Why is it that the foods we enjoyed decades ago invariably seem to taste better than today's offerings? Last week I talked about a Saturday shopping trip to the old Belair Market on Gay Street in the late 1950s. Several readers, in turn, offered their gustatory impressions on this Baltimore institution:
Ted Lingelbach of Parkville recalled the names of the market merchants: the DeLegge family for vegetables by the peck, Berger's for cakes and cookies, Bucheister and Suder for candy, Castle Farms for dairy products and fresh buttermilk by the cup, Hagel's bakery, Huddleston and Kaiser for cold cuts, Panzer's for pickles, Smelkinson's for butter and eggs, Utz chips and pretzels, and Wetzelberger's breakfast sausage.
"My favorite stop in the Market was the lunch counter just inside the Ensor Street entrance to the North Shed operated by a family from Greece," he wrote. "They only closed just before the bulldozers arrived [about five years ago]. I can still smell and taste their delicious hamburgers smothered in a steaming pile of yellow onions."
Another market patron, Dennis Klingenberg, recalled, "I could do lunch at Belair and get three hot dogs with chili and onions for $1."
It was a favorite of my family as well. My mother had six children and she'd line us up at this stall's marble counter, feed us, and still have money left. Ted and Dennis are correct: The onions and chili were out of this world.
Another impression arrived from a member of the Jesuit order, Brother Paul Cawthorne: "My grandfather, a German immigrant, each Saturday would proceed from his home at 1727 N. Collington Avenue down to the Gay Street Market where he would regularly purchase a securely wrapped portion of Limburger cheese and a small heavy loaf of real pumpernickel bread, not what passes for pumpernickel now.
"What is contained in the jars commonly sold [as Limburger cheese] nowadays is a pale shadow of the reality, which, to attain its requisite ripeness, must be aged in goat dung. In fact, unwrapping real Limburger was like opening up the series of Russian dolls, from biggest to smallest, except that the surprise was not smaller, but grander, as the odor increased with the unwrapping of each layer.
"Once unwrapped, the cheese was duly smeared upon the small dark heavy slices of pumpernickel, and my grandfather would have his weekly treat. His only problem after his snack was finding a place to put the cheese, because my grandmother refused to allow the effulgence of that cheese to permeate other foodstuffs in her refrigerator."
Cawthorne continued:
"When we lived just around the corner from my grandparents, at 1734 N. Gay Street, in the shadow of the American Brewery a half-block from the statue of Gambrinus raising a flagon of spiritus frumenti, my mother's favorite shopping venture on any given Saturday was to go to the Monument Street Market, where she would buy brains, kidneys, and shad roe (in season). Sunday would be our treat day. Breakfasts were regularly pretty dull in our house, but Sunday's breakfast might consist of brains or shad roe on scrambled eggs and toast."
Is this a Baltimore thing? My grandfather's idea of a high time on Saturday night was a glass of beer, Limburger on soda crackers and the Lawrence Welk Show on television.
jacques.kelly@baltsun.com