Mrs. S. and I rolled into Marks Locker, know to me as "the Rowley Locker," lookin' for some MEAT! If you have a dead cow or pig on your hands (whether it be your own, via gift or purchase, or whether you be the farmer who reared it), they'll do a fine job breaking it down into the standard North American cuts. We arrived sans cow, pig, and perused the frozen items available for sale to one whose meat and organs were not still intact in their animal shape, one who gets his meat from grocers. CITYFOLK!
That was our big mistake, popping in to pick up something treated, cured, or stuffed. A locker is a place where professional butchers disassemble meat, simple and lovely but without ornament. The art of curing, stuffing, seasoning, or transforming that fleisch into tasteful, properly-rendered meat products is best left to smaller shops, pungent with spices and salts that both preserve and flavor: city-based delis and charcuteries that abut narrow brick-paved alleyways, where the sour carcass stench lingers and the blood streaming out the backdoor pools. Such establishments STINK, because animal tissues STINK, because muscle and organs and guts and gristle STINK when detached from a body and kneaded, frozen, thawed, and pushed through grinders. The whole environment is half outhouse, half mad scientist's laboratory, a place where critters are mashed together - liver of cow with butt of pig with thigh of chicken with leg of lamb, all mixed with plants and peppers - and forced through tubes to take new shapes, to become new things. Portly old Bismarck had it right: one smell, and you don't want to know how this stuff gets made.
A nice locker, on the other hand, doesn't smell like much. There's a hint of livestock, but mostly it smells like cold air. Marks Locker, like any locker, is a good, sterile place to have your beast cut up.
Sadly, I'm not reviewing the cut-up beasts.
The foodstuffs are stored in two tall refrigerators and a wide freezer. (There is an additional freezer further down, but when you open it you're confronted with half-emptied boxes of ice cream products that don't seem to be for sale.) They offer a limited variety of uncured meats, ranging from a T-bone steak to a slab of side pork (from least to most exotic). You can also buy uncased sausage meat, including sweet or hot Italian sausage: fellow travelers lost in Iowa and hankering for a properly cased salsiccia will have to do their own stuffing.
Above all there are brats, various and made in-house. This is where we pull back the floorboards and reveal atrocities so great they warrant a one-star review.
The Rowley Locker offers a standard brat, good but indistinguishable from what you'd get at a nearby Fareway or HyVee. The problems occur when they deviate from that template. A "Mac 'n' Cheese brat" immediately caught my eye, and the label actually admitted to having stuffed mac 'n' cheese into pork and a casing. And nearly every other variety of brat featured cheese of some kind or unnecessarily molded some perfectly fine dish into brat form.
I spotted a "Philly brat." Unlike the other brats, the relationship between its name and its ingredients wasn't self-evident. I asked the cashier for clarification, and she explained, "It's just a beef brat." She then attempted to steer me away from the beef brat toward "our most popular item," the breakfast brat. I had noticed this brat earlier and assumed it was a standard breakfast sausage: an English banger, or whatever Jimmy Dean has in those frozen boxes. Nope, she said. "The breakfast brat is a brat with cheese, eggs, and hash browns mixed in."
Food for people who don't like food.
I was still stuck on the Philly brat. What did beef wurst have to do with Philadelphia? Mrs. S speculated: "It's probably a cheesesteak brat." But it doesn't have cheese! "You probably add the cheese." But EVERY OTHER BRAT here already has cheese in it. Then it occurred to me: "Philly" was code for "Jewish." At some point, somewhere in Ohio, a mildly anti-Semitic butcher had cheekily dubbed his beef brat a "Brooklyn brat" or a "Bronx brat," code for "Jew brat." A westward game of goy telephone ensued: in Indiana, the Bronx brat became the "New York brat." In Iowa, "New York" became "Philadelphia." Somewhere in Nebraska or Wyoming, it's called the "Generic East Coast City brat." It's all code for, "You don't want it - get the breakfast brat instead!"
Mrs. S. didn't buy my theory of the Philly brat's origins. Either way, before we left, I bought some Italian meatsticks, the closest I'd get to encased Italian sausage. As we drove home, I ate them. The leathery casing consisted of no known edible material. That's okay: the "meat" - mostly grease and slime - slipped right out. It was heavily salted and seasoned with what tasted like a single drop of Tabasco in lieu of red pepper. It was easily the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten in my life. But I have yet to eat a breakfast brat. read more
