Gyros

[Mike Salovesh]

Reading Barry's excursions into cookbookland, and the list's discussion
of po' boys that somehow turned into gyros, I can't resist following the
food trail to dialectology.  It's going to take me a long detour to get
there, however.

Robert Kelly wrote:
>
> in NYC I grew up hearing only Greeks referring to gyros, but they did
> pronounce it [gamma/iro] or [xiro], which is a natural enough hearing in
> English as 'hero.'

Chicago Greek restaurants weren't yet serving gyros as I was growing up
in the early to middle 1940s.  They weren't even available at "Poppa
John's", once a local institution next to the IC tracks in east Hyde
Park.

Poppa John's family restaurant was what the uninformed called a greasy
spoon, and they did serve standard greasy spoon fare. But it was a great
GREEK greasy spoon. Every day the menu featured some Greek dishes that
really were home cooked. The women of the family did miracles  baking
with filo, and the place served fantastic Greek pastries nearly every
day. That's where I permanently lost my heart to baklava.

Poppa John himself (whose real family name was Pappagiannis) let his
sons run the restaurant/snack shop/greasy spoon. He did his own cooking
on a steamer he had built on a pushcart. He sold hot dogs, soft drinks,
and snacks at the corner next to my old school on weekdays from 10 to 5.
Then he'd push his cart back to the restaurant, a llittle over half a
mile away. Poppa John didn't like pushing the cart through deep snow,
and he wouldn't go out if the temperature was zero or below. Otherwise
he was there every school day.  In wintertime, the middle of the Midway
was flooded  for ice skating, and Poppa John would push his cart half a
block over to serve the skaters once he'd taken care of the after-school
rush.

(Quiz for old, old Chicagoans:  What school did I attend? And before you
suggest it, no, it wasn't Bruno Bettleheim's Orthogenic School.  Thank
God.)

My parents, old, old Chicagoans, raised me in the great Chicago
epicurean tradition. Once on my own, I continued the family custom by
trying to learn about every ethnic cuisine to be found in Chicago.
That's the simple prerequisite to a wonderful hobby.  The beauty of it
is that you don't have to learn all about every cuisine before the fun
begins: you can introduce one at a time.

Each cuisine has its own special features known to few outsiders.
Examples, at the most elementary levels: sukiyaki should be accompanied
by a raw egg beaten into a small bowl; borshch really should be served
cold, and it demands sour cream; chop suey, being an American dish, is
not what you should order when trying to judge a Chinese restaurant;
veal scaloppini a la marsala is one of the best tests of the quality of
an Italian restaurant -- a great one is heaven, but most are nothing but
stringy breaded veal cutlets doused in some undrinkable wine. Note that
you don't have to know the whole range of a cuisine to begin to make
reasonable critical judgments: it's fair to assume that a Japanese
restaurant isn't promising if the sukiyaki isn't cooked at your table,
regardless of whether you are offered an unbroken, uncooked egg to go
with it.

Why would anybody want to know that?  To get ready for the real game:
hunting for the best place to get authentic ethnic cuisine of a given
variety.

Before the great white flight to the segregated suburbs, Chicago was a
mosaic of tightly knit ethnic neighborhoods. Their restaurants
specialized in the best of the cuisines of the surrounding ethnic,
national, and religious enclaves.  There was no guidebook to the best of
the best.  The fun was in finding your own set of classics, and
suggesting one of them the next time you were with a group looking for
someplace wonderful and different for a meal. Then you'd pray that the
information wouldn't get out so widely that your classic place would be
discovered -- and destroyed as it tried to satisfy the hordes of
strangers who would inundate the place in search of the latest fad in
foods.  (You could tell the descent into the popularity of being quaint
was on its way when standard,
nationally advertised brands of beer began to replace the beers
preferred by the people of the surrounding ethnic enclave.)

There was one neighborhood -- the old Maxwell Street district -- that
once was the port of entry of successive waves of immigrants, before
they moved out to monocultural enclaves. That was the neighborhood
graced with Jane Addams's Hull House, the great exemplar of the
settlement house movement. Within a few blocks, you could find great
Armenian, German, Jewish, Italian, Mexican, Lithuanian,  Jordanian,
Chinese, and Greek restaurants.  They were souvenirs of the many groups
of immigrants who settled in Chicago beginning in the 1890s.
(Eventually, the construction of a campus for the U of Illinois/ Chicago
urban renewed all the greatness out of the neighborhood.)

A neophyte in some variety of ethnic cuisine who knew Chicago's history
would start within a few blocks of Halsted and Maxwell, to find a place
to learn the fine points, before searching for hidden treasures.  The
dedicated searcher for multicultural gold would learn how to find the
neighborhoods or communities or streets that became home to groups that
had bypassed the Maxwell Street port of entry. That could lead to some
great Peruvian and Cambodian and Catalonian and Filipino and Ethiopian
restaurants, among others.

End of nostalgia trip.  (I can't go on: I'm drooling!)

My early experience with the old Poppa John's convinced me that Greek
food was worth searching for, and every once in a while I just had to
eat in Greek Town or in some uncelebrated place that was rumored to make
a really great lemon drop soup. I ate in a lot of Greek restaurants, but
I don't recall noticing gyros any earlier than the middle to late
1960s.

Finally, back to dialectology:

When gyros spread through Greek restaurants, snack bars, and greasy
spoons, my Chicago Greek friends pronounced the word as Robert Kelly
reports for New York. Their initial gamma is *voiced*.  (In Greek
pronunciation, it's a continuant, not the English /g/ stop.)

To my ear, that makes it unlikely that "gyros" can be related to the
name of hero sandwiches.

Classical scholars, please ignore my bad spelling and accept my wish:
Kali nichta!

-- mike salovesh    <salovesh at niu.edu>      PEACE !!!