What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [32]
“Well, we still have a family box at Oaklawn—the home of the Arkansas Derby,” says Patrick in self-defense, “and corned beef is still at the top of my list. It’s a perennial winner and makes a great show when you have the guys over. But before you get to make a corned beef sandwich, you have to cook the beef.
“I get it and its little package of spice at the local fancy market, boil it as long as it says to, and add cabbage, potatoes, and other vegetables toward the end. The meat shrinks and gives off a lot of fat. If it’s winter—and winter is the time for corned beef, not summer—you can stick the pot in the snow when you’re done cooking so that all the fat congeals. Then you can scrape it off. Now you can make the sandwich: slice the meat thinly across the grain, put it on rye, and add a lot of mustard and horseradish. Have the vegetables on the side. A slab of corned beef will make sandwiches for the better part of a week.”
Of course, corned beef and cabbage is revisited every Saint Patrick’s Day, but I’ve found a way to make it less dreary if not actually uplifting and spring-like. It’s simple. Use golden beets, baby bok choy, and radishes for the vegetable accompaniments; add the rosy slices of meat and it all looks like a spring garden. And the leftovers still make plenty of sandwiches.
Men, many of them, do like their meat. Among all the men we spoke with, just one suggested that he might use his solitary nights for the opportunity to have a salad for dinner. This was an amicable African American man I sat next to on a flight to Atlanta, who knew a thing or two about barbecue and a lot about cheesecake, his favorite food. Salad came in second. I ended up with a list of the best places to get cheesecake from New York to Atlanta, then over to Kentucky. But this man was actually passionate about salads, and I never would have pinned him for a salad man. He patted his ample front and said, “It’s good that I love them. I need to eat salads!”
The publisher of one of America’s more astute food journals mentioned that he eats meat six out of seven days a week. It might be a roast or the fattiest, thickest pork chop he can find, served with a baked potato—a weekend menu, he said. “I deglaze the pork chop with white wine and most of the time I overcook it because even though the danger of trichinosis is low—1 percent if the hog has been fed garbage, 1/10 of a percent without the garbage—the problem is, you never know.”
There’s a pause, then he changes direction and remarks that because his schedule is the same weekday or weekend, he’ll most likely cook a steak—logic that is lost on me.
“I like the raunchy chuck-end of a rib eye,” he says, nearly smacking his lips. “I sauté it, or I should say ‘fry’ it, with a lot of fat. I put olive oil with the fat trimmings in a stainless steel skillet and fry it hot. Salt and pepper go on before, garlic after. I also take a piece of bread, toast it, rub it with garlic, and drizzle it with more oil.”
In case you’re wondering, this man is thin. Maybe because he tempers his excesses with a lettuce or arugula salad with freshly cut raw onions. Or maybe because he eats everything with red wine and ends his meal with a tiny piece of chocolate, which is no doubt beneficial if you’re going to dig into the raunchy end of a rib eye a few times a week. And to think Patrick interviewed him years before we knew that red wine and chocolate were heart savers and all of that. A man ahead of his time.
A scholarly British author living in France told us that when he’s batching it, he buys a piece of meat, usually a lamb chop. But this is no simple throw-it-in-the-pan-then-eat-it affair. “I look among the vegetables and pick something my wife doesn’t like, like parsnips. She really dislikes parsnips. Then I look into the cupboard to see what appeals to me. I open a stout or a cold Pelforth Brune, and I also open a bottle