Frusco’s Steaks was one of Philly’s only woman-owned cheesesteak shops. Here’s what she taught me about great steaks.

If you wanted a good cheesesteak in Philly in the early ‘90s, your options were limited to places with names like Pat’s or Bill’s or Jim’s. Imagination must skip a generation, or a few.

Among this crowded field of monosyllabic dudes and their small pool of quibbling suppliers stood all 5-foot-2 of Marlene Frusco. She had other names for those guys, most rhyming with brass or plastered. “You had to be tough with all of them,” Frusco, her age “forever 39,” said by phone last week.

The Northeast didn’t have many signature cheesesteak destinations until Steven Iliescu opened Steve’s Prince of Steaks in 1980, providing the Great Northeast with an alternative to haggardly chopped steaks and sad sliced cheese. Frusco opened her namesake shop about 15 years later, initially in Lawndale before settling down in Mayfair with her then-husband.

In the front window, neon-lit caricatures of a pig on a platter and an overstuffed sandwich beckoned hungry neighbors to come to the corner of Frankford Avenue and Wellington Street for roast pork sandwiches, hoagies, and steaks. Inside, people clustered around a picture window punched in the blue-and-white kitchen wall to watch as staff prepared food in plain sight.

Frusco and her husband divorced, and she found herself in singular company: running one of the only woman-owned steak shops in Philadelphia. “You don’t really think about it at the time,” she said. “I was just trying to survive.”

I worked at Frusco’s Steaks for about two years during college, packing orders, cooking steaks, and cutting meat (and my finger — the scar is still numb on my right pointer).

Most Philly eaters know that rolls should either crunch or squish; beef cuts should be sirloin or rib-eye; and cheese should maintain a creamy texture, regardless of the amount of processing. Pieces of limp cheese stamped into a bed of chopped Steak-umm does not constitute a cheesesteak.

“You have to have the right meat and the right roll,” Frusco said. “That’s what the sandwich is. If you can give somebody a nice warm roll, with good meat and perfect cheese, you’ve got something.”

In the mornings, Frusco would douse the stainless-steel grill with a blend of olive oil (for taste) and vegetable oil (for its high-temperature-cooking properties), toss on a few pieces of steak, and set the burners to sizzle. She’d spread on the yellow onions, diced into symmetrical cubes by a converted French-fry cutter to help achieve an even brown, then leave the meat and the onion to coalesce into a frothy foundation of beef flavor.

Bricks of American cheese were fed through a meat grinder, as the spaghetti form was easier to melt with a little boiling water — a style that complemented our thin-sliced medallions of marbled rib-eye. “We had the melted American cheese and not a lot of people had that,” Frusco said. “When you put the cheese on, and it melts into the meat — come on.”

We never chopped, because the quality of the meat should speak for itself. “Everybody would call chopped meat ‘mystery meat,’” Frusco said.

Bakery-fresh rolls were kept cozy in warmer drawers until the order receipt printed. We aimed for a gentle squish to help marry the bread to the meat — not a crusty roll that maintained separation.

The first slice on any roll had to be the juiciest slice off the grill; we’d place it so that it would peek out of the heel, because you only got one shot at a diner’s first bite.

That attention to detail is how a sandwich, whether you order wit or witout, is elevated into a cheesesteak.

Frusco walked away on New Year’s Eve 2014. “It was time,” she said. “I was tired of smelling like steaks and onion.”

The closest you can get to a Frusco’s steak now — the sliced medallions; the melted American; spongy, warm rolls — is at Steve’s.

“Honestly, if I wanted a cheesesteak, I would probably go to Steve’s,” Frusco said. “Because he was the originator.”

Last weekend, out of the four Steve’s locations, I went to the original shop at Bustleton Avenue and St. Vincent Street with my friend and former Frusco’s coworker, Jay Barron, for a bite of nostalgia.

The roll was cushion-soft and warm, the cheese gooey but not watery, and the rib-eye medallions browned but juicy. (There was, however, plenty of room for a few more pieces of meat.)

Walking out of the diner-style shop, the smell of the steak stayed on our hands. It transported me back behind that blue-and-white kitchen wall, where I recalled every step of that old Frusco method — which I still swear is the proper way to make a cheesesteak.

“We were good,” Frusco said. “There’s always someone else who is good, too. And we don’t even exist anymore.”

Bells and birds help tell the city’s story, but it’s a sandwich that helps explain Philadelphians. How we evolved from farmers in the cradle of liberty to DoorDashers in a melting pot of orange whiz is informed and defined by the cheesesteak. Raising the Steaks is a weeklyish chronicle of this long-rolled reminder of life’s redeeming qualities.