sirloin, foie gras, and short ribs is a cinch to make yourself if you have a kitchen crew to bake the buns, bone and shred short ribs, combine them with foie gras and black truffles, and add these ingredients to the best sirloin, which is chopped, then roasted and placed on a bun sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, toasted and layered with tomato confit and a horseradish mayonnaise. Then all you have to do is add tomato and frisée and serve with pommes soufflées.
For years I would drive past McDonald’s on the wayto Sag Harbor, noticing how many millions and then billions of their burgers had been sold. I was not surprised by these numbers, for McDonald’s had stumbled upon an evolutionary defect in the human brain: an insatiable craving for fat and sugar on which primitive survival depended, a craving that has not moderated under civilized conditions, when fat and sugar have become an addictive menace and a marketing opportunity. McDonald’s Pavlovian victims see the arches, respond to the primal need for energizing sugars and stored fat, and millions of stomachs, bypassing the brain, propel their owners toward them, oblivious to the risk of obesity and untimely death. McDonald’s supplies enough calories from fat to sustain a daylong mammoth hunt and enough carbohydrates in its McNuggets, shakes, and fries for a quick sprint should one become the quarry. But with no more mammoths to hunt or saber-toothed tigers to run from, this unused energy simply adds to the gross weight of McDonald’s billions of customers.
If hamburger addicts can control their appetites until they get home, they will save money and calories by buying fresh-ground sirloin or chuck with no more than 20 percent fat, forming it into quarter-pound burgers a half-inch thick, frying or grilling them over medium heat until just cooked through, and stuffing them into toasted supermarket buns with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, and whatever else their primal instincts demand. The burger itself may not be muchless caloric than a Mac, but the home cook is unlikely to add fries and a sugary shake.
I patronize a quality butcher who trims his own prime beef and grinds the scraps for hamburger, which he sells for only slightly more than the supermarket charges for ground chuck.
PRIME BEEF HAMBURGER
From the same shop I buy four-inch rolls and toast them lightly under the broiler. Then I shape the meat, which requires no seasoning, into six-ounce disks about three-quarters of an inch thick, grill them slowly in a ridged pan or beneath a slow broiler for four or five minutes per side, so that the outside doesn’t burn before the inside cooks, and serve them just beyond medium rare—with only a trace of pink at the center—at which point the meat will be warmed through and won’t crumble on the bun. Don’t succumb to the temptation to squeeze the burgers with a spatula. Test them for doneness by pressing them lightly with a finger. The firmer they feel, the more they’re done. I add a slice of sweet onion cut from the center and serve ketchup—sparingly, for it is full of corn sweetener—on the side. That my prime-beef hamburgers are less dangerous than Macnamara’s is small consolation for the fact that I am no longer fourteen, beside a lake in Maine at dusk, with my friends at an outdoor counter under a string of colored bulbs, listening to Artie Shaw and the hum of crickets.
THREE
SUMMER SCHOOL
L ater, during college summers, I cooked in a restaurant on Cape Cod, drawn to that gritty work, I suspect, in preference to languid teenage days at Craigville Beach with friends, by memories of those aromatic mornings beside my grandmother’s stove in Maine. One morning I made breakfast for a troupe of actors on their way to the playhouse at Dennis. A waitress told me that one of them was Gertrude Lawrence, but I had never heard of her and had no way of knowing whether or not it was she who had eaten my bright-yellow scrambled eggs, which I had beaten and
For years I would drive past McDonald’s on the wayto Sag Harbor, noticing how many millions and then billions of their burgers had been sold. I was not surprised by these numbers, for McDonald’s had stumbled upon an evolutionary defect in the human brain: an insatiable craving for fat and sugar on which primitive survival depended, a craving that has not moderated under civilized conditions, when fat and sugar have become an addictive menace and a marketing opportunity. McDonald’s Pavlovian victims see the arches, respond to the primal need for energizing sugars and stored fat, and millions of stomachs, bypassing the brain, propel their owners toward them, oblivious to the risk of obesity and untimely death. McDonald’s supplies enough calories from fat to sustain a daylong mammoth hunt and enough carbohydrates in its McNuggets, shakes, and fries for a quick sprint should one become the quarry. But with no more mammoths to hunt or saber-toothed tigers to run from, this unused energy simply adds to the gross weight of McDonald’s billions of customers.
If hamburger addicts can control their appetites until they get home, they will save money and calories by buying fresh-ground sirloin or chuck with no more than 20 percent fat, forming it into quarter-pound burgers a half-inch thick, frying or grilling them over medium heat until just cooked through, and stuffing them into toasted supermarket buns with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickle, and whatever else their primal instincts demand. The burger itself may not be muchless caloric than a Mac, but the home cook is unlikely to add fries and a sugary shake.
I patronize a quality butcher who trims his own prime beef and grinds the scraps for hamburger, which he sells for only slightly more than the supermarket charges for ground chuck.
PRIME BEEF HAMBURGER
From the same shop I buy four-inch rolls and toast them lightly under the broiler. Then I shape the meat, which requires no seasoning, into six-ounce disks about three-quarters of an inch thick, grill them slowly in a ridged pan or beneath a slow broiler for four or five minutes per side, so that the outside doesn’t burn before the inside cooks, and serve them just beyond medium rare—with only a trace of pink at the center—at which point the meat will be warmed through and won’t crumble on the bun. Don’t succumb to the temptation to squeeze the burgers with a spatula. Test them for doneness by pressing them lightly with a finger. The firmer they feel, the more they’re done. I add a slice of sweet onion cut from the center and serve ketchup—sparingly, for it is full of corn sweetener—on the side. That my prime-beef hamburgers are less dangerous than Macnamara’s is small consolation for the fact that I am no longer fourteen, beside a lake in Maine at dusk, with my friends at an outdoor counter under a string of colored bulbs, listening to Artie Shaw and the hum of crickets.
THREE
SUMMER SCHOOL
L ater, during college summers, I cooked in a restaurant on Cape Cod, drawn to that gritty work, I suspect, in preference to languid teenage days at Craigville Beach with friends, by memories of those aromatic mornings beside my grandmother’s stove in Maine. One morning I made breakfast for a troupe of actors on their way to the playhouse at Dennis. A waitress told me that one of them was Gertrude Lawrence, but I had never heard of her and had no way of knowing whether or not it was she who had eaten my bright-yellow scrambled eggs, which I had beaten and
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