A trek along Cermak Road-the Czechoslovakian “Main Line”-through west suburban Berwyn and Cicero is a memorably tasty trip back in time, using food as its vehicle.
This wide thoroughfare, for generations a home to immigrant Czechoslovakian and Bohemian food merchants, still supports a handful of storefront bakeries and butcher shops that stand as tenacious testaments to a long road traversed by many. Now, they endure as the ethnic heart of the Czech community in the Chicago area.
For those with Czech backgrounds, food is more than sustenance. It is life, home, family, culture and a proud heritage all rolled into a flaky, fruit-filled kolachy or a slice of buttery raisin-studded houska bread or a plump link of jaternice sausage. These beloved foods are not just revived for holidays and special occasions: For many, they’re an intregral part of daily life.
In a Chicago Tribune Magazine story written 22 years ago about Vesecky’s Bakery, one of the stalwarts of the strip, Norbert Blei wrote that “among other things, Bohemians find joy in beer, weddings and bakeries.”
Butcher shops-vendors of the myriad sausages that add brawn and heft to Czech menus-should be added to that list. For us, the joy of discovery, coupled with a hearty appetite, prompted a stroll along the storefronts of Cermak Road between Central and Harlem Avenues.
Just a step inside Fingerhut or Vesecky’s bakeries, Quality Meats or Jim’s (which is several blocks off Cermak but worth the detour) asks you to travel to a time long past made vivid by loaves of rye, coils of cream sausage and sweet, stern faces of the counter help. That past melds into the present, connected by the heady aroma of sweet rolls or the pungent mix of garlic and spices. It is a journey made by many during occasional return trips to the old neighborhood from far suburbs or retirement homes.
Now gentrified by a recent influx of Hispanic and Italian businesses, Cermak Road still has about half a dozen thriving Czech bakeries and butcher shops. Some people have their favorites and are unfailingly loyal. Others patronize them all. We dropped into mom-and-pop businesses, two bakeries and two butcher shops, to sample a slice of Czech life and its fine feasts.
Vesecky’s Bakery
Crowds at Vesecky’s Bakery, 6634 W. Cermak Rd., Berwyn, are legendary. Traffic and customers who overflow onto the sidewalk point to what many say is the best old-style Czech bakery, bar none.
On a recent Friday, mid-morning, the ticket dispenser was spewing out numbers 20 counts behind those being served. The regulars take it in stride, one even commenting that “the crowd isn’t so big today. Wait until Saturday. There’ll be 50 ahead of you, not 20.” Coveting them like badges of honor and swapping them like war stories, customers love to match tales of their longest waits.
“Three hours, once. Yep, it was right before Easter,” recalls one customer who tells of a 30-year relationship with Vesecky’s. “But what are you going to do? You can’t go home empty-handed.”
Conventional wisdom about the convenience of supermarkets or cutting back on sweets gets chewed to shreds here. The case is crammed with sweets that stand poised to that test the will of weak and strong. Apple turnovers twice as large as need be. Crumbly kuchens with jewel-toned fruit toppings. Almond crescents destined to dissolve into a pile of flaky crumbs when broken open. A turban-shape cake called king’s crown, twice blessed, first with fruit topping then white icing.
A cheerful but efficient counter crew never appears to weary of answering questions, peeking through a tray to find the last hidden long john or loaf of potato rye or of tying up the white-wrapped bundles of baked goods.
James Vesecky Jr. is proprietor of the business started about 75 years ago by his grandfather, newly immigrated from Czechoslovakia. James Jr. still dons bakers’ garb and so, occasionally, does his father James Sr. This is, after all, a family business and two of James Jr.’s sons are ready to carry on for the next generation.
“The business is changing. So is the neighborhood,” James Jr. says. “There used to be a couple of Bohemian bakeries on every block out here but not any more. So many of my customers are senior citizens. When they move, I send to them by mail order. They have to have their houska. Where are they going to get it in Florida?”
For the time being, he says, this business makes him a happy man. “You see a good product come up, you’ve made it by hand and it’s so good that it will all be sold by the end of the day.”
Fingerhut Bakery
If Vesecky’s anchors the west end of the strip, Charles Fingerhut Bakery, 5537 W. Cermak Rd., Cicero, holds up the eastern reach. Here, 600 pounds of Babi’s rye are made daily; on Saturdays they bake twice that amount. Here, the kaleidoscopically loaves known as Rainbow bread were dreamed up, devised and still are made.
In 1894, Frank Naprstek, a Czechoslovakian tailor and baker, gathered his family and set out for Chicago. Naprstek (which means “thimble” in Czech and was changed in the U.S. to “finger hut”-a thimble for tailors) saved some space in the steamer trunks for his favorite recipes, including his grandmother’s rye bread. According to his great-grandson Herbert, the bread charted a new destiny.
One year later, Frank swapped his sewing machines for ovens and a life of rye. Three generations later, the tradition continues here and at a second Fingerhut in Brookfield.
“The philosophy we operate with always has been to make it the best you can and charge the right price-not too expensive,” says Herb Fingerhut, noting that it’s not within the nature of Czechs to tolerate overpriced bread. Obligingly, a one-pound loaf of homemade rye costs $1.50.
It works. Customers come back. From Barrington, Libertyville, Stickney, Orland Park-even Seattle. “If they’re just in town for a funeral or wedding, they try to stop in,” Fingerhut says.
Babi’s rye is one item on a roster of about 600. On any given day, there are about 250 kinds of baked goods to choose from, each skillfully made by one of the 17 full-time bakers. The obligatory houska is there: Fingerhut calls it one of the biggest sellers. Flaky, buttery kolachys are another favorite. But fruit streusels, rugalah (butter and cream cheese pastries filled with apricot preserved and walnuts), kugelhopf (a butter and sour cream cake baked in a fluted mold), poppy seed rings and babovka (Yeast dough filled with poppy seeds or almonds, baked in a Bundt pan and iced.) have their fans.
To accommodate the area’s changing landscape, Fingerhut added specialty cakes that veer from the ethnic nature of his business. The bakery’s windows are lined with white-iced cakes with piped-on curlicues and flourishes and perhaps a Barney, Bert or Ernie added to the top as well. But they bring new customers to the shop.
“Baking is a lost art and I’m afraid our traditions will die,” Fingerhut says. “And it’s a tough business. The hours. The constant demands for quality, which you just can’t slack up on. But I love it and it shows. I tell my customers never to trust a skinny baker. At least they can look at me and know I like to eat what I bake.”
Quality Meats
Chicago always has been a sausage-loving town, due in a large measure to the large pockets of Central and Eastern Europeans who settled here. The area’s appetite for weiners and wursts of all types has paved the way for sausagemaking giants to set up shop. Happily, the behemoths still leave enough room for Rose and Bruno Szczech of Quality Meat Market, 6239 W. Cermak Rd., Berwyn, to flourish.
This pristinely clean, old-time shop settled into Cermak Road under different owners in 1923; the Szczechs have owned it for 15 years. Rose speaks lovingly of her products, almost as though they were her children.
Buchta. Prasky. Jaternice. Jelita. Sulc. Foreign, tongue-tripping names to the uninitiated. To Rose, they’re all familiar and she’s anxious to make the proper introductions.
“I call that Bohemian pizza,” she says as she points to klobasy, also called cream sausage. Its shape inspires the nickname for the fresh sausage made from veal pork and cream or milk. Typically cyclindrical, klobasy is wrapped into a tight spiral about the diameter of a medium pizza. A wooden skewer bisects the circle to hold it in place.
“And those are Bohemian bananas,” she says, this time pointing out a tray of jelita that are the approximate size and shape of bananas, though the color is a deep burnished red. “But that sounds cheap so I call them Bohemian lobsters.”
If one dares to ask why, they’ll learn that the addition of blood to pork and barley sausage adds the rosy glow. Jaternice is similarly sized and shaped though it is made without barley or blood.
She and her husband make all of the sausage fresh. They hand-trim the meat, making sure there’s enough fat to ensure a flavorful sausage but not so much that it’s greasy. Then they season it. There are many “secret” blends that make each sausage distinct, but it’s not hard to guess that garlic is a favorite and ever-present taste. Its pungent aroma hovers all around. What Will Rogers reportedly once said of Gilroy, Calif., the garlic capital of the U.S., also is true of Quality Meats-that you could hang a steak out on a clothes line to marinate it.
“Bohemians are careful about how they spend their money-that’s why there are so many savings and loan associations on Cermak. So they expect a good product. If something is not good, they come right back and tell me,” Rose says. “They keep us on our toes.”
Jim’s Market
“You must make one stop that’s not on Cermak,” one shopkeeper advised. “It’s not far and you’ll be glad you found it.”
That was the advice that found us heading about six blocks north of Cermak to Jim’s Market, 1538 S. 61st. Ave, Cicero. James Ruda, the bearded proprietor of the family-owned establishment, tells of much longer journeys that customers make faithfully.
“We still have a lot of people who come right from the neighborhood, but more and more, they’re driving in from suburbs farther out. On weekends, they come from all over. Michigan, Wisconsin. Those who are too far to drive, we ship to overnight.”
The little corner shop is pristine, whether you stand in front of the meat cases or downstairs, where meat is carefully cut and sausage is made by hand. An old wood smoker, singed by decades of use, now is joined by a more efficient modern smoker.
Ruda’s father, a Czech immigrant, bought the shop from another butcher in 1952. “All the men in our family always have been either butchers or sausagemakers,” Jim Ruda says. “I started to learn the trade when I was 9.”
Back then, he carefully learned the all-important Bohemian specialties such as jaternice, jelita, buchta (veal loaf), prasky (smoked pork and beef garlic salami) and sulc (head meat flavored with vinegar and onion). Now, to keep pace with changing demographics, he has added to his roster several varieties of Italian sausage, German bratwurst, Polish sausage and Mexican chorizo. All have natural casings and are made from fresh meat, never frozen, Ruda explains.
“Our customers know a good product because many of them have made it themselves at one time or another.”
Ruda says that every year he sells more sausage than the year before. “There used to be another butcher shop on the same block. They were all over the place. Now, a lot of our competition has retired. Once we were just a neighborhood shop. Now, we’re a specialty store, a holdover from the old days.”
For many who shop in this area, the old days aren’t entirely gone. Memories of the old country and the new, of family and of their heritage are kept vibrant and alive. Vera Wilt, president of the Czechoslovak Society of America, suggests that food serves as one bridge to the past.
“When there’s a celebration or even if someone just drops in for a visit, piles of food come out. Food is love in this culture, really. It always has been.”
MAP: Berwyn and Cicero. Chicago Tribune map.
