Garbage and Glory From Rochester to Cairo
A tale of two kosharys
The flashing signs warning us of high winds along the I-90 toward Rochester far outnumber the mile markers. As we rumble to a stop in the desolate parking lot of a lonely Dunkin’ Donuts, the promised gale pounces with ineffable, casual fierceness. It is not the first time I try to voice my reluctance to join this bizarre, frigid caravan, but the wind swallows my words almost as soon as I open my mouth. Thwarted and freezing, I realize the futility of any attempt to resist this particular journey. All of us have come too far to quit, so I resign myself to the pilgrimage and bow my head against the wind.
Two of my companions, both natives of Rochester, grumble about the cold. Their frustration is only quotidian, a grumpy acceptance characteristic of people who have spent their lives accompanied by overcast and subfreezing temperatures. The weather is a nuisance, perhaps, but a friendly one, part and parcel of home. Coffee in hand, we shuffle back to the car and get on our way, passing acres of virgin forest, one-stoplight hamlets, and outlet malls.
There is little to note in the soft, backlit winter landscape here. Even the sky, after months of unceasing snow, seems tired. The air howls and howls. It threatens to push the car off the road more than once, but the New Yorkers in our group are fearless in their driving and unwavering in their commitment to our goal.
“We will not stop,” they promised me, “until we find garbage plates.”
Several hours later, faces numb and fingers white from clutching our seats and the steering wheel, we settle in a greasy corner store that looks unassuming and feels like Eden — quiet, windless, and an upstate New York kind of promising.
If you haven’t heard of a garbage plate, a field trip to Rochester is in order. The garbage plate is perhaps the most quintessentially American culinary masterpiece I have yet encountered. Actual garbage is mercifully absent, but junk food abounds. It starts with styrofoam and carbs — as all good food rightfully should — and my local guides advise me that my choice of garbage base will be a deciding factor in the positivity of my first garbage plate experience.
From a list of more than 10 types of variously fried, battered, steamed, and scooped starches from tater tots to pasta, I choose macaroni salad and fries as a starting point. The cooks then lop a heaping pile of baked beans atop them; styrofoam creaks, but I trust that these are practiced platterers, and that it will not break. After the beans, they throw on a hamburger patty, cheese, a pizza log, something called “country sweet,” and then ask me if I “want meat hot with that.”
Clearly, I am out of my depth. My plate is piled with meat already. There’s both a burger patty and a pizza log on here. I decline. The man at the register assures me that it’s fine, that no “meat hot” is necessary, and that “country sweet” pairs excellently with pizza logs.
My Rochesterian friends, on the other hand, are appalled at this oversight. When I sit down at the table, garbage plate in hand, the first thing they ask me is where my meat hot is.
“This is meat hot,” I reply. “This is pepperoni and hamburger patty. Both hot. Both meat.”
They are having none of this. In mock indignation, one of them stands, exchanges a few words of this strange upstate jargon with the cashier, and returns with a small cup of what looks like liquefied hamburger meat.
“No,” she clarifies, pushing it my way. “This is meat hot.” Dutifully, I pour it out onto my garbage plate, now truly struggling to bear its own weight.
Eating a garbage plate is almost as singular an experience as watching one come together. Everything falls together in a bizarre, harmonious culinary chaos that defies description. The baked beans bleed into the macaroni salad just enough to remind you that you have long since abandoned all notions of where food belongs on a plate in your odd quest to consume all the garbage in all its possible combinations. The meat hot is, in fact, distinct from the hamburger meat. It tastes like nothing else on this earth, like a glorious abomination that shouldn’t mix well with a pizza log, but somehow does anyway.
The garbage plate is a culinary refusal. It is an act of defiance. It dares the consumer to impose an outdated system of propriety upon a dish so beloved that it has outgrown and outmatched all attempts to restrain it.
It is so culturally rooted in this corner of the world — a physical, touchable, palatable intersection of all things quintessentially American — that when I gaze upon the masterpiece before me, I am shocked by the wave of deja vu that strikes me immediately. Here, on this simple plate, is everything together that should not go together. Here is everything our culture has neatly portioned into more convenient, attractive boxes. In a way, I can understand what we’ve done. A hamburger is definitely easier to eat when it’s not spread across a macaroni salad.
But when I look up from my plate to the window, I can almost feel the wind quiet and watch the storefronts dissolve into the dust-colored high rises of Chambellion Street, half a world away in the labyrinthine heart of downtown Cairo.
The distance between New York and Egypt closes in an instant, because I realize that I am staring at the same sort of food that confused and delighted me for the first time when I tasted koshary, the national dish of Egypt. The garbage plate is koshary transplanted. Both are too much to comfortably consume in one sitting, and both deny convention the right to pigeonhole them. They are cheap and weird and ugly plates full of things that don’t belong together.
In koshary, rice takes the place of macaroni salad at the base of the plate, which is then inundated with pasta, lentils, chickpeas, spicy tomato sauce, fried onion, and the Egyptian equivalent of “meat hot,” called do’a. The mystery topping is the love child of vinegar and red pepper, just as confusing to the unfamiliar traveler as its sister sauce in Rochester.
I really didn’t want to like koshary. Pasta and rice in the same dish was too much, the hot air of the cramped restaurant was too much, and the fried onions on top of it all were still not enough to distract from the lentils and chickpeas that populated the plate just below them.
In spite of it all, I finished the whole bowl. With one bite, it became clear why koshary was so loved. A nation adored it because it simply refused to take “no” for an answer, because it decided that everything belonged. It filled and fed and tasted better than the sum of its parts.
Koshary is an oddity, and it still isn’t my favorite food of all time. But it represents an unshakeable cultural ingenuity and national bravery I cannot help but admire. When history gives you war, when it gives you poverty, when it makes convention seem like a pointless illusion, you push back. You give history koshary.
When I return from my meditation to the cold and the insistent howls of the gale outside, gazing at the small miracle that is the garbage plate, I see that same spirit living in our frostbitten caravan. There is an unmistakable genius in this calculated insanity, this deliberate appeal to human ingenuity, this symbol of a culture that will not allow itself the defeat of caving to acceptability.
Despite my insistence when entering the restaurant that there was simply no way I could eat a garbage plate, I finish the entire thing. Granted, I chose the smallest possible size. My attempt is laughable by my friends’ standards, but to my mind, it still warrants pride. After all, this culture is new to me. I am still more beholden to beauty and to neat, tidy things than the garbage plate would like me to be. But I am learning.
And next time, I won’t forget to ask for extra meat hot.
