Holiday Shopping Memories
Elegant department store dining rooms are history
Thanksgiving leftovers are still on the menu at our house, since we cooked a 22-pound turkey for six and a half people. We have done them in sequence—straight up, just like Thanksgiving dinner again: then hot turkey sandwiches, a vat of turkey-and-vegetable soup with noodles, and Turkey Pot Pie. Last night, aiming for a different flavor profile, I remembered our former neighbor Chuck Fisher’s Marshall Fields Special Turkey Sandwich, which Chuck and his wife Jenny made for us one year. It was a welcome change.
Chuck currently lives in Siletz, Oregon, so we haven’t seen him in years, but he's still part of our holiday tradition. He and Jenny make the best old-fashioned caramels and sea foam candy and send us a box wherever we are. This holiday traditionalist honors the past and remembers trips to the Midwest department store in Chicago. “We went to Marshall Fields to shop for Christmas presents, and my father would buy each of us one nice hand-blown ornament every year while I was growing up in Ann Arbor. (I now have all of them that have lasted through the years.) And we always had lunch at the restaurant on the top floor,” Fisher recalled.
I never went to Marshall Fields, but I can relate to the fine-dining department store lunch concept since I worked around the corner from Wanamaker’s when I was a teenager in downtown Philly.
In the mid-twentieth century, the day after Thanksgiving marked the official start of the holiday shopping season. Retailers, who often operated in the “red” or at a loss for much of the year, looked forward to the shopping frenzy to put them in the “black,” meaning making a profit. In the 1950s, the Philadelphia police coined the term “Black Friday” because that day was so busy with shoppers, tourists, and suburban traffic before the annual Army-Navy football game on Saturday at Municipal Field in South Philly. Scores of shoppers flooded the downtown, and Wanamaker’s department store, with the world’s largest organ and the magnificent Crystal Tea Room, was Ground Zero for the chaos.
Nowadays, Black Friday has morphed into a week-long call to arms for shoppers. But much of that shopping is done online, without the immersive experience. Holiday shopping was hands-on in those days. And all the shopping and bargain-hunting worked up an appetite. At Marshall Fields, their signature sandwich was what Chuck Fisher recalls from his childhood, and he continues to celebrate the tradition. And has gotten me hooked on it as well. We can make the salad sandwich on our own and reminisce—as we shop with our fingers on a keyboard or call an old friend for a holiday catch-up.
The iconic Marshall Fields Special Turkey Sandwich is beloved enough to have its own FaceBook following. It’s so popular that you can even find detractors who badmouth the dish. That is the price of fame. Try it and see what you think.
Here is the recipe that I used, based on one from Food.com—and Chuck’s advice.
