THENASTYBITS (3 page)

System D, arguably, reached its heyday in the Victorian-era railway hotels, where the menus were huge and it was not unusual for an extra two hundred guests to show up wanting, say, the Fricassee of Lobster Thermidor—for which only fifty portions were ever available. Suddenly, Thermidor for fifty was transformed into Thermidor for two hundred. Don't ask how. You don't want to know. It is possible that the system began with the ever-changing requirements of volume cookery, only to be perpetuated by subsequent generations as the golden age of mammoth hotels began to wane and the enormous dining halls and banquet facilities of days past were faced with the necessity of serving grande luxe-style meals and bloated menus with ever-shrinking staffs and more stringent economizing. I suspect that some of the classic dishes of that era reflect System D philosophy, particularly the efforts to get more bang from limited ingredients. Potage Mongole, for instance, allowed a chef to take a little pea soup and a little tomato soup, combine them, and come up with a third menu selection. New York's fabled Delmonico's offered, at one time, a staggering array of soups, numbering over a hundred. One can only assume that not all of those were made individually and from scratch every day. Parsimonious and forward-thinking Frenchmen—already inclined to make the most of humble (read
cheap)
ingredients, utilized every scrap of stock meat, hoof, snout, tongue, organs, creating dishes that are now popular stand-alone and frequently expensive favorites, ordered on their own merits, rather than served as cleverly disguised by-products.

The traditional bistros that grew up around Les Halles, Paris's central marketplace, were fertile ground for hotel-trained cooks and chefs to take System D to even more extreme lengths. They had limited space to work with, most had limited capital, and the markets—whence came their clientele—generated huge amounts of what might have been considered unpalatable foodstuffs. If you're stocking your larder from a place proudly named The Tripe Pavillion, you tend to develop a cuisine heavy on
boudins, tete de pore,
confit of ears, stomach lining, shanks, pates, and galantines. Don't take my word for it. Read Orwell, or Freeling, or Zola's masterful
Belly
of
Paris;
nothing I've said here or will ever say approaches the terrifying accounts of mishandled food, criminally misrepresented menu items, marginal sanitation practices, and dubious sources of supply in these classic accounts. Orwell describes working ankle deep in garbage and outgoing dinners in one such establishment—and this was by no means a slophouse. Even today, French veterans of bistro cooking are masters of System D, inured as they are to working in tiny kitchens with dollhouse-size ranges, producing ten or twelve menu items despite access to only minimal storage, refrigeration, and work area, with a
plongeur
bumping them from behind. Work with some of these folks, even in the relatively roomy kitchens of Manhattan, and you're likely to see a number of practices they definitely do
not
teach at culinary school.

Of course, expediency is one thing. Laziness is another. I hate, for instance, to see a cook "sear, slice, and flash," where instead of searing, say, a gigot, then finishing to proper doneness in the oven, he'll sear the outside of the mat, slice it nearly raw, then color the slices under the salamander. I've seen jammed-up cooks searing lamb, beef, and duck simultaneously—all in the same pan. I hate that too. And instead of reducing and mounting sauces to order, in a clean pot each time, some cooks keep a veritable petri dish of reducing sauce festering on a back burner, adding unreduced sauce as needed until the pot is a crusty, horrible abomination of oversalted, scorched, and bitter swill. Not for me, thanks—and not in my kitchen. The microwave was a blessing to full-time System D experts. I've seen veterans of three-star kitchens throw absolutely raw, unseared
cote de boeuf
for two into a microwave oven, presumably to "warm it up" to cut cooking time!

One
can
be a proud practitioner of The System without resorting to food murder. With a fine set of moves, a strong,

TO

adaptable mind, and a certain threshold, a level beyond which one will
not
under any circumstances go, one can break all the rules and still make good food. One's customers will get what they wanted, when they wanted it. And no one will be the wiser.

If Vatel, the famous French chef of years past who allegedly killed himself when informed that his fish delivery would be delayed, had been fluent in System D, he might have lived a longer, happier, and more prosperous life. We remember him, after all, only for his passing.

Maybe we don't remember the name of whatever early pioneer of System D first gazed upon a snail in a moment of need and thought to himself, "Gee . . . maybe if I cram enough garlic butter in there, I can
serve
that!" But we're still eating
escargots de Bourgogne,
aren't we?

THE EVILDOERS

i'm on the subway
after a long, hard day in the kitchen, my feet swelling up like twin Hindenburgs; my back killing me; fourteen hours of hot, sweaty, uncomfortable toil and two hundred eighty dinners under my belt; and I want to sit down. There are three seats in front of me in the crowded subway car. Unfortunately, one miserable, fat bastard is taking up all three of them. As he sits glumly but defiantly in a center seat, his gigantic butt cheeks and thighs spill out of the molded plastic bucket onto the seats on both sides, and his beady eyes dare me to try and squeeze my bony ass into one of the narrow spaces next to him.

Dream sequence: I'm on a packed commuter flight and we're going down for a forced landing in a Midwestern cornfield. Engine one is on fire, the cabin fills up with smoke, panicky passengers overturn their meal trays as they rush the emergency exits. The pilot manages to plow the plane belly-down onto soft earth, but when the plane—in flames now—comes to a full stop and the emergency doors pop free, the three-hundred-pound ectomorph in the window seat becomes lodged firmly and inexorably in the small doorway. At the head of the aisle, another giant fuck collapses wheezing onto the floor, blocking egress. As my hair catches fire, the last thing I see is jiggly, crenulated back fat.

Whose fault is it? Who made my fellow Americans obese—if not
morbidly
obese? How did the age-old equation that poor equals thin and rich equals fat change so that now our working poor are huge and slow-moving and only the wealthy can afford the personal trainers, liposuction, and extended spa treatments required, it seems, to be thin? In whose evil snail tracks across the globe can we watch thighs expand, bellies pooch out over groins, so that fewer and fewer every year of the flower of our youth can even
see
their own genitals without benefit of a mirror? Who is making each new generation from once normally proportioned countries swell up like grain-fed steer?

We know the answer. America's most dangerous export was never nuclear weapons or Jerry Lewis—or even
Baywatch
reruns. It was, is, and probably always will be our fast-food outlets.

The Evildoers of the major chains live nowhere near their businesses. Like crack dealers, they know what they sell is not good for you, that it makes neighborhoods uglier, contributes nothing but a stifling sameness to society. Recently, with Eric Schlosser, the author of the brilliant and terrifying
Fast Food Nation,
I debated two representatives of the fast-food industry at a "multi-unit foodservice operators'" convention in Texas. Our position, unsurprisingly, was that everybody in the room basically sucked. The opposition countered with tortured recitation of numbers and statistics, mostly to do with what a valuable service their industry provided, employing—for a few months at a time—hundreds of thousands of people who (they implied) might otherwise be sticking up liquor stores, setting fires, and sodomizing pets. They neatly deflected Schlosser's own accurate and sobering numbers, mostly to do with workplace injuries in the meat-cutting industry, average length of employment, bankrupt "nutritional" value, the quantifiable path of balooning thighs following in their businesses' wake across the globe, and so on. But when I asked these folks, one by one, if they would live anywhere near their own overlit, maniacally cheery looking restaurants, I got, more often than not, a stunned look and a "Fuck, no!" When I mischievously suggested (opportunistically taking advantage of the current fervor of flag waving) that their chosen enterprise was basically unpatriotic; that they were deliberately targeting children with their advertising, then knowingly raising them to be no-necked arterially clogged diabetics who'd "never in a million years make it through basic training. God
help
us if we ever have to hit Omaha Beach again, those doughy overfed punks'll drown like rats!"—they looked, actually . . . guilty. They
know,
you see. You think they eat their own gruel anywhere
near
as frequently as the average rube? I don't.

But is fast food inherently evil? Is the convenient nature of the beast bad, in and of itself? Decidedly no. Fast food—which traditionally solves very real problems of working families, families with kids, business people on the go, the casually hungry—
can
be good food. If you walk down a street in Saigon, or visit an open-air market in Mexico, you'll see that a quick, easy meal, often enjoyed standing up, does not have to be part of the hideous, generic sprawl of soul-destroying sameness that stretches from strip malls in San Diego, across the U.S.A., through Europe and Asia and around again, looking the same, tasting the same: paper-wrapped morsels of gray "beef" patties with all-purpose sauce. The unbelievably high-caloric horrors of beef-flavor-sprayed chicken nuggets, of "milkshakes" that contain no milk and have never been shaken, of "barbecue" that has never seen a grill, "cheese" with no cheese, and theme monstrosities for whom food is only a lure to buy a T-shirt, is not the way it
has
to be.

There is delicious, even nutritious, fast food to be had in the world—often faster and cheaper than the clown and the colonel and the king and their ilk produce. In Japan (and increasingly in the West), there are quick affordable sushi joints. In Tokyo, you can purchase
yakitori,
small skewers of grilled poultry and meat, from
yakitori
vendors clustered around business districts to serve executives looking for an easy after-work snack. In Spain, tapas (or
pinchos)
are served standing up; you grab something good at one tapas joint, then move over to another, a moveable series of snacks, inevitably delicious—and again, usually good for you.

In Vietnam, fast food is everywhere, right out in the street: freshly made, brightly colored sandwiches on homemade French bread; steaming bowls of
pho,
noodles served from a portable kitchen carried on a yoke on the proprietor's back; grilled shrimp kebabs skewered on sugarcane; tiny bundles of rice and pork wrapped in banana leaves; spicy calamari; crispy little birds; hunks of jackfruit; caramelized bananas and mango—all of it made and served by
individuals,
lone entrepreneurs for whom pride is not a catchphrase or a slogan but an operating principle. In Mexico, one is likely to find happy swarms of people slurping posole, a sort of soupy stew, or
menudo,
a similarly delicious concoction, around primitive carts right out in the street, electric power provided by a chugging gas generator. A few pesos and a few seconds and you're eating better than at any place run by evil clowns or steroid-overdosed action-movie front men. Turn right and there's an old woman making absolutely fresh quesadillas of zucchini flowers and farmer cheese, turn left and a mom and pop are slicing up a tender head of pork and rolling it into soft tacos with
salsa fresca
so fresh and wonderful you'll think you've died and gone to heaven. Total time elapsed from time ordered to actual chewing? About twelve seconds.

Even in Russia they've got blintzes and piroshkis, served on fire-engine-red plastic trays—in the worst American tradition— but again, made by a
human,
fresh, on site, from real, recognizable ingredients, not shipped in frozen, preportioned vacu-seal bags from some meat-extruding facility near a far-away turnpike. And that cherished idea of the Russian as stocky, Krushchev-like babushkas is way wrong, friends. Most of the Russians I saw recently? The guys all looked like Dolph Lund-gren and the women were tall, slim, and hard-looking enough to handle themselves in a street fight.

In Cambodia, a desperately poor cyclo driver, munching on a crispy little bird at a market, engaged me in conversation. "Is it true," he asked, "that all Americans eat only hamburgers and KFC?" He looked truly sorry for me.