own central Wisconsin there are restaurants featuring Thai cuisine, Chinese, Mexican, Korean, Cajun, French, South Chicago, Italian, German, and Afghanistan, with plans for eateries featuring classic Icelandic, the South Segoria Islands and the Shawinigam Falls variant as is French cuisine with a mustard fixation. All this and no baloney.

I am not one to knock chicken teriyaki or the fabulous gumbo at Christians Bistro, but whatever happened to good ol’ American pie? I mean rhubarb pie so acidic as to etch glass. “A la mode” has nothing to do with sweetening up classic rhubarb pie as providing a suitable chemical antidote. How come there is a restaurant in good ol’ Central Wisconsin where you can, without parental supervision, order blackened shrimp that will peel the skin off your un-anaesthetized tongue, but not one local emporium offers classic Wisconsin rhubarb pie that will unwind your very own double helix and lay it out smoking and ruined before your eyes?

How come no bologna? How come no good ol’ farmer tan, John Deere green, hay-scented ring baloney served in a candle-lit restaurant where womenfolk will appear semi-naked in public because it qualifies as “dining out?”

What got me thinking about ring baloney was the morning talk around the breakfast table last Sunday. We were celebrating our Sabbath ritual of scrambled eggs served with a pint of stewed tomatoes. An item you also won’t see in a breakfast restaurant because it looks so darn ghastly on the plate. Resembling as it does a roadway accident no coroner wants to attend. Stewed tomatoes are, the appearances aside, a divine repast, better than the English routine of fried tomatoes that in the winter taste like ochre-hued tennis balls. Not to forget stewed tomatoes look chainsaw-massacre horrid. I remember when the average pizza looked just as horrid. The modern pizza is now so over-mantled with cheese and arthropods to resemble an ornate Frisbee and not the ancestral Sicilian bloody murder classic. And healthier for the participants than the double-clutch cheese-deluxe franchise death.

In my reference good food looks horrid. Chicken and biscuit comes to mind, lumpy wallpaper paste is a fair synonym. Boiled cabbage dinner resembles the contents of any average overturned garbage can. And then my favorite, sauerkraut, boiled potatoes, ring bologna, the holy trinity. I prefer to dice the potatoes, heap the sauerkraut, and dose the resulting midden with catsup. Very horrid. A double-barrel dose of pepper and that KTB plate is up there with the best porterhouse served at Alexanders on West 57th. If not priced at $300 a plate and to wait six weeks for a table reservation. Were it up to me, I’d start a franchise tomorrow, kraut, taters and bologna. Chuck Kostitchka of Hancock tells me true faith is fried potatoes instead of boiled, but otherwise the same recipe. My mama was too much in a hurry to fry the potatoes first.

As we were discussing food on Sunday morning, the question came to me whether our children had been imprinted with our very own ethnic cuisine, the notable kraut, taters and bologna. So I called my daughter a few minutes later to ask the question. Do they ever eat ring bologna, sauerkraut and boiled potatoes. Just last week, was her reply.

I am rather proud of my daughter, she learned to drive without wrecking the car, but then a course in tractors will accomplish that. She the class of ’95 at Columbia, Honor Society, the National Debate Tourney, magazine editor (Birds & Blooms), a mom, two kids, redheads. Nice stuff. Deep down, what I’m really proud of is her ring bologna loyalty. Taters, kraut, and bologna, as proud a transition as the mystic E4 gene as inclines the holder to a tenor voice and freckles. Where is the genetic marker for ring bologna, and where located in the helix I do not know, though I am certain it exists, a gene for kraut, taters and bologna.