1943: ADAM OF THE ROAD by Elizabeth Gray Vining
After a May as gray and cold as December, June came in, that year of 1294, sunny and warm and full of birds and blossoms and all the other happy things the songs praise May for.
I'm happy to report that Adam Of The Road is fine. It’s historical fiction about a kid in the medieval era, a genre that I feel like I’ve already read eight times for this project. This one is fine. Adam is the son of an accomplished troubadour who dreams of becoming a troubadour himself and riding the road, going from town to town, endearing himself to everyone from the king and his entourage to the patrons of the local tavern. He gets to try out his dream when his father takes him on the road for his next journey, but through a series of things going haywire, Adam ends up separated from his father (and his dog) and left to wander the road on his own, using his wits and his musical gifts to keep himself afloat and find his father again. Again, it’s fine.
Where Adam Of The Road is most effective is as a window to everything that was happening on “the road” in the late 1200s. It is pretty cool to learn about the kind of songs that these troubadours would perform, and how they would tailor their performances for different audiences, and how people traveled in thirteenth-century England, where they stayed, what they had to bring with them, how they had to communicate by basically passing oral messages along at every stop and kind of hoping they got to the right people in time with minimal distortion. And it was interesting to see what else people did for entertainment in this era, as in the scene where Adam goes to see a miracle play.
Miracle plays were public re-enactments of popular Bible stories, often produced by and performed in local churches. They started as static tableaus of these stories as part of church services and grew over time into the most prominent dramatic art of this era. And the reason that miracle plays even existed in the first place was pretty direct: the Catholic church was at the center of most of medieval European society, and took its responsibility to educate the faithful very seriously, but most of the faithful couldn’t read or write. So how do you teach people who can’t read or write? You sing songs, you tell the stories out loud, and you get a bunch of people to act everything out to get an audience to show up.
This was an innovation in religious education that has endured for centuries. The descendants of the miracle play are still around today, although they’re certainly evolved. The Ten Commandments and similar biblical epics are distant descendants of the miracle play tradition; there are obvious commercial motives for making movies like that, but they’re still based on the fundamental idea of getting people to act out stories from the Bible and trying to reach as large an audience as possible with a different and more engaging format for the story, ultimately reaching a larger audience than would have just read the story in the Bible itself. Jesus Christ Superstar is a variation on this theme. The Life Of Brian is a parody of it. The final form of this theme, of course, came last year when a Texas megachurch put on a Jesus-y version of Hamilton and got a cease and desist letter from Lin-Manuel Miranda. It is difficult to imagine any other innovations in catechesis that have lasted and endured through so many centuries and so many transformations; nobody in Christianity has come up with “the next miracle play”, save for one attempt, which resulted in the Great Hamburger Heresy of 2013.
Okay, so here’s some background information to get started: there is a restaurant in Chicago called Kuma’s, which is a heavy-metal-themed place that makes rococo heavy-metal-themed burgers, with each burger named after and loosely thematically connected to a metal band. I used to live near one of their locations at 666 West Diversey1, and can attest that the music was very loud there but the burgers are outstanding. My personal favorite is the Sourvein: raspberry aioli, 10oz beef patty, applewood smoked bacon, deep fried blackened chicken tenders, cheddar cheese, belgian waffle strips and maple syrup, named after the nineties North Carolina sludge band:
That is, unless I’m at Kuma’s in November, in which have to get the seasonal favorite, the November-only Thanksgiving-themed Sleep burger: turkey patty, tempura fried stuffing patty, turkey gravy, fried sage, and cranberry sauce, named after the San Jose doom metal group:
Yes, whether your taste is more Led Zeppelin (applewood smoked bacon, beef patty, BBQ pulled pork, cheddar, pickles), or Deafheaven (beef patty, honey glazed brussel sprouts, braised pork shoulder or pulled jackfruit, apple cider and orange gravy, frizzled butternut squash, parsley), there’s something for you at Kuma’s; I understand they’ll even substitute plant-based patties on request now.
Here’s the other piece of background information you need for this story: there is a Swedish metal band called Ghost. They’re still making music today. This is Ghost:
Ghost, as you might be able to tell from the photo, is very into their stage presence and image. Frontman Tobias Forge has performed as the lead singer under various demonic-looking “Papa Emeritus” characters - he is currently on Papa Emeritus IV, with the previous incarnations having been killed off and replaced in the band’s mythology - dressed in dark papal vestments and singing about the devil and whatnot. Ghost also has an apparent love for the city of Chicago; Papa Emeritus IV even threw out the first pitch at a White Sox game last year:
So maybe you’re starting to see where this is going: Kuma’s created a limited-edition Ghost burger for their menu in October 2013. Pretzel bun, beef patty, braised goat shoulder, ghost pepper aioli, aged white cheddar cheese, and a red wine reduction sauce. Here it is below:
Oh, one other thing you probably noticed in the photos: the garnish for the burger is a Communion wafer. This is not a consecrated Communion wafer; a priest did not transubstantiate the body of Christ and then hand it off to the heavy metal burger place on Belmont. It’s a wafer, the kind that anyone can buy in bulk if they just go to the Priest Store; Saoirse Ronan ate them by the handful in Lady Bird. Putting it on a burger is irreverent, but not literal desecration, and it’s no more irreverent than being in a heavy metal band and wearing a pope hat, which would not lead to anybody thinking that you were the actual pope.
The Ghost Burger was hailed by Time magazine as the sixteenth most influential burger of all time (okay?) and made headlines nationally, for that dang wafer. Here’s an all-time lede from CBS News in 2013:
“Kuma's Corner at 2900 West Belmont seems to enjoy being irreverent. It's a heavy-metal themed place which on its Facebook page, calls itself "purveyors of bovine genocide." But some are angry over its new Ghost Burger, a 10-ounce patty of goat and beef meat garnished with an unconsecrated communion wafer.”
Here’s another good one from Thrillist:
“Those familiar with Kuma’s and Kuma’s Too (recently opened, of course, at 666 W Diversey) already know the restaurant’s ever-flowing stream of metal, artwork of nuns shooting heroin, and legendary protein-packed burgers are not for the faint of heart. Yet now, owner Luke Tobias (who put out an Impaled Nazarene burger two years ago without hearing so much as a “harrumph”) has had Catholic charities refusing a $1,500 donation and has been flooded with interview requests over the controversy.”
Thrillist also includes a helpful Q&A on whether you should eat the Ghost Burger (“You look at the Hamburger Helper mascot and see an idle-handed minion of Satan? Don’t eat the Ghost Burger.”), and hinted at the controversy that erupted in Chicago’s religious-themed protein-sandwich community in the early 2010s. Chicago’s own WGN was quick to point out that “Customers can order The Ghost with no wafers or extra ones”, but that didn’t change the anger that some of the city’s Catholics felt at a burger that appeared to mock the Eucharist at the center of their sacramental worldview2. Kuma’s Luke Tobias said he understood why people were upset, but he wasn’t planning on changing his thirty-day burger promotion for “a small nine-table restaurant in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago…In the past we have done a number of burgers dealing with this same exact topic to very little fanfare. Never in the spirit of offending anyone, and always in the mindset of praising a band for the work that they do.” And I’m not an expert on Catholicism, but I do feel that the October-only menu at one burger restaurant is probably not the top priority of most of the faithful. As a gesture of good faith and “as we understand that they share our mentality of serving anyone in need from any walk of life”, Kuma’s donated $1,500 to Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Chicago, and that was the end of it.
Just kidding, it wasn’t the end of it at all, because Catholic Charities refused the donation. Refused it! Money that was supposed to help people! The Catholic church, which famously does not have a ton of money lying around anymore, said “we don’t want the donation” to the restaurant because of the Ghost Burger! As a spokesperson for Catholic Charities put it, “The Eucharist is a central part of the Catholic faith and we strongly urge Kuma's Corner to discontinue selling a burger that disrespects that faith and the faith of all Christians.” This strikes me as being dumb as hell3, and it led to this bizarrely smug story in, of all places, Restaurant Hospitality magazine, which led with the headline “Kuma’s Corner commits burger blasphemy”:
“It’s OK when a restaurant promotion is a little edgy, but you have to know where the edge actually is and be careful not to go over it. That’s the lesson Chicago burger restaurant Kuma’s Corner is learning after it chose to garnish its October burger-of-the-month special with a communion wafer. It’s a move that is generating the kind of negative feedback—not all of it from Catholics—that no restaurant would want.”
Restaurant Hospitality closed their piece with “Kuma’s Corner had a solid business prior to this flap, and operates a second location in Chicago. It’s going to be interesting to see what effect the Ghost burger controversy has. But we’re betting November’s special burger at Kuma’s is going to be a lot less likely to cause controversy than this one has turned out to be.” Yes, shame on Kuma’s for doing this, I certainly hope they’ve learned their lesson lest they torpedo their business!
Anyways, the Ghost Burger has returned to Kuma’s at least twice, with one resurrection in April 2019, and a second coming in February of last year. Ghost played The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the most Catholic of the network talk shows, and they got nominated for Grammys, and also for Grammis, which are, apparently, what the Grammys are called in Sweden. The Catholic church is also still around, I guess, but they’ve been having some problems that have nothing to do with the kind of hamburgers you can eat. The miracle play has endured. Ghost, Kuma’s, and the Ghost Burger have endured. The Catholic church has endured, but just barely and is constantly on the brink of collapse. As for Adam Of The Road, as I stated at the top, it’s fine.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1968 medalist, From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg.
This location has since closed, which is fine because the assholes in Lincoln Park don’t deserve a Kuma's, and there are other Kuma’ses elsewhere in the city, it’s just that none of them have an address that is nearly as awesome.
I should also note that multiple news outlets referred to the burger as containing a 10oz patty that was a blend of ground beef and goat meat, which is incorrect. Kuma’s burgers start with the 10oz beef patty and then pile the additional meat on top of it. The goat shoulder was incremental meat.
Zing!