Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  “Messieurs et dames!” The guttural voice of Pierre Moustique suddenly set my every nerve atingle. “I now attempt a feat to dizzy the imagination, keeping trois boules [three balls] suspended in the air simultaneously!” From the depths of his cape, he brought forth a green cheesecloth bag and spun three mothballs into swift rotating motion.

  Rentschler sprang up with a choked cry. “Gobe-mouche that I am! Blockhead!” he exclaimed. “Don’t you see, Schneider? That’s why the hollandaise laid those diners low—he used that very bag to squeeze the sauce, indifferent to the fact that it had contained mothballs! Seal the exits! Stop that man!” But it was too late; with a snarled imprecation, Moustique sprang toward the wings. In the shrill hubbub that ensued, I inexplicably found myself dancing a java with a comely grisette; then Rentschler, flinging people aside like ninepins, was pulling me through a skylight and we were hurtling across the rooftops after our quarry. In reality, my associate explained as we hurtled, Moustique had left the Bobino in a cab, but protocol precluded our following him in any such mundane fashion.

  “He’s heading for the Ritz,” panted the inspector. “A group of asparagus connoisseurs are holding their annual feed there tonight, which the columns of Le Figaro have been full of it for a week. Superfluous to add that if this blackguard, who is cooking for them under a nom de plume, compounds his lethal dressing, why the poor bastards will be stretched out in windrows. I’ve a pretty—good—hunch, though,” he panted on, clearing the Rue du Cherche-Midi with a bound, “that we’re about to tie a kink in his mayonnaise whip.”

  Well, we didn’t. Two minutes afterward, Rentschler tripped over a loose gargoyle and dashed out his brains in the Quai Voltaire. I pressed on to the Ritz, but I must have crept in through the wrong dormer, because I wound up at a too, too marvelous gala at the Vicomtesse de Noailles’. Edith and Osbert and Sacheverell were there, and they gave me a simply divine recipe for my book. It’s called Continental Upside-down Chowchow, and here’s what you do. You take a double handful of exotic locales…

  1951

  “Believe me, if there are any compliments I'll pass them on to you.”

  EAT, DRINK, AND BE MERRY

  PETER DE VRIES

  Early last winter, I tipped the scales at 200 pounds, whereas the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company prefers something in the neighborhood of 180 for men of my height and frame. Friends implored me to delete the difference, citing the connection between weight and longevity, and recommending various diets for soundness of body and length of days. However, though persuaded to reduce, I decided to give other methods, such as massage, a try first. To this end I permitted myself to be methodically flailed at weekly intervals by a giant Swede. I lost no weight, but the strenuousness of the Swede’s exertions suggested it might be otherwise with him. After two months, during which my body underwent no change whatever except to turn the color of eggplant, I took up walking.

  I went for brisk hikes about the Connecticut countryside, where I live, armed with a stick to fend off the numerous dogs in whom apparently boiled an accumulated resentment toward a man remembered as someone barreling down the road in a Pontiac to their constant peril. I got more exercise out of swinging the cane than out of walking—the first day or two, one mongrel in particular followed me all over the blasted heath—but my exertions were as fruitless as the Swede’s.

  I did extract from these all-weather rambles a certain lyric sustenance. I had a sense that, for housewives glancing from their cottage windows and for passing motorists, I pulled the whole scene together by offering to the eye that solitary figure for which all landscapes cry; of representing, as I strode cross-lots or climbed a stile, abiding values. Superimposed on this was another, terribly peculiar sensation. I had the conviction that I was losing girth, not at the waist but around my head. I wore on these expeditions a gray Homburg, relatively new, the only hat in my possession. Because my head is narrow, a hat that fits in terms of front and back is often loose enough at the sides for me to insert two fingers there, so that every hat I have owned has been both large and small for me. This Homburg seemed, on the moors, to grow roomier with every step I took. Since, like its predecessors, it was a doubtful fit to begin with, and since it was my wont to swing along at a brisk gait, each jar of my heels brought the hat a little farther down on my head, the way you bring an axe head down on its helve by pounding the end of the handle on a stump. On certain days I would arrive home with the hat resting on my ears, an effect that made for poor visibility and once almost cost me my life, when I started to cross a road in the dusk and was narrowly missed by a motorist who had not yet turned his lights on.

  That was the day on which I had fixed to weigh myself. It had been two weeks since I began the walks, and I had refrained from checking. I gingerly boarded the bathroom scales and looked. There was some change but not much: I had gained four pounds.

  The reason was not hard to find. I returned from these excursions ravenous, and as a result (taking the fueling of a furnace as a metaphor for caloric consumption) I had been shoveling it in as fast as I had been burning it up—or, rather, a little faster.

  At about this time there fell into my hands a document containing some computations made by Dr. L. H. Newburgh, of the medical school of the University of Michigan, who has done work in the metabolism of obesity. A man weighing 250 pounds, he writes, “will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread.” A horizontal walk of a mile will reduce the man’s weight “only 121/2 grams (less than 1/2 ounce). He must walk 36 miles to rid himself of one pound of adipose tissue—how disappointing!”

  On the basis of Dr. Newburgh’s findings, I figured that the only way for me to make appreciable inroads on myself by walking would be to commute on foot between Westport and New York City, a discipline almost certain to be neutralized by Gargantuan snacks at Norwalk, Port Chester, and most other points along the way.

  The inevitable remained.

  There are numerous diets currently being recommended, published, and discussed. One is the familiar du Pont executives’ diet, which I tried first. Its motif is meat. For lunch the first day, I had a pair of lamb chops with accessories too dismal to mention. For dinner, I had a plank steak. Steaks and chops two or even three times a day are, in addition to an ideal way of sustaining the requisite high protein intake, a neat formula for bankruptcy, unless you happen to be a du Pont executive. I realized, as the long, carnivorous days went by, that I was eating myself and my family into destitution, and switched to another feeding plan.

  This one permitted me, implacably, for breakfast half a grapefruit, one boiled egg, and black coffee. To eat that at 7 A.M. and practice rigid self-denial until lunch at one o’clock is to engage in what theologians call mortification of the flesh. Noon, in fact, often found me close to that crystalline fatigue in which the early Christian anchorites are said to have had their visions. I carried in my wallet a checklist of low-calorie foods with which to assuage the worst pangs of my hunger. An item on the list was tangerines. I once ate seven at a sitting, pips and all. Another was cottage cheese, of which I sometimes devoured an entire container. One Saturday, my wife returned from shopping to find me hunched over an eighteen-ounce jar of it, a flying spoon in my hand.

  “What are you gorging yourself for?” she asked.

  “I’m on a diet,” I said. “You know that.”

  It is possible to rationalize having dinner at someone else’s home as a legitimate holiday from one’s diet. My wife and I had a dinner invitation for Saturday of my second week on the more plebeian regimen. My wife caught a heavy cold on Friday, and Saturday morning I heard her canceling the engagement by phone. I rushed up and wrested the instrument from her grasp. “I’ll be there,” I told the hostess. “I won’t hear of upsetting your plans any more than necessary!”

  The hostess told me to come at “sevenish.”

  “Sevenish, then,” I said, hanging up.

  I was at h
er door at six-twenty, slavering. She served fish, roast duck and red cabbage, candied yams, tossed salad, and cherries jubilee, all of which I had the courtesy to eat without demurrer.

  It takes only one good table bacchanal to undo a whole week’s calorie budgeting. Since all this dieting was going on during the winter, when we were receiving or giving hospitality every Saturday or Sunday evening, I found myself faced with continuing complications. (I felt it as ungracious to diet before guests as before hosts.) I began a third diet without wholly abandoning the other, then still another while retaining features of its predecessors. Soon I had three or four diets going simultaneously, and became bewildered and discouraged. I weighed 205, then 207. I resolved that when the winter was over, I would buckle down in earnest. But once the round of al-fresco summer gaieties was under way, I was, far from mortifying my flesh, mortified by it. A British acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen for several years greeted me on a recent visit with “Getting a bit thick in the flitch, aren’t you, old man?”

  The phrase “thick in the flitch” plunged me into a depression that lasted for weeks. It was, indeed, one of those periods of gloom when a man seeks relief in every anodyne—the pleasures of reading, companionship, and certainly food and drink. And it was in this interval that I came across a magazine article setting forth a viewpoint new to me on excess weight. The article was entitled “Obesity: Its Emotional Causes.” It was written by the head of a Midwestern clinic who has done a great deal of research in the field and who claims that food is an escape for people who are emotionally upset. I at once took inventory of myself along the lines the author laid down. The only thing I could find that was upsetting me was my physical condition—my excess weight. It followed that I was eating too much because I was overweight.

  The sinister hopelessness of this dilemma convinced me that it must be absurd, but I was presently routed from that refuge by the recollection of a parallel case I know of involving a man who is given to a kindred indulgence—that of the bottle. Chief among the “realities” to which he is unable to face up is the realization of the wasted, bibulous years behind him. Hence he has reached a point where it is, in large measure, liquor that is driving him to drink. He is living to a ripe old age in this vicious circle, too. My own circle, it seemed to me, was equally vicious. Or was it, I wondered. Was “vicious” quite the right word for it?

  Well, come to think of it, maybe not. When all is said and done, what is there like a good dinner, prefaced by a few cocktails, washed down with a properly chilled wine, and topped off with a cup of well-brewed coffee and a spot of brandy, to assuage life’s pains, obscure its vanities, and make one forget, for an hour, the melancholy of expanding girth? The answer is, nothing. Friends are, of course, another major ameliorative, and I can only regret that mine continue to talk about diet in the way they do, with a lot of scientific jargon and in a sort of Oxford Group testimonial fashion. It’s a subject on which my own words carry, as the months go by, less and less weight.

  1952

  NOTES FROM THE OVERFED

  AFTER READING DOSTOEVSKI AND THE NEW WEIGHT WATCHERS MAGAZINE ON THE SAME PLANE TRIP

  WOODY ALLEN

  I am fat. I am disgustingly fat. I am the fattest human I know. I have nothing but excess poundage all over my body. My fingers are fat. My wrists are fat. My eyes are fat. (Can you imagine fat eyes?) I am hundreds of pounds overweight. Flesh drips from me like hot fudge off a sundae. My girth has been an object of disbelief to everyone who’s seen me. There is no question about it, I’m a regular fatty. Now, the reader may ask, are there advantages or disadvantages to being built like a planet? I do not mean to be facetious or speak in paradoxes, but I must answer that fat in itself is above bourgeois morality. It is simply fat. That fat could have a value of its own, that fat could be, say, evil or pitying, is, of course, a joke. Absurd! For what is fat after all but an accumulation of pounds? And what are pounds? Simply an aggregate composite of cells. Can a cell be moral? Is a cell beyond good or evil? Who knows—they’re so small. No, my friend, we must never attempt to distinguish between good fat and bad fat. We must train ourselves to confront the obese without judging, without thinking this man’s fat is first-rate fat and this poor wretch’s is grubby fat.

  Take the case of K. This fellow was porcine to such a degree that he could not fit through the average door frame without the aid of a crowbar. Indeed, K. would not think to pass from room to room in a conventional dwelling without first stripping completely and then buttering himself. I am no stranger to the insults K. must have borne from passing gangs of young rowdies. How frequently he must have been stung by cries of “Tubby!” and “Blimp!” How it must have hurt when the governor of the province turned to him on the Eve of Michaelmas and said, before many dignitaries, “You hulking pot of kasha!”

  Then one day, when K. could stand it no longer, he dieted. Yes, dieted! First sweets went. Then bread, alcohol, starches, sauces. In short, K. gave up the very stuff that makes a man unable to tie his shoelaces without help from the Santini Brothers. Gradually he began to slim down. Rolls of flesh fell from his arms and legs. Where once he looked roly-poly, he suddenly appeared in public with a normal build. Yes, even an attractive build. He seemed the happiest of men. I say “seemed,” for eighteen years later, when he was near death and fever raged throughout his slender frame, he was heard to cry out, “My fat! Bring me my fat! Oh, please! I must have my fat! Oh, somebody lay some avoirdupois on me! What a fool I’ve been. To part with one’s fat! I must have been in league with the Devil!” I think that the point of the story is obvious.

  Now the reader is probably thinking, Why, then, if you are Lard City, have you not joined a circus? Because—and I confess this with no small embarrassment—I cannot leave the house. I cannot go out because I cannot get my pants on. My legs are too thick to dress. They are the living result of more corned beef than there is on Second Avenue—I would say about twelve thousand sandwiches per leg. And not all lean, even though I specified. One thing is certain: if my fat could speak, it would probably speak of man’s intense loneliness—with, oh, perhaps a few additional pointers on how to make a sailboat out of paper. Every pound on my body wants to be heard from, as do Chins Four through Twelve inclusive. My fat is strange fat. It has seen much. My calves alone have lived a lifetime. Mine is not happy fat, but it is real fat. It is not fake fat. Fake fat is the worst fat you can have, although I don’t know if the stores still carry it.

  But let me tell you how it was that I became fat. For I was not always fat. It is the Church that has made me thus. At one time I was thin—quite thin. So thin, in fact, that to call me fat would have been an error in perception. I remained thin until one day—I think it was my twentieth birthday—when I was having tea and cracknels with my uncle at a fine restaurant. Suddenly my uncle put a question to me. “Do you believe in God?” he asked. “And if so, what do you think He weighs?” So saying, he took a long and luxurious draw on his cigar and, in that confident, assured manner he has cultivated, lapsed into a coughing fit so violent I thought he would hemorrhage.

  “I do not believe in God,” I told him. “For if there is a God, then tell me, Uncle, why is there poverty and baldness? Why do some men go through life immune to a thousand mortal enemies of the race, while others get a migraine that lasts for weeks? Why are our days numbered and not, say, lettered? Answer me, Uncle. Or have I shocked you?”

  I knew I was safe in saying this, because nothing ever shocked the man. Indeed, he had seen his chess tutor’s mother raped by Turks and would have found the whole incident amusing had it not taken so much time.

  “Good nephew,” he said, “there is a God, despite what you think, and He is everywhere. Yes! Everywhere!”

  “Everywhere, Uncle? How can you say that when you don’t even know for sure if we exist? True, I am touching your wart at this moment, but could that not be an illusion? Could not all life be an illusion? Indeed, are there not certain sects of holy men in the East who are
convinced that nothing exists outside their minds except for the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station? Could it not be simply that we are alone and aimless, doomed to wander in an indifferent universe, with no hope of salvation, nor any prospect except misery, death, and the empty reality of eternal nothing?”

  I could see that I made a deep impression on my uncle with this, for he said to me, “You wonder why you’re not invited to more parties! Jesus, you’re morbid!” He accused me of being nihilistic and then said, in that cryptic way the senile have, “God is not always where one seeks Him, but I assure you, dear nephew, He is everywhere. In these cracknels, for instance.” With that, he departed, leaving me his blessing and a check that read like the tab for an aircraft carrier.

  I returned home wondering what it was he meant by that one simple statement “He is everywhere. In these cracknels, for instance.” Drowsy by then, and out of sorts, I lay down on my bed and took a brief nap. In that time, I had a dream that was to change my life forever. In the dream, I am strolling in the country when I suddenly notice I am hungry. Starved, if you will. I come upon a restaurant and I enter. I order the open-hot-roast-beef sandwich and a side of French. The waitress, who resembles my landlady (a thoroughly insipid woman who reminds one instantly of some of the hairier lichens), tries to tempt me into ordering the chicken salad, which doesn’t look fresh. As I am conversing with this woman, she turns into a twenty-four-piece starter set of silverware. I become hysterical with laughter, which suddenly turns to tears and then into a serious ear infection. The room is suffused with a radiant glow, and I see a shimmering figure approach on a white steed. It is my podiatrist, and I fall to the ground with guilt.