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Thank you, a thousand times!! But I know there’s a big, bologna a.k.a. baloney sandwich in town.

How would I not know? I’m the Queen of Baloney Sandwiches.’ I was crowned many years ago in a ceremony at Canyon Village at Yellowstone National Park. 

I was a pantry girl but I also worked in the employees’ cafeteria when I wasn’t bathing heads of lettuce in the kitchen sink and creating relish trays out of recycled vegetables.

Evidently, the Yellowstone Park Company chefs had never heard of fried pork chops and turnip greens. I survived on rolls, butter and green beans during the week and on chocolate milk on Sunday nights when we had “cold cuts.”

I’d never heard of such a thing as cold cuts. They looked like square pieces of uncooked meat with pimento and olives smashed into them. But there, among all those cold cuts, was one piece of meat that I recognized – baloney.

Forget the cold cuts. I decided to make me a baloney sandwich. But first I had to fry the baloney because I didn’t eat raw meat. So, I turned on the grill and fried a piece of baloney, crisp around the edges and a little burned in the middle. I put the piece of fried baloney between two pieces of bread that I had smeared with mayonnaise and mustard, added a slice of tomato, a leaf of lettuce and a few dill pickle slices and I was in hog heaven.

I noticed several noses sniffing. “What’s that?” the noses wanted to know.

Fried baloney. It’s a Southern thing.

Several hippies wanted to try a fried baloney sandwich. Soon lips were smacking. By the next Sunday night, nobody was eating cold cuts and I was sweating over the hot grill trying to keep up with the orders for fried baloney.

This went on for a couple of Sunday nights until French Chef Grum-pay noticed that the summer stock of baloney was almost gone. “Why! Why?!

Then, came the directive from the YP Company: The grill must be OFF on Sunday nights. That didn’t set well with all the college kids who had developed a taste for fried baloney sandwiches.

The hippies were experienced protesters so, they waved signs and banged their plastic glasses on the tables and the prissy pants from New England joined in and they all made a big fuss.

A few days later came another directive came: “Let the girl from Alabama fry baloney!”

I was crowned Queen of Fried Baloney. My crown was a colander with slices of baloney stuck on its feet and my scepter was a large turning fork. We sang “A hundred slices of baloney on the grill” and then we sat down to a Sunday cold cut night of fried baloney sandwiches.

Just wonder, why nobody told those new boloney folks, that the Queen of Baloney’s still in town.