Fried Lebanon Bologna Sandwiches
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We all have a few quirky favorite summer foods. One of mine is fried Lebanon bologna sandwiches, which mom made for me during summer days when I deigned to be around the house at lunchtime. Of course, during the school year, I ate lunch at school. It was usually bad cafeteria food at my elementary school—ugh, spaghetti and white bread, and metallic-tasting salad that I called “irony salad,” much to my mother’s amusement—or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the high school lunchroom.
But when summer came, mom would buy Lebanon bologna at local Pennsylvania Dutch markets in the Pocono Mountains, where we lived and where the Dutch were still the primary farmers of the area. These weren’t the plain Dutch, as the Amish and Mennonites called themselves, but the hoefti Dutch, or fancy Dutch, which was another way of saying they were just local farmers who had TVs and drove cars instead of horses and buggies. And they weren’t Dutch anyway. They were Germans who had immigrated to Pennsylvania in the 17th and 18th centuries from the Black Forest area of Germany, “Dutch” being a corruption of “Deutsch,” as Germans call themselves. It’s a mark of how insular the Pennsylvania Dutch can be that, plain or fancy, when I was a kid they were still speaking German 250 years after coming to America. And many still are. Even 25 years ago my nearest neighbor, known to all as Pappy Greiss, raised pigs and made his own sausage. It was wonderful good, as the Dutch might say.
The Pennsylvania Dutch also invented Lebanon bologna, named for the town of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, the county seat of Lebanon County. The original European settlers of this region of fertile rolling hills, fields, and woodlands were Christian sect members seeking to escape persecution in Europe. Many towns in eastern Pennsylvania are named for Biblical places—Bethlehem, Emmaus, New Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Lebanon among them.
Lebanon bologna is a coarsely-ground mixture of beef chuck mixed with white pepper, paprika, allspice, nutmeg, onion powder, powdered milk, vinegar, milk powder, corn syrup, and who knows what else. Along with real Pennsylvania Dutch summer sausage, it’s the most highly flavored bologna there is. After being stuffed into sausage casings, it’s hung in a smokehouse and smoked for varying lengths of time, depending on the maker.
Mom would buy it fairly thinly sliced and slap rounds of it into a hot skillet, flipping it a couple of times. Its sweet smoke would fill the kitchen and it drew me from whatever I was doing to watch her finish making the sandwich. The fried bologna went on wheat bread where a bit of its rendered fat would stain the bread. This was topped with a pad of Iceberg lettuce leaves. The top piece of bread was smeared with Miracle Whip and put on to make the sandwich. She placed it on a plate, cut it in half, and gave it to a grateful young kid (me). My dad,a freelance artist who worked in a studio on the property, would come in for lunch, but he didn’t like Lebanon bologna sandwiches. He went for Liederkranz cheese and saltines for lunch.
I still make fried Lebanon bologna sandwiches for myself occasionally. Though I live in California, there’s just one market in Santa Rosa that sells it. When I ask for a pound, sliced thin, the counterperson invariably says, “Hardly anyone asks for this.” The smell and flavor puts me right back at the summertime table with mom and dad—though both are gone now.
That’s reason enough to make that sandwich.
