table talk / By Joseph Byrd

Remembering food:

Let’s get weepy over meals of yore

(July 12, 2007)  My first memory of food is the White Castle in Louisville, 20 miniature hamburgers for a dollar. I was 4, and the aroma — onions grilled in suet, then plopped with a tiny steamed beef patty inside a miniature square bun, in tiny white boxes, all bagged — was heavenly. At the age of 5, we moved to Tucson, and while there are many taste memories from the Southwest, I didn’t have White Castle again for years.

Burger purists, like those at www.ahamburgertoday.com, despise White Castle. On the East Coast, they are called “sliders” and have about as much social cachet as Taco Bell. They are, after all, not true hamburgers: The meat is steamed over minced onions, not grilled or broiled, and, well, it’s not exactly ground beef — it seems to be mixed with beef broth and maybe mayonnaise (there are numerous recipes online), and the patty comes out less than 1/4 inch thick, 3 inches per side. Needless to say, it takes a bunch to make a meal.

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But that magical memory/flavor/aroma stuck in my brain, and when I finally found a White Castle in the early ’60s — not in Manhattan, but on a grimy highway deep in The Bronx — it was exactly as I’d remembered it. It had nothing to do with my preference for rare ground chuck, and other ingredients I consider to be critical to a great burger. It wasn’t a great burger: It was White Castle, and yes, I happily devoured five or six.

The point of this is that I think that childhood memories of food are the most accurate early memories we have. The persistence of early memory is important in this day and age, where corporate megaliths control much of what we consume. For instance, I am old enough to remember when Coca-Cola was made without corn syrup. “What difference does that make?” you might ask.

Well, corn syrup is something most people under 60 have been subjected to all their lives. It’s a glucose derived from processing cornstarch, and much cheaper than sucrose (made from sugar cane or beets), galactos (from milk) or fructose (from honey, fruits and vegetables, the sweetest naturally occurring sugar, about twice as sweet as sucrose), which were the predominant sweeteners back when Coke was competing with colas like Pepsi and R.C.

Cokes were tangier and less saccharine in the 1950s, with a strong citric component, a thirst-quenching edge. But having captured the market, the company turned to lower manufacturing costs to generate more profit. Now all major soft drinks use corn syrup.

Corn syrup has a different flavor from other sugars. There is an aftertaste, a kind of odd back-of-the-tongue off-flavor, which is why you are often tempted, despite being full, to take another sip — subliminally you are trying to get rid of that aftertaste.

Sucrose doesn’t have an aftertaste, but it’s not as intense as corn syrup, so it takes more to achieve the same sweetness affect. As I said, corn syrup is cheap. That’s why Boylan’s and Virgil’s root beers are much more expensive than Hires, A&W, Mug, IBC and Dad’s. In some countries, sucrose is still used in soft drinks, which explains the legend of Mexican Coke (in fact, some Mexican Coke is now made with corn syrup).

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