Fish Stories

Or, how a debate about ketchup on hot dogs took me to memories of Lake Michigan

In April 1983, my second cousin took me smelting on Lake Michigan. If you had told me earlier that day that I was going smelting that evening, I wouldn’t have known what you were talking about.

Smelting on the lake is a peculiar Chicago ritual every April, the only month it’s allowed (and then only from 7 pm to 1 am). People gather in clusters on the lakefront around charcoal grills to stay warm, and perhaps to cook the evening’s catch. They play cards and tell stories while perched on coolers full of beer, which might be the main point of the gatherings nowadays. As recently as the ‘80s, when my cousin took me, the annual smelt run in the lake produced copious amounts of the silvery little delicacies, which are very tasty and can be coated in flour and fried (or whatever your choice of prep) and eaten whole. In the last couple of decades, much of the population has been devoured by trout and Coho salmon, leaving the surviving smelt to compete with invasive zebra mussels for food.

My second cousin, Leslie, was my mother’s first cousin and a prominent doctor in Chicago. I was in the city for a year at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, and his family’s house in Hyde Park was a scenic, but not short—the shoulders of that city are very broad indeed—drive down the fabled Lake Shore Drive from my apartment in Evanston. Leslie brought nets and pails, which we soon filled up with smelt, and then headed down to his kitchen to fry them up and slurp them down. I haven’t had fried smelt since, unless that was what we were served for lunch in a small cafe in Torremolinos, Spain, in November 1995. Those fish were similarly sweet and bite-sized, and man, were they inexpensive, like the glasses of red wine we washed them down with.

I took this trip down memory lane (a) to temporarily escape the madness engulfing my laptop like ivy, and (b) because a friendly discussion among friends about the proper condiment(s) for hot dogs led me to a quest to track down an old Northwestern classmate. More on him in a minute. First, Burhop’s.

I was happy to discover in my sleuthing that Burhop’s in suburban Wilmette is still there; I can’t remember how I first discovered it, but once I did, I always bought my fish there. What I didn’t know at the time was that Burhop’s is an institution that made a huge contribution to American culinary history.

Prior to 1926, it was nearly impossible to find anything resembling fresh seafood in the Midwest. There were plenty of fish in the lakes, but nothing to rival the ocean’s bounty—you just couldn’t bring perishables like that so far inland. At least, not until Albert Burhop partnered with his friend Clarence Birdseye to use the latter’s “plate freezer” technology to transport refrigerated seafood from the East Coast to Chicago. That was a game changer, and soon Burhop was selling fish at several locations in the Chicago metro area and also supplying restaurants, wholesalers, and the 1933 World’s Fair.

Burhop’s happens to be right down Sheridan Road from the house my friend Matt grew up in, and when I went looking for him, I found Burhop’s too. The hot dog connection? The crux of the debate was whether or not it is permissible to put ketchup on a hot dog. I say no, but then again, I don’t put ketchup on anything. Here in my neck of the woods (upstate New York and western Massachusetts), ordering a dog or mini-dog with “the works” is likely to get you mustard, onions, and either chili or a meat sauce. In Buffalo, I’m told, they will give you ketchup. In Chicago, no way. My high school girlfriend, meanwhile, puts ketchup on both sides of her hamburger. But we could argue this till the cows (or tomatoes) come home.

This all led me to tell the story of the day that Matt took me to his house in Wilmette, where his father, a prominent opthamologist on the North Shore, offered to make me a pastrami sandwich on rye. I said sure, and asked for mayonnaise on the sandwich.

Now Matt’s father was a very nice Jewish man, not prone to violent outbursts as far as I could see. But if looks could teleport you into Lake Michigan, I might have gone swimming that day. Apparently, you DO NOT PUT MAYONNAISE on a pastrami on rye.

So that’s settled. It’s actually a fond memory. Glad to revisit it. Now if I could only find Matt. He might be in L.A.—where, as an Anthony Bourdain episode once informed me, almost anything goes on a hot dog.

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Stephen Leon is the author of the boarding school mysteries Farmington River and Leave of Absence, as well as the art-world mystery To the Highest Bidder. All three are available for download or print-to-order on bookshop.org.