Men and Their Meat

Enough with chicken and fish, already. Red meat is back--in leaner cuts, we're happy to announce. In fact, the average American consumes about 65 pounds of beef each year. Some guys broil their steaks, some barbecue them and Playboy Contributing Editor Denis Boyles even cooks them with two blowtorches. It takes him 20 minutes to get the meat just the way he likes it--a thin, crisp sear on the outside and a blood-red center. But that's not the strangest cooking technique we've discovered. In their humorous book Manifold Destiny, authors Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller use a car engine for cooking. Dwight David Eisenhower Pepper Steak, for example, calls for four tablespoons of peppercorns per half pound of strip steak, crushed using a tire iron and pressed into the meat. The meat is then wrapped in foil and taken for a half-hour ride (per side) atop the engine.

Danny Glover has been known to improvise for meat's sake. A few years ago, while he was filming To Sleep with Anger in South Central Los Angeles, the crew and cast were hassled by neighborhood gangs. Glover tried to make peace by cooking everybody a hearty gumbo. Between scenes, he would adjourn to a tiny kitchen to stir the pot filled with thick chunks of sausage, crab, chicken and spicy rice mixed with peppers and onions. The filming went on without a hitch.

Menno Meyjes, Academy Award nominee for the screenplay adaptation of The Color Purple, likes his meat thin, as he had it growing up in Holland. "Americans eat steak too damn thick," Meyjes says. He pounds his with the side of a hammer to quarter-inch height before searing it in butter or barbecuing it with red torpedo onions that are sprinkled with salt and pepper and then twisted in aluminum foil and thrown onto the coals for about an hour.

Harold McGee, author of The Curious Cook, disagrees with the idea that searing meat over high heat seals in the juices. "The analogy is cauterizing a wound," he says, "but it's just not the same thing. Seared flesh actually loses more liquid than meat heated at a steady temperature--the rarer, the juicier." The debate is still cooking.

If you really want rare, talk to Football Hall of Famer Bob St. Clair, formerly of the San Francisco 49ers. St. Clair acquired a taste for uncooked meat as a boy when his grandmother threw him scraps while she was cooking. "In training camp we used to play a little trick on the rookies," St. Clair says. "I'd take my plate of raw meat, covered with a napkin, to their table. They'd be flabbergasted that the captain of the team was sitting with them. Then I'd remove the napkin and start eating. The table cleared out fast."

Morgan Entrekin, Tennessee native and publisher of Atlantic Monthly Press, prefers his meat cooked but insists that barbecue is a noun and grill is a verb. (Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary says barbecue is both.) "Barbecue is what comes off a pig or a cow that has been cooked for hours in a pit. If you want to find (continued on page 160)Men and their Meat(continued from page 108) out about grilling, you should read A. Cort Sinnes' book The Grilling Encyclopedia. He's the grilling maestro."

Writer Armistead Maupin says that how you cook a steak isn't as important as where you get it. In his opinion, that place should be New Zealand, where he lives for half the year. Kiwi lamb or beef on the barbie, marinated with spring onions and local wine and seared on both sides, he says, is worth a visit down under.

Maupin is not the only one willing to go the distance for his favorite meats. Some beefy facts about the onetime head of the FBI were uncovered by Curt Gentry while he researched his booky J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. Apparently, taxpayers paid for Hoover's regular shipment of steaks that were flown into Washington from Texas. He also had a special agent fly from Beverly Hills to deliver Chasen's famous chili. The "top secret" recipe for the chili hasn't changed in 60 years, and Chasen's boasts that almost every president has had it sent to the White House. Here are the ingredients, as published by The Los Angeles Times in 1989:

[recipe]1/2 pound dry pinto beans[/recipe]

[recipe]5 cups chopped tomatoes[/recipe]

[recipe]1 pound chopped green peppers[/recipe]

[recipe]1-1/2 tablespoons oil[/recipe]

[recipe]1-1/2 pounds chopped onions[/recipe]

[recipe]2 cloves garlic, minced[/recipe]

[recipe]1/2 cup chopped parsley[/recipe]

[recipe]1/2 cup butter or margarine[/recipe]

[recipe]2-1/2 pounds ground beef, preferably chuck[/recipe]

[recipe]1 pound lean ground pork[/recipe]

[recipe]1/3 cup chili powder[/recipe]

[recipe]2 tablespoons salt[/recipe]

[recipe]1-1/2 teaspoons black pepper[/recipe]

[recipe]1-1/2 teaspoons cumin seeds[/recipe]

Soak beans in water overnight. Drain, cover with cold water and simmer for about an hour, or until beans are tender. Add tomatoes, simmer five minutes longer and then set aside.

Next, sauté green peppers in hot oil until tender. Add onions and cook until soft, stirring frequently. Add garlic and parsley.

In another skillet melt butter and add beef and pork. Cook, stirring for 15 minutes, or until browned and crumbly. Add meat to onion mixture and stir in chili powder. Cook ten minutes. Add meat mixture to beans along with salt, pepper and cumin seeds. Simmer, covered, for one hour. Remove cover and simmer 30 minutes longer. Skim fat from top. (Yields eight to ten servings.)

Another equally mouth-watering dish is carne adovada, a pork stew that Martin Cruz Smith, author of Gorky Park and Red Square, had in Santa Fe. "It's so hot," he says, "you really want to eat it while straddling a keg of cold beer."

To make the stew, cook three pounds of boned pork chops (trimmed of fat, cut into cubes) smothered in a New Mexican red or chimayo chili sauce in oven for about 3-1/2 hours at 350 degrees. To make the sauce, roast eight ounces of chilies in an oven for five minutes and remove the seeds and stems. In a food processor blend the chilies with four cups of water. Mix in one tablespoon of chopped white onion, four chopped cloves of garlic and a half teaspoon each of Worcestershire sauce, oregano, salt and white pepper. Arrange the meat in a shallow baking dish. Cover it with the sauce and bake as described above. The dish is traditionally accompanied by chopped tomatoes, cilantro, lettuce and fresh handmade tortillas.

Howard Hesseman (Johnny Fever on WKRP in Cincinnati) says he doesn't cook but has eaten in steak houses and rib shacks nationwide. His favorites are Eli's in Chicago, Leonard's Hickory Pit in San Francisco, Hot Sauce Williams' Bar-beque in Cleveland and Johnson's Bar-B-Q in Norfolk, Virginia. "If you like spicy ribs, any of these will leave you talking in tongues of fire."

When Hesseman's in Paris, where he lives part of the year, he eats regularly at Le Coup de Fourchette because he loves the steak, potatoes and onions that are cooked in one skillet. The proprietor is so dedicated to her viande that Hesseman has heard her discourage potential patrons by announcing that vegetarian friends of Brigitte Bardot are not allowed in her bistro.

Bardot would probably cringe if she heard this favorite meat-eating memory of New Yorker cartoonist and playwright William Hamilton. "I once owned a cow named Madame Vache, who had been alone all her life with only deer as companions. She had no reference to what she was. When we took walks in the woods, she would self-consciously try to hide behind a tree, and she foraged in the wild just like a deer. One day Madame was shot, so we made the murderer give us the meat. She was the most tender and delicious steak I can remember," he says. "If our roles were changed, I would hope that she'd enjoy me as much as I enjoyed her."

Cable TV mogul Ted Turner, an avid bird hunter, may like beef but refuses to raise cattle, because his father did. "They trampled down all the grass and wrecked the bird habitat," he says. Of course, that hasn't stopped him from raising buffalo on his 130,000-acre spread outside of Bozeman, Montana. Perhaps Jane Fonda, his weight-conscious wife, had some influence in the matter, as buffalo meat has significantly less fat and cholesterol than beef.

On a less palatable note, when musician Todd Rundgren isn't touring, he cranks up the grill and cooks chicken-and-apple sausages and the occasional burger and dog. "But as a kid," he says, "I was much more excited by my mother's meat of choice, Spam."

Such enthusiasm would dwindle quickly if Rundgren had read Paul Theroux's new travel book, The Happy Isles of Oceania. In it, Theroux theorizes "that former cannibals of Oceania feasted on Spam because Spam came the nearest to approximating the porky taste of human flesh. It was a fact that the people-eaters of the Pacific had all evolved, or perhaps degenerated, into Spam-eaters. And in the absence of Spam they settled for corned beef, which also had a corpsy flavor."

In a more abstemious part of the book, Theroux describes eating kangaroo meat in Australia. He was given "a brown strip of meat that had the look of leather, exactly the shape and size of the tongue of an old shoe." It was two-year-old roo meat, wonderful in soups--"lovely stuff."

Francis Ford Coppola's meat follies are not for the weak of stomach. For his annual Easter party in the Napa Valley, he orders four dozen goats' heads (with eyes), 80 lambs' tongues, 100 pounds of pork liver wrapped in pork fat with fennel seed, and a few dozen calves' brains. A little Parmesan cheese is sprinkled on the eyes before the heads hit the barbecue and, once at the table, the men are quickly separated from the boys.

Finally, when asked about his best piece of meat, lawyer Melvin Belli, the king of torts, said, "I bit an insurance adjuster on the ass and collected a million-dollar judgment from him, too. Talk about an expensive piece of meat."

"Taxpayers paid for J. Edgar Hoover's regular shipment of steaks that were flown in from Texas."