Papa Richard's El Camino Cheesesteaks

My father didn't cook in a kitchen.

My father didn’t cook in a kitchen.

He cooked on a four-foot flattop grill that he got from a restaurant that went bust.

Loaded it up in the back of his El Camino.

Strapped it in, drove it home, and dragged it up onto the deck.

It was technically illegal to have a thing like that at a house.

We were waiting for it to burn the house to the ground. It didn’t!

Instead it set the stage and the scene. This was my boyhood.

Saturday afternoons.

The air tasted like salt and hot grease.

The whole family descended.

Thirty people loud enough to wake the dead.

Uncle Tony walking up the deck stairs carrying wooden crates of tomatoes and grapes.

Tony was a fruit salesman in Boston.

He wore a black eye patch after getting hit by a delivery truck full of melons.

A pirate carrying a box of lettuce!

Uncle Tony brought all the fruits and vegetables to feed the family table every weekend in the summer down the Cape. Every weekend.

Then there was the meat.

Papa Richard didn’t make delicate food.

He made food that stopped you in your tracks.

He’d throw paper-thin slices of ribeye onto the El Camino flattop.

He cooked his cheesesteaks low and slow to get all the juices out of it. If you cook it on the iron screaming hot, you get a sear on it, a crust. When you’re cooking a thick piece of steak, that’s what you want. But when you’re cooking paper-thin ribeye, you cook it low and slow. This is how you get it right and juicy and full of flavor.

He piled on peppers, onions, and mushrooms.

He took a brick of Velveeta cheese and melted it down in a pot.

Then poured it straight over the top.

It dazzled me.

A heavy golden blanket of fat and salt bubbling into the grain of the meat.

You ate it hot. You ate it standing up.

When you take a bite outta his El Camino cheesesteak in the summer wind, you want to get the juice gushing out from the bread onto the deck.

I don’t mind telling ya: this is delicious!