Back Home, We Just Call Them Maid-Rites

Tavern sandwiches are on the List for this month. I’ve eaten at many a tavern in my day, and had my own ideas about what might constitute a tavern sandwich. Imagine my surprise, then, to learn that tavern sandwich is another name for something commonly called a “loosemeat” sandwich. Loosemeat sandwiches are made with seasoned ground beef, served loose rather than in a patty, in a hamburger bun, with your basic typical hamburger condiments.

Back home, we always called them Maid-Rites.

The tavern sandwich was invented, some say, in Missoula, Montana in 1920, by Carroll Dietz, who put them on a menu as “steamed hamburgers.”

In 1924, a joint in Sioux City, Iowa called Ye Olde Tavern began selling its own version of the loosemeat sandwich, leading to the “tavern” name Wikipedia gives it. But in 1926, Floyd Angell started selling his own version at the first Maid-Rite restaurant in Muscatine, Iowa. Within a few years, more Maid-Rite restaurants opened, eventually spreading throughout Iowa and into a few neighboring states. Newer Maid-Rite restaurants are subject to corporate efficiencies and branding, favoring a shiny and homogeneous nostalgia-chromed version of the mid-20th century. The older locations appear to be more loosely-franchised, offering their own takes on the classic Maid-Rite menu.

If you’ve been reading the site for a while, you may (or may not–maybe you just come for the pretty sandwich pictures, and I totally understand) recall that I grew up in Quincy, Illinois. There’s no particular reason you should be aware of Quincy, a town of about 40,000 people on the Mississippi river. Quincy ends up in the news once every 20 years or so when we have one of our “100 year floods.” More recently, the town featured in the Netflix series Queer Eye, whose costar Jonathan Van Ness graduated from the same high-school I did (though some years later), and returned home to make over the school system’s music director, Kathi Dooley (who was still there when I attended the school over 30 years ago).

Another notable thing about the Quincy I grew up in–there were not one, but two Maid-Rite locations in town. These days it’s back down to just a single Maid-Rite, but it’s just the kind of old-school place that still does things the way it wants to, rather than wearing the corporate uniform and serving the corporate menu. Not that it’s some kind of rebel–it’s family owned and everybody that works there is either 17 or 70 years old, it seems. The place is so quaint that when Alton Brown, dad-joke-spouting Alton Brown, showed up on a motorcycle for his show Feasting on Asphalt, it looked like an alien invasion.

Now there are Maid-Rites in the Quad Cities, closer to where I live. There are older, more picturesque, more definitive Maid-Rites (and former Maid-Rites) like Taylor’s Maid Rite in Marshalltown, Iowa, or Dan’s Sandwich Shop in Newton, Iowa. But there was not a more perfect Maid Rite location for me to visit than the classic Maid-Rite in my hometown, at 507 N. 12th St. in Quincy, Illinois.

So Mindy and I drove back home for a weekend, with our sons in the Northwest visiting their grandparents and cousins, and visited the Maid-Rite of our youth. Neither of us were frequent visitors of the place back then, but we were both familiar enough with it. Alton Brown said in his show that it’s “right on the main drag” but that’s not entirely accurate, as it’s a couple blocks north of Broadway, which is as close to a main drag as Quincy has.

When it comes to menus, this Maid-Rite has you covered. There are paper menus at the counter, and menu boards above it. There are also menu boards scattered around the dining rooms.

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Whereas the corporate Maid-Rites have “Signature” sandwiches such as the Jalapeno Maid-Rite and a bleu cheese Maid-Rite, Quincy’s Maid-Rite only offers the Maid-Rite and the Cheese-Rite, in 3 different sizes each–regular, Super, and Mega. I ordered a Super Maid-Rite and a Super Cheese-Rite, along with cheese fries. Mindy ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and a slice of apple pie. All of it was fine–the fries were standard crinkle-cut and the cheese sauce straight from a can, the grilled cheese well-made but ordinary, and the apple pie, while flaky-crusted, did not appear to be hand-made.

The “Super” Maid-Rite “with everything” consists of a standard, cheap hamburger bun, mustard, thin slices of pickle, finely-diced onions that resemble the rehydrated kind found in a Big Mac, and the famous Maid-Rite steamed loose meat, all wrapped up in wax paper. If you take a good look at that photo, you can see that this is not a lean beef mixture–there is congealed fat on the paper all around the sandwich and the bun glistens with it. The meat is also quite salty. Wow is it good though.

It’s not good in a fancy, haute cuisine kind of way. It’s salty and fatty and ordinary, like a cheap beef pot roast soaking in its own gravy, but with a crumbled texture instead of stranded, and served on a 10 cent hamburger bun with the cheapest mustard, pickles, and onion you can find. It’s way better than I remember it being.

The Cheese-Rite is more of the same, but with an entirely superfluous slice of semi-melty American cheese. They call this loose-meat, which is accurate, but it doesn’t fall apart the way you might expect. It isn’t the cheese holding this sandwich together–the meat is held together by its own fat and moisture and a handy piece of wax paper.

We had a few more adventures while visiting Quincy that weekend–it was the weekend of the event known locally as “KC BBQ,” an annual fundraiser thrown by the Knights of Columbus chapter across the street from my mom’s house, and we spent some time there, listening to the band and eating carnie food. We also drove to several taverns around town trying to find the best fried cheeseballs (which ended up being at Mr. Bill’s, a place I once said I’d never visit again, but 15 years is close enough to never I guess).

But really, the main point of the trip was going to Maid-Rite, and the only thing there that’s really worth eating is the Maid-Rite, so we said our goodbyes and came back home to Chicago, and that was all I thought I’d have to say about the Maid-Rite, loosemeat, “tavern” sandwich.

I was wrong, though. Of course I had to try making it myself. My version turned out less salty but maybe a touch more fatty than the version I had in Quincy. I’m good with that, but YMMV.

I bought a 3 pound chub of the cheapest, fattiest (73%/27%) ground beef I could find, along with a quart of beef stock, and mixed the beef into the stock until it disintegrated into tiny tiny pieces, before adding 2 bouillon cubes, covering the pan, and simmering it over low heat for 2 hours. Then I added probably about a teaspoon each of onion powder, garlic powder, and black pepper, as well as perhaps a quarter teaspoon of MSG, and reduced the mixture, stirring occasionally at first but more frequently as the moisture evaporated, until it looked like this:

To the cheapest hamburger bun I could find, I added a squirt of cheap yellow mustard from Aldi, cheap hamburger-sliced pickles, and a big spoonful of yellow onions diced as fine as I could make them.

Then, using a spatula, I mixed the meat mixture up a bit to redistribute the fat and juices, and scooped up probably about 3-4 ounces worth on top of the onions.

I served it with potato chips. It was good–as I said, less salty than the original but I don’t think that’s necessarily a flaw, and the use of stock, bouillon, and MSG gave it a highly beefy and savory flavor. The pickle chips were sliced a little thicker than the kind Maid-Rite uses, throwing off the balance a bit, and I suppose I should have added more loosemeat to correct for that, but there’s only so much of this you can pile into a hamburger bun before the whole mess disintegrates and you end up wearing it.

Four hours of cook time is probably more than you’d generally want to spend on a sandwich that’s kind of ordinary the way this one is, but if you compare that to a 10 hour round trip and a weekend spent visiting with family, drinking cheap beer, and eating fried cheese and carnie food, well… I’ll see you in Quincy, I guess!