The great Minnesota potato salad schism

Cook your burgers in the air-fryer, they say. Skip the grill. But, you respond, what of those guarantees of flame-broiled flavor, the grill strips? Here's a Sharpie. Draw them on if it'll help.

My burgers are the best in the land, thanks to a tip passed on by my friend, the Giant Swede: Fry up some applewood-smoked bacon, then add the drippings to the ground beef. The results are fantastic, but I feel as if I shouldn't put this in the paper without a link to a 15% off coupon at Stents 'R' Us.

Which leads us to brats. That was Sunday supper, because it is summer and we are in the Midwest. I wondered: Could I air-fry them? Nay, nay. Grill you must. The flames must torment the brat, the seams must burst and hiss out a juice-jet that makes the flame rise with sudden rage, so the brat comes out perfect, i.e., a tube of minced-spiced pig parts with a charcoal jacket.

But maybe not? I turned to Google; sure enough, the air-fryer propaganda websites insisted that brats would be done to perfection.

While I was at the store picking up some fresh ones, I figured that I might as well get some potato salad. Asked for a pint at the deli counter, and the eager clerk said, "Sure!" And then:

"Lunds or Byerly's?"

I froze. I felt revealed as an outsider. I have been here for 47 years, but I did not know the difference. Of course I remember the old days when Lunds was Lunds and Byerly's was Byerly's and never the twain shall meet, but I thought all was settled when the warring houses merged after the exhausting War of Suburban Succession. As the brands cohered, you would expect the potato salad recipes to consolidate.

"Lunds," I said, with studied nonchalance. Perhaps I should have gone on the offensive and added a note of honor offended: "What do you take me for? It should be obvious, sirrah. Half a pint and be quick about it."

The very existence of a potato-salad schism suggests deep and irreconcilable factions within the organization, does it not? Stalwarts and patriots devoted to the old ways, secret hand signals flashed in the hallway, meetings in dimly lit rooms. People who never accepted the entente, and rally around the flag of the true potato salad.

I wondered if my choice exposed me as a sympathizer, and I would get private messages on my grocery store app: "The tuber sprouts at midnight. The mayo has two uncles."

I noticed that the Lunds potato salad was on sale, but the Byerly's was not. Somehow this seemed apt. The latter was always a few degrees more hoity and/or toity. In the old days, middle-class people would say, "They must be doing well, they buy their milk at Lunds now." And rich people would whisper, "They must be struggling, they buy their milk at Lunds now."

It was tempting to buy some Byerly's, as well, and say, "Great Uncle Cornelius is coming over, and he simply demands it with his oysters. Wipes his chin with railroad stock certificates, he does." That might shut up any snooty ladies observing the exchange through their pince-nez, waiting on their ambergris pâté.