Last weekend, I ordered the Summerfest-exclusive fried bologna sub sandwich from Cousins (located across from the Miller Lite Oasis, next to the playground.) 

Kristen Tracy, PR manager for Cousins, confirmed the sub was a limited-time, Summerfest-only delicacy. "You cannot find the fried bologna sub at any other location," said Tracy.

Translation: There are exactly three days left to try this. 

The sub features fried Usinger’s bologna, bacon, American cheese, onion, pickle, mayonnaise and mustard piled on Cousin’s Italian bread. It was everything I wanted it to be, and with each bite, another forgotten memory of my youth resurfaced.

Jenny and I must have fried up 1,000,000,000 slices of Oscar Mayer bologna during our childhood. Like many kids coming of age in the 80s and 90s, we were “latchkey kids” who let ourselves into the family home after school and basically watched TV and snacked until our parents returned from work. 

The snack options were limited, mostly because neither of us had any interest in cooking. But we were very interested in eating. So we fixed ourselves huge bowls of Life cereal and experimented with the then-novelty microwave oven, learning the hard way that you can’t leave the fork in the bowl when zapping leftover spaghetti. 

Our favorite after-school snack was fried bologna. And our 9-to-5 mom made sure it was always in stock, on the refrigerator shelf next to the rectangle box of Velveeta and the Miracle Whip.  

But we didn't need other condiments to enjoy our sizzled mystery meat. This sh-t was gold right out of the non-stick pan. Years later, we’d find out that the coated-in-poison pan might cause cancer, but back then, we were healthy as unicorns, straight outta social studies and ready to enjoy our two-hours of freedom from adults on any given weekday afternoon.

When fried, bologna becomes puffier, saltier and crispier on the edges. It shrinks and puckers up. In retrospect, it looks kind of like a diaphragm or a shallow Diva Cup, neither of which I was aware of when I was 10 and just trying to saute a slice before Gilligan’s Island resumed.

The thing about fried bologna is that it transforms a crappy cold cut into an appealing appetizer deserving of a French name. Cold bologna is garbage, but once seared, it morphs into spectacular cuisine. (Cuisine spectaculaire!)

Recently I asked my mom how Jenny and I learned to make it. I have no memory of her – or my dad or my grandma – teaching us the particulars of fixing fried bologna.

"I dunno," she said. "I think you learned it from a neighbor?"

Maybe the Fried Bologna Craze that took place during the final quarter of the 20th Century was a collective wave of culinary consciousness that wafted over young Gen Xers. I like to think that maybe if we knew that we were all frying bologna at the same time in brown-and-orange kitchens from coast to coast we would have been spared some of the angst and ennui we were destined for. But probably not.