Secret Ingredients (63 page)

BLOCKING AND CHOWING

BEN M
C
GRATH

I
f you are an offensive lineman, the Netherlands cafeteria, at Hofstra University, in Hempstead, where the New York Jets hold their training camp, has a couple of things going for it: the portions are unlimited, and the food doesn’t cost anything. “Shit, if it’s free it’s for me, you know what I’m saying?” Randy Thomas said recently, dipping a piece of fried chicken into a puddle of blue-cheese dressing during his lunch break, between practices. Thomas, the Jets’ starting right guard, has a fast metabolism, and he weighs three hundred pounds; his appetite can be expensive. “I’m known to eat, like, seventeen pieces of chicken,” he says. “By the way I eat, you would think I’m a big fat slob. But I just keep myself lean.”

“Lean” is a relative term in the Brobdingnagian world of an NFL cafeteria. Thomas is not quite the largest of the men who, for the past month, have lumbered into the Netherlands four times a day, like trucks rolling up to a gas station, dressed in sleeveless T-shirts, green shorts, and sandals, with their ankles, knees, and elbows wrapped in tape. Jumbo Elliott—“still the biggest guy on earth,” according to the Jets’ head coach, Herman Edwards—is three inches taller; Kareem McKenzie is twenty-five pounds heavier. But Thomas is the undisputed king of consumption, and when he pushes back his chair, raising his arms above his head after polishing off a plate of pecan pie, he reveals an ample midsection.

While there is no direct meal-by-meal oversight of Jets players’ dining habits, the strength-and-conditioning coach, John Lott, has a few basic recommendations for some of his bigger, hungrier charges: avoid fried foods and sweets; drink water instead of soda. To this end, the cafeteria menu, prepared by the team trainer and a certified nutritionist, is color-coded by fat content: green for lentil soup; yellow for a mesquite-turkey club; red for meatloaf with gravy or fish-and-chips. Thomas was unaware of these traffic signals, but would probably not have heeded them anyway. “I don’t worry about my fat,” he says. “I just fuckin’ eat. It makes me happy and comfortable and relaxed, you know? ’Cause if I’m hungry on the field I don’t perform—I’m thinking about fuckin’ eatin’.”

Once the season begins, this week, the players are on their own for dinner—and for the all-important late-night “snack,” which for Thomas means a dozen wings and eight fried jumbo chicken fingers. (The team continues to provide a buffet breakfast and lunch every day.) And while Thomas and his teammates savor the cafeteria grub—“These goddam chicken tenders are good, boy. They’re addictive. They’re so goddam
crunchy
”—they spend a certain amount of time at the training table trading restaurant tips for steak houses and all-you-can-eat buffets. Major’s Steak House, on Long Island, is one favorite, and East-West, an all-you-can-eat Chinese restaurant in New Jersey, is another; Thomas ran afoul of the management at East-West two years ago when he put away sixteen lobster tails. (“I’ve fucked up some buffets, man,” Thomas says.)

Coach Lott was a player himself, so he understands the urge to eat after a hard-fought game. (In his playing days, he weighed as much as 307 pounds.) “I really strongly advise the guys to go to town one night a week,” he says. “If you hamstring them and say ‘Don’t eat this’ or ‘Don’t eat that,’ you will find a guy at three o’clock in the morning with a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken eating all he can because he’s just going stir crazy.” Still, Lott tries to set guidelines: “Instead of getting a Big Mac, get the grilled-chicken sandwich. And, hey, if you want a milk shake, get your milk shake.”

In past years, the team has scheduled a series of educational seminars with the nutritionist, to recommend healthier alternatives to fast food. This season, the Jets are testing a new, more proactive approach: house calls. “Not everyone’s married, and they don’t live with their moms, so they’re by themselves,” Coach Lott said. “I’m going to have a couple of ladies cook prepared meals and bring them to their house. It’s not going to be a lady preparing them sundaes; it’s going to be a balanced meal.” So far, four players have signed up (Randy Thomas, who is married, is not among them), but Lott expects more players to request lady service once the word spreads. “They won’t have to think about it,” he said. “They just go home and eat.”

2002

“Let me see if I have it correctly, sir. To hell with the appetizer. A chopped sirloin that damn well better be rare. No goddam relish tray. Who cares which salad dressing, since they all taste like sludge?”

WHEN EDIBLES ATTACK

REBECCA MEAD

T
he guests at the Food Allergy Ball, a black-tie gala that took place at the Plaza Hotel last week, were drawn from that class of New York society which includes Fortune 500 CEOs and senior partners at corporate law firms and exclusive interior decorators: the fortunate few who are largely sheltered from many of life’s afflictions. But food allergies—the symptoms of which can range from mild nausea at a bite of shrimp to convulsions brought on by the mere inhalation of a cashew fragment—can strike even the most pampered New Yorkers, and, more significantly, the children of the most pampered New Yorkers, for whom a rogue peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the lunchroom can present a deadly threat. This fact helps explain why the Food Allergy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that was founded six years ago, has already raised a total of nine million dollars for research and education.

“If you’re not going to do it for your kids, who are you going to do it for?” said Todd Slotkin, the Food Allergy Initiative’s chairman and a senior executive at MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings. Slotkin’s food-allergy activism was activated by the diagnosis of allergies in his twin sons as toddlers, after he unwittingly fed one of them a nut-laced cookie while on vacation in Nantucket. Slotkin suffers from the usual anxieties of parenthood—what are your kids doing, and who are they doing it with?—amplified to an excruciating degree. “My sons are eleven, and in a few years, I hear, they will start to kiss other people,” he said as he tucked into a feast that began with a grilled-eggplant terrine (comprising twenty-one ingredients, all carefully enumerated on the menu), and explained that for his boys a make-out partner who had recently eaten a nut-studded brownie could prove fatal.

Sharyn Mann, the FAI’s vice chairman and the mistress of ceremonies, was motivated by similar concerns: her daughter, Tamara, suffers from severe food allergies. Mann wore a strapless black gown and a spray of black feathers in her upswept hair, in keeping with the black-and-white décor inspired by Cecil Beaton’s set designs for
My Fair Lady.
Mann had managed to enlist ten cast members of the show’s London revival to fly over and perform, and friends of Mann testified that her maternal vigilance was as impressive as her event production talents. “I was there the first time her daughter turned blue,” said Wanda Dworman. “If she went anywhere, she couldn’t eat anything outside of water or Jell-O.” Dworman described how her own consciousness about allergic reactions was raised during a trip to Aspen, where a bee flew behind her wraparound sunglasses and stung her twice; and she was pleased to report that there were at least some restaurateurs who took the issue seriously. “A lot of places have nuts in bread, but there are restaurants, like Le Cirque and Daniel, that are very sympathetic to this,” she said.

The guests of honor were Joseph Flom, the senior partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom—and, according to Ronald Perelman, who introduced him, “my lawyer, my friend, and a member of my family”—and Flom’s son Jason, the president of Lava Records. Jason Flom described how his aversion to nuts had caused him to make a hasty, gasping exit from the Chappaqua dinner table of former president Clinton not long ago, after it became clear that assurances from the waitstaff that the meal was nut-free depended on what your definition of “nut” was. Other politicians have also failed to grasp the seriousness of the food-allergy issue. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is a board member of FAI, said that he had written to Jimmy Carter after Carter sent a letter to the airlines in defense of packaged peanuts as an in flight snack.

The main course was beef goulash with garlic-chive spaetzle. The Plaza kitchen, having striven so hard to create an allergy-proof menu, was momentarily flummoxed by requests for a vegetarian alternative; eventually someone rustled up a plate or two of steamed baby vegetables, the kind of thing children only pretend to be allergic to. The seven different desserts—created by the restaurants Danube and Bouley, whose chef, David Bouley, was honored with the Joe Baum Lifetime Achievement Award—were delivered to dimmed lights, a drumroll, and a rousing trumpet voluntary.

Bouley, on receiving his award, cited “the right to have a fine culinary experience without fear,” and the evening’s menu demonstrated the possibility of having a fine culinary experience without nuts—although some guests admitted quietly that a nut or two could be a good thing. Rita Blake, who owns a company that makes what she described as “very, very, very high-end window treatments,” said that a few handfuls of nuts had served as her dinner the previous night. Blake was sympathetic to those with food allergies, having developed an intolerance to shellfish a few years ago, but nonetheless defended the maligned foodstuff. “I love nuts,” she said. “I think they are nature’s perfect food. I give my dog raw almond butter with her vitamins.”

2003

“If I told you the secret of making light, flaky piecrust, it wouldn’t be much of a secret anymore, now would it?”

KILLING DINNER

GABRIELLE HAMILTON

I
t’s quite something to go bare-handed up through a chicken’s ass and dislodge its warm guts. Startling, the first time, how fragilely they are attached. I have since put countless suckling pigs—pink, the same weight and size as a pet beagle—into slow ovens to roast overnight so that their skin becomes crisp and their still-forming bones melt into the meat. I have butchered 220-pound sides of beef down to their primal cuts; carved the tongues out of the heads of goats; fastened baby lambs with crooked sets of teeth onto green applewood spits and set them by the foursome over hot coals; and boned the saddles and legs of rabbits, which, even skinned, look exactly like bunnies.

But when I killed my first chicken I was only seventeen and unaccustomed. I had dropped out of school and was staying in the basement of my father’s house, in rural New Jersey, for very little rent. That fall, I spent a lot of time sitting outside on the log pile at dusk smoking hand-rolled cigarettes in my canvas jacket, watching the garden decay and thinking about death and the inherent beauty of the cycle of life. In my father’s chicken coop, one bird was being badly henpecked. My dad said we should kill it and spare it the slow torture by its pen mates. I said I could do it. I said it was important to confront the death of the animal you had the privilege of eating, that it was cowardly to buy cellophane-wrapped packages of boneless, skinless breasts at the grocery store. My father said, “You can kill the damned thing when I get home from work.”

From a remote spot on the back kitchen steps, he told me how to pull the chicken decisively out of the pen. I spoke to it philosophically about death, grasping it firmly yet calmly with what I hoped was a soothing authority. Then he told me to take it by the legs and hold it upside down. The chicken protested from deep inside its throat, close to the heart, a violent, vehement, full-bodied cluck. The crowing was almost an afterthought. To get it to stop, I started swinging it in full arm circles, as my dad instructed me. I windmilled that bird around and around the way I’d spun lettuce as a kid in the front yard, sending droplets of water out onto the gravel and pachysandra from the old-fashioned wire-basket spinner my mom used.

He said this would disorient the bird—make it so dizzy that it couldn’t move—and that’s when I should lay it down on the block and chop its head off, with one machinelike whack. In my own way, not like a machine at all, I laid it down on a tree stump, and while it was trying to recover I clutched the hatchet and came down on its neck. This first blow made a vague dent, barely breaking the skin. I hurried to strike it again, but lost a few seconds in my grief and horror. The second blow hit the neck like a boat oar on a hay bale. I was still holding its feet in one hand and trying to cut its head off with the dull hatchet in my other when both the chicken and my father became quite lucid, and not a little agitated. The chicken began to thrash, its eyes open, as if chastising me for my false promises of a merciful death. My dad yelled, “Kill it! Kill it! Aw, Gabs, kill the fucking thing!” from his bloodless perch. I kept coming down on the bird’s throat—which was now broken but still issuing terrible clucks—stroke after miserable stroke, until I finally got its head off. I was blubbering through clenched teeth. My dad was animated with disgust at his dropout daughter—so morose and unfeminine, with the tips of her braids dyed aquamarine, and unable even to kill a chicken properly. As I released the bird, finally, and it ran around the yard, bloody and ragged but at least now silent, he screamed, “What kind of person are you?”

It was a solid minute before the chicken’s nerves gave out and it fell over motionless in some dead brown leaves. I wiped my snot on my sleeve, picked up the bird from the frozen ground, tied its feet, and hung it on a low tree branch to bleed it. The other chickens in their pen, silhouetted against the dusk, retreated inside to roost for the night. My dad closed the kitchen door and turned on the oven. I boiled a blue enameled lobster pot full of water, and submerged the bird to loosen its feathers. Sitting out on the back steps in the yellow pool of light from the kitchen window, I plucked the feathers off the chicken, two and three at a time. Its viscera came out with an easy tug: a small palmful of livery, bloody jewels that I tossed out into the dark yard.

There are two things you should never do with your father: learn how to drive, and learn how to kill a chicken. I’m not sure you should sit across from each other and eat the roasted bird in resentful silence, either, but we did that, too, and the meat was disagreeably tough.

2004