Back in the summer of 2018, I treated myself to lunch from McDonald’s, and with my change, the cashier handed me this golden coin:

The Big Mac was 50 years old?  Had it really been 50 years of those two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions, on a sesame seed bun?  What’s even more incredible to me is that only 1 out of 5 millennials have tasted a Big Mac.  Silly millennials.

I worked at McDonald’s when I was in high school.  It was exciting to get a McDonald’s franchise in our town (prior to that it was Hardee’s or nothing), and I was thrilled to have my first real non-babysitting job.  That excitement did not last much beyond my first week of work.  The manager — his name was Harry or Henry — was a little twit of a man, not many years older than me, with a stupid little black mustache, who clearly favored other teen employees over me.

I liked my job, even though I was not one of the cool kids.  (Yes, there was a clique among the teens working at McDonald’s — because in case you haven’t figured it out yet, middle school is never really over).  I learned that food had to be thrown out after sitting around for 30 minutes, and we were never ever to talk to union organizers.  Some nights I worked the shake station, and I’d go home polka-dotted with milkshake splatters.  Sometimes I assembled sandwiches, squirting special sauce out of something that looked like a caulking gun.  The job I liked the least was keeping the dining area and rest rooms clean — which Harry/Henry seemed to delight in assigning to me, not being one of the cool kids. But no matter which station I worked, my dog was happy to greet/hump me when I got home with my $1.25 worth of food in hand — our meal allowance that we could take at the end of our shift.

One day, Harry/Henry called me into his closet of an office.  He sat there in his yellow short-sleeved shirt and brown polyester slacks in his vinyl-covered wheel-a-throne, and informed me that I was being fired because I wasn’t “a McDonald’s person.”  Although he didn’t elaborate, he assured me that they had other employees who, despite not being McDonald’s people, had gone on to successful careers at Jack in the Box.  (Come to think of it, that might have been what I was told when I was laid off from my first law job at the Manhattan law firm.)  Although it was humiliating at the time, it prepared me for many more “you’re not a [fill in the blank] person” conversations in the years ahead.

I tried to find out what happened to Harry/Henry, but not surprisingly, my Google search for “Harry or Henry who was a manager at McDonald’s on Long Island in the 70s,” was not fruitful.

I harbor no ill will towards McDonald’s.  In fact, I still love a Big Mac once in a while.  According to my research, in 1967, a man running a McDonald’s franchise named Jim Delligatti was frustrated.  His customers at his Pittsburgh franchise were primarily steel workers with big appetites, but all he had to offer them was a regular cheeseburger.  He experimented in the kitchen, and came up with what is now known as the Big Mac.  He placed a center bun, known as the “club bun” between the patties to stabilize the sandwich.  (Ironically, the first thing I do when I get a Big Mac is remove the center bun, stability be damned.)  But what really made the sandwich unique was the “special sauce” he created.  With Ray Kroc’s blessing, the Big Mac was introduced systemwide in 1968.  Today, Americans consume 550 million Big Macs a year.

I found a few copycat recipes for Special Sauce on the interwebs, but none of them sounded right, and were really little more than thousand island dressing.  Then I found this recipe for Special Sauce, which is purportedly from the McDonald’s Manager’s Handbook published in 1969 (which presumably also informs managers how to terminate employees that are “not McDonald’s people”), to be used in the event of an emergency if a store ran out of the pre-made sauce (gasp!).  More out of curiosity than anything else, I prepared a batch of the McDonald’s Manager’s Handbook Special Sauce.

The ingredients include a parade of horribles, things I would normally never have in my refrigerator — Miracle Whip, bottled French salad dressing, sweet pickle relish:

I tried ordering a Big Mac with the special sauce on the side so that I could do a side-by-side comparison, but the cashier would not oblige me.  (I think maybe my face is on a “not a McDonald’s person” poster hanging in the break room.) So I scraped off what I could, and here’s the side-by-side:

Copycat on the left, real stuff on the right

I’m not sure if the real stuff has that much more relish than the copycat, or if that is just what I was able to scrape off. And?  Yeah, it’s on point– a little more orange than the OG, perhaps, but the taste was pretty darn close.  Even if you’re not a McDonald’s person, this is still awesome sauce.