Back for Seconds

Back for Seconds
Pin It

from Hemmings Classic Car

October, 2010 - Jim Donnelly

On the long drive back from central Pennsylvania over the Fourth of July weekend, I happened to drive past a fast-food joint just outside Binghamton, New York. I'd been looking for gas on a holiday weekend, not fatty food. Not to give them a plug or anything, but this particular place was a Sonic, still a pretty uncommon sight in most of the Northeast. Drove through the carhop area, kept on going, and found gas a little farther down U.S. 11. After all, my doctor says to run from the lardburgers and get closer to the treadmill than the wife.

He's got a point, but that doesn't mean I have to enjoy it, or even like it. To enjoy a car, you need a road, and to enjoy a road, it's got to have dining opportunities along the way, so you can take a break and digest the scenery. Yes, I know that I've jitterbugged around this topic before, but the fact is that in 2010, the chains have even the old roads shackled, even good ones like Culver's in the Midwest or the Cook-Out in the deep South. You may never have visited it, but gritty little Binghamton, where the Monarch motorcycle was produced, has U.S. 11 as one of its main streets, running along the Susquehanna River. The "American autobahn," as state Route 17 has long been dubbed, also passes through town.

But Binghamton, since we're using it as a case study here, also has some comestibles to match its history. Perhaps surprising for a city that's so far outside the South, most of them involve chicken (including a local delicacy called "spiedies," which consists of tangy marinated, grilled chunks folded inside cheap white bread) or "city chicken," which really isn't chicken, but instead marinated pork cooked on a skewer. The town also boasts cuisine from Eastern Europe and more recently, Vietnam, reflecting its welcoming nature.

The point? Old roads are the ideal place to take an old car, and where the old roads go, traditional fare will inevitably find you, too. Few people from outside the area probably know it, but the surrounding Southern Tier of New York, as it's called, is a tight little hotbed of barbecue. Again, it's mostly chicken. Maybe that's because most of the livestock in New York is kept for dairy purposes, I don't know.

We all venerate cars and trucks from the past for what they do to our senses, whether it's driving them, admiring them when they're parked, or letting the harmony of exhaust noise and a reverberating radio, the latter probably explaining why oldies get played incessantly at car shows. We try to drive where the past has retreated. It therefore follows that these tastes of yesterday, of original palates, are ingredients in that simmering, delicious stew, too. Remember, also, that people with roots in other lands built American-branded cars by the tens of millions.

Within maybe 100 miles of southern New York, you can stick your fork into turkey with waffles (Frackville, Pennsylvania), coal candy (Pottsville, Pennsylvania, also the hometown of the Yeungling brewery, the nation's oldest), vanilla pusties (in the Little Italy district of Utica, New York) and a Michigan (in many parts of New York, this is a loaded hot dog--which in Michigan is called a Coney Island, interestingly).

I touched on this topic probably a couple of years ago, decrying corporate food's conquest of the Interstates. What happens on the back roads, where the world of the car was born, plays into our hands perfectly. For the plates that land in front of us, too. It's usually a good thing in life to stay hungry, except for this connotation.


Order Backissues of Hemmings Classic Car       |       Subscribe to Hemmings Classic Car

Reader Comments

Hemmings Classic Car

Order Backissues of Hemmings Classic Car