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Contradiction is part of the core curriculum of college life. It’s a time of striving, worldliness, perspective, difference making, while most of at least two years are spent focused solely on how to dupe the local liquor store counter man. It’s a time of intelligent thinking and wisdom, combined with poisoning brain cells and endless cigarettes.
For me, there was a Woody Allen-ish romantic montage of Nietzsche, lofty poetry and independent city living, all while, really, mom paid the rent, and my palate was sated, happily, lustily even, by grilled cheese. Not just grilled cheese, but a hastily slapped together, George Foreman-ed sandwich, with whatever-was-on-sale enriched flour white bread, two Kraft singles, and, nothing else. I’d have a second, had an extra long nap fortified my appetite enough. Which it often had.
It wasn’t just because the kitchen of the slum-lorded duplex on 18th and Kilbourn was generally a war zone, with but a sliver of Formica counter space to concoct any kind of foodstuff without contact with multitude expanding bio experiments. Or that I was a poor college student, subsisting on Leinenkugels, dreams and depleted funds from too frequent late night forays to Marquette Gyros. Well, it was that. But, also, the fact remains: grilled cheese is the most satisfying of youth-time creature comforts, running alongside, perhaps even topping, peanut butter and jelly.
After all, there are fewer ingredients, yet more magic: The calculus involves the Maillard reaction: the chemical breakdown between amino acids and sugars that makes toast taste better than bread, and cheese—ideally, unsophisticated American—transforming itself into a rivulet-like goo of warm, salty smackiness. It’s the richest of hoped for satisfactions when you’re halfway between the kitchen’s of youth and the future apartments of the partially employed, shivering yourself to sleep on a futon, drunk on Henry Miller hot plate reveries.
It was about when I started having the funds to add bacon to the formula, to take the time to butter the bread, possibly chop tomatoes, to splatter with Frank’s Red Hot or whatever was on hand, that I realized I was actually, maybe, becoming an adult. Ready for the sophistication of a complex world, for the nuances of real life, which is best-tackled when you embrace your roots, your simplest times, the grandma-makes-it-best comforts, and build upon them.
The habits of youth aren’t all meant to be gotten over. Sometimes they are just in need of tweaking. College wasn’t the time for a lot of things. But with some remove, it’s nice to look up, out, and sample Milwaukee’s best grown up takes on the simplest, most childish of caloric releases.
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- Page 1 (Results 1-10)
