The movie theater popcorn butter burger

my regrettable ode to wisconsin

Greetings, clowns!

I’m glad you guys had fun with last week’s edition of the newsletter. I still have that stinky Malört in a jar in the fridge, and I’m a bit worried about how long I can contain its sheer power. My friend John Carruthers (with whom I’m throwing a charity pop-up with next Thursday) said, upon learning what I did, “I bet this is how Oppenheimer felt.”

[By the way, if you’re in Chicago, you can get a ticket to the pop-up here. It’s likely I’ll be too busy preparing for it to post a new edition of the newsletter next week.]

Today’s version of Food is Stupid involves a signature food from our northern neighbor, Wisconsin. As many of you already know, Davida grew up in Wisconsin, and we visit regularly to see her family. That means I have learned to partake in many of the delicacies the Badger State has to offer.

Wisconsinites tend to be very nice people, but beneath the surface, they have a dark secret. You see, they sometimes eat their burgers much differently than the rest of the country. While we consider standard burger condiments to include things such as mayo, mustard, ketchup and the like, many Wisconsin natives add an additional ingredient that many of us do not: buttloads of butter.

And guess what? It’s a spectacular practice. This is almost more French than French food is. The result is burgers just dripping in butterfat, inevitably greasy chins, and the eventual dismay at how much butter you potentially just ate (Was it a half-stick? A whole stick?).

There aren’t any other foods I can think of that we dress with unbelievable amounts of butter like that, save for one, and that’s movie theater popcorn. But this butter is slightly different, because it does not come from the teats of a cow, but rather the nuts of a tree. That’s because movie theater popcorn butter is usually made of butter-flavored coconut oil.

Cross-ethnic fusion cuisine is so yesterday. Who said we can’t inbreed American food instead? Who was going to stop me, Dannis Ree, the greatest food writer in all of history, from making a movie theater popcorn butter burger? At the goddamn movie theater?

And as you know, sneaking food into places I shouldn’t is one of my main passions in life.