Sore Throat

Woke up with a scratchy, raw throat at 5:21 this morning. Oh, no! Please, please, not strep! After awhile I knew I was going to have to eat a sloppy joe with a big stacker dill pickle. It's not the best thing for a sore throat, but it's as close as I can get.

I belong to the Campbell's chicken gumbo soup recipe* contingent of Midwestern sloppy joe eaters, not the Heinz ketchup-Manwich contingent. This is very important. Down here in Texas when a displaced Nebraskan meets a displaced Iowan, the conversation gets around to loose meat sandwich preference pretty quick. Like religion and politics, it's important to find out just what kind of person you are dealing with so you can avoid stepping on conversational toes.

The best thing of all for a sore throat is a Tastee sandwich from the Tastee Inn & Out drive-in at 48th and Holdrege Streets in Lincoln, Nebraska. Actually an order of three Tastees is about what it takes to do the job of recovering from a sore throat. I sure hope the Tastee drive-in is still there.

When we turned the pea-green '54 Chevy into Tastees on the looping tree-lined driveway off Holdrege, the microphones stuck up from the ground like giant white lollipops. The pick-up window was on the passenger side of the car. Sometime I got to lean out of the car to get the cardboard tub of Tastee sandwiches from the woman with the white uniform and hairnet. Ahhhh, the steam and mustard aroma! [The tub made a fine tom-tom.] If we went inside to order and eat, the person at the counter would write up our order and send it in a pneumatic tube! This was fascinating to me as a kid, just as my sons loved the Omaha drive-through bank with the clear pneumatic tube.

I've invested a large chunk of today Googling Tastees, Maid-Rites, and other loose meat sandwiches. Never did find a photo of the Tastee Inn & Out in Lincoln, but it was lots of fun, and my throat is feeling much better. It was easier finding a photo of the original Runza Drive-In on the way to Pioneers Park, and the original Valentino's by the Ag Campus. Dad says the first Tastee Inn near the main NU campus was the site of the mid-Seventies Hong Kong Pizza King, a multicultural experience, and later became Pontillo's, home of the very bad breath meatball sandwich.

You can read the review of a play presented at the FringeNYC Festival last August:

Onion Girl, a new play written by Joye H. Cook-Levy and directed by Scott R.C. Levy, tells the story of Billy, a young woman whose Mother has died and left her the family business: the Tastee Inn & Out in Sioux City, Iowa, a relic of the original fast-food days. Regulars can drive up and place their "usual" orders with a person they know, and “onion chips with an extra container of dip” is a house specialty...

There's some disagreement about the year of the invention of the loose meat sandwich, but all signs point to Sioux City, Iowa. "Loose meat" is a pretty unappealing name. I had never heard that term until a 1994 episode of Roseanne. The Food Timeline's History of Sandwiches has a section on Sloppy Joes:

During the second half of the nineteenth century ground beef gained popularity in America because it was both economical and nourishing. Recipes for Hamburg Steaks (aka hamburgers) were included in many popular American cookbooks. Cooks often added inexpensive fillers (bread crumbs, ketchup, tomato paste, eggs, sweet peppers, minced onions, Worcestershire sauce, bottled horseradish, pickle relish, mustard, salt & pepper were the most popular) to stretch the meat. [Duh!] This ground beef mixture was then fashioned into meatballs, meat loaves, hamburger stew, and loose meat sandwiches....Where do sloppy joes fit in?
"The origins of this dish are unknown, but recipes for the dish date back at least to the 1940s. It dates in print to 1935. There is probably no Joe after whom it is named--but its rather messy appearance and tendency to drip off plate or roll makes "sloppy" an adequate description, and "Joe" is an American name of proletarian character and unassailable genuineness. There are many individual and regional variations on the dish. In Sioux City, Iowa, a dish of this type is called a "loosemeat sandwich," created in 1934 at Ye Olde Tavern Inn by Abraham and Bertha Kaled."
--- Encyclopedia of American Food & Drink, John F. Mariani [Lebhar-Friedman:New York] 1999 (p.297).


Besides Tastee drama and history, there is Tastee art. This is from Kent Wolgamott's review of Wendy Jane Bantam's exhibit last spring:

...She also captures some Lincoln landmarks with three smaller paintings that also display her quirky sense of humor. They're "Sub Zero at the Topper Popper," "Zesto Zesto," in which ducks frolic in the parking lot in front of the ice cream shop, and "Spies at Tastee Inn & Out," where rabbits surround the building and one is on the roof holding binoculars.

I love it! I tried to find that painting on the website for her gallery, but I think Wendy sold it.

Okay, we've got drama, history, popular culture, medicine, and art. Now it's time for religion. This is the Tastee Inn Prayer from a story by David Boles. (I bet I went to school with his sister):

"Oh, Lord, may the pick-up window never be on the right side of the car and may the building never get a new coat of paint."

Can't you just hear Janis Joplin singing, "Oh Lord, won't ya buy me a Tastees sandwich. My friends all get curly fries and chocolate shakes, too..."

*Sloppy Joes:
1 lb. ground beef
1 can chicken gumbo soup
1/2 cup chopped onions or 1 heaping tbsp minced onions
1/4 cup water
1 tbsp catsup
1/2 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp salt & a shake of pepper
Brown beef and onions. Add other ingredients. Simmer 30 min.