There are only two truly unique Chicago signatures. One is the most wonderfully variegated skyline in the world and other is the Chicago hot dog, specifically the PolishWith-Everything, robust, challenging, and possibly a balanced meal .

A Chicago POLISH-WITH-EVERYTHING is grilled, not boiled. It is eaten with relish; and mustard and onions and kosher dill pickles and Jalapeno peppers and tomatoes; and, sometimes, ketchup and celery salt.

POLISH-WITH-EVERYTHING is not just a summer dish. It is eaten year-round, even in Chicagoís bitter winter. With the eater's feet in the snow, it quickly warms the upper body, and, with additional Jalapenos it will also do the feet.

A perfect POLISH-WITH-EVERYTHING in a large bun held with the crack open to the sky must almost, but not quite, hold everything.

For the first bite Chicagoans with a normal sized mouths keep the bun upright while turning their heads sideways to get the bite in their mouths without everything falling on the sidewalk. This ungraceful, sideways maneuver may put a little mustard and relish on the face, and maybe the shirt, but prevents a greater amount from being lost on the sidewalk.

Wrapping a paper napkin around a Polish before the initial bite can help hold it all together but is visuallly detrimental. A perfect POLISH-WITH-EVERYTHING is not only a beautiful thing to eat it is also a beautiful thing to see. The experience is similar to that of first setting your eyes on a great banquet. Before the first bite there are golden visual moments of heightened anticipation and unspoiled salivation These are lost if the feast is hidden by paper napkin. (Also, pieces of the napkin could, later, wind up in your mouth ) No, the better way, the recommended way, is naked, sideways, and head on.

At the moment when your top row of teeth come down and split that first little Mexican pepper an excitement starts in your gums and the Jalapena heat tingles downward to your epiglottis–and then up your nose like lightning.

Almost simultaneously the sensation is framed in the mouth by slices of summer tomato and the toothís quick cleaving of the crisp cool sour of the pickle ( as in piccolo) to create a lovely counterpoint relief to the heat of the Jalapenos.

The sweet acedic fumes of the kosher dill will have, by now, followed the Jalapenos up the nose and layed their cool hands on your Jalapeno fevered nasal membranes.

A slight Jalapeno buzz is causing some areas of your skin to flush and a light perspiration to trickle across your scalp and armpits.

Seconds later the bases thunder in as your molars cleave and squash into the juicy garlicky sausage. The Polishís sausageís flavor quickly dominates and spreads but it does not obscure the rest of the orchestra Its flavor, centered on the sides of your tongue, start to form, coupled with the tiny shards of onion, a magnificent chord.

Meanwhile fragments of Rosen bun, more or less in each cheek are providing a gentle background melody. On the underside of your tongue quiet strains of Guldens yellow mustard are weaving a tart counterpoint.

By now the tomato has played its fleeting but special role and has become only a persistant memory.

Fragmentary strains of peppers and pickles resurface sharply then become a refrain on your taste buds even as the main mouthful of the full POLISH-WITH-EVERYTHING orchestra starts to come together, building steadily towards a great POLISH-WITH-EVERYTHING crescendo.

Then, as though in the hands of a crazed conductor or a mad painter throwing everything onto his canvas, it is all mashed and mauled to that grand finale, a great variegated, universal, mouthful of POLISH-WITH-EVERYTHING mish-mash. An orgiastic climax that can cause goose flesh on the arms and perspiration anywhere on the body.

. Finally, down the gullet goes the glorious mix. At this point the stomach seems to have developed taste buds of its own and sends warm messages of thanks, well being, and requests for more, from the middle of the gut, tingling up the spinal column, to the brain.

Another bite and the whole theme, with variations, is replayed- and over and over again until even the tail end of the bun holding the last of the everything is gone.

A requiem of cold beer is then allowed to bubble and sizzle slowly over the tongue; slide, almost painfully, down the overheated throat, to find a contented warm home, mid-belly, with the whole polish orchestra.