Redding, CA: Thursday, 6 June
California reality
Things have slowed down since we arrived in Redding, proudly the sunniest city in California. With daytime temperatures above 100 F (that around 40 C for those of you using the more sensible scale), a summer’s day often starts and ends outside but usually involves a lot of air conditioning–hopping in the middle. That said, my grandmother’s condo community has a pool and her house has very fluffy towels — all you need.
Our first stop on the day’s air-conditioned tour was the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed church my grandmother attends. A bizarre building, it’s all triangles and rough, sloping surfaces under a bright turquoise roof. Presumably, these are designed to mimic the surrounding rocky hills and river; Redding sits on the Sacramento River at the edge of the Cascade mountains. In its current state, the church represents only a fragment of Wright’s original design — the local congregation either ran out of money or got tired of lugging the huge rocks of which the main walls are constructed! The congregation member who normally acts as docent for building tours was away, but Alfie did a pretty good job of standing in.
Built on an area known as Poverty Flats during the Gold Rush, Redding was named for the Sacramento politician, Benjamin Redding, who bought up the land for the railroad. His namesake town sprang up around that railway terminus. Then, less than 50 years after Redding’s official incorporation in 1887, a local institution was born. In 1938, during the construction of Shasta Dam, an enterprising lad set up a tent outside the hiring hall for dam workers that offered potential recruits a ‘Damburger’, a piece of pie, and a cup of coffee for all of 25 cents. What a deal!
The Damburger is still going; a ‘Dam Lunch Deal’ of double smash burger, fries and medium (read, huge) drink will now set you back close to $12. They even serve Beyond Burgers now, although you wouldn’t know it from the aggressively Pepsi-branded appearance and rugged adherence to the all-plastic aesthetic. I was also surprised to find a new alcohol menu of ‘Dam Drinks’ — local beers and ciders. My grandfather Norval says it otherwise hasn’t changed much since he started going there in the late ‘40s. Order your burger ‘original’ (mustard, lettuce, and onion) or with ‘the works’ (that plus mayo, ketchup, and pickles), add American or Pepper Jack if desired, and enjoy your shoestring fries with fry sauce or ranch. Norval’s order — the Dam Deal with Pepsi; original burger, add jalapeños; the fries with sriracha ketchup on the side — practically goes up on the docket when he walks in the door. It’s not fancy, but it’s perfect.
Having walked back to the mercifully cool car, where I had a Trader Joe’s crossword to keep me occupied, we headed for one of many local strip malls for Alfie to get a haircut at ‘Calif. Haircuts’ (cue several jokes about Saudi Arabia-level temperatures). Meanwhile, my grandmother and I nipped to Safeway at yet another nearby mall complex to get some ingredients for dinner. While I marvelled at the bounty of the fruit and veg section in this non-fancy grocery store (five colours of carrots, many types of fresh chilli pepper, lotus root, jicama, even durian!), it was nothing to the potato chip or ice cream aisle. Classic.
Evening margaritas out on the porch were followed by barbecued chicken with salad and corn on the cob slathered in my smoky chilli-honey butter for dinner. What a wonderful, summery welcome! While exploring Portland’s doughnut scene had been most enjoyable, it was great to get back in the kitchen and help prepare a home-cooked dinner. And once darkness fell, I got to see a raccoon for the first time ever — he was spotted snaffling the cat food in the yard. Those adorable little hands!
I find the mustard-on-burgers thing fascinating. Outside of the US obviously ketchup is the default condiment of American food, whether on burgers or hotdogs or whatever. Mustard, if it's an option at all in the UK, is something you'd have to specifically ask for.
But it seems that (a) historically, mustard was the American condiment of choice for these foods, with ketchup a relatively latecomer, and (b) still to this day mustard much more common on burgers etc. within the US than outside the country. I see evidence of this in both burgers that you have mentioned thus far: the Damburger has mustard by default and ketchup as an extra, and the In-N-Out burger has mustard fried into the burger itself. Would be interested to hear if this is your perspective as well.
What's weird about this, to me, is that presumably ketchup was historically more alien to other countries than mustard? Mustard has been eaten for millennia, whereas ketchup in its current form is basically a nineteenth-century industrial product. It seems really odd that when American food made its way to e.g. Western Europe, such an emphasis was placed on the relatively-unfamiliar ketchup and the very-familiar mustard was dropped. Normally cross-cultural pollination of food involves changes being made to make foreign cuisines *more* familiar. But this change would seem to be the opposite. I'm sure there's some explanation, I just don't know what it is.
Do you have any sense of this as someone with experience of living (and, presumably, eating burgers and hot dogs etc.) both in and outside the US? For what it's worth, I would never have had mustard on my burgers until basically this year, but now I do it all the time.