Out of My Mind

by Andy Rooney

  When I was up front with soldiers fighting the war, I ate what they ate. The food they got depended on how intense the fighting was. If things were relatively quiet, the company mess sergeant could set up a mobile kitchen and do some basic cooking in huge pots over propane stoves with what was the best Army field ration, called the ten-in-one. It was a heavy carton of food about 20-inches-by–12-inches-by-6 inches. I forget whether it was meant to feed ten men for one day, or one man for ten days but it had good stuff in it.

  If an infantry division was at the front, with the enemy behind hedgerows 100 yards across an open field, they ate K-rations. Each heavily waxed container was about the size of a Cracker Jack box, if I remember correctly, and contained a small can of hash, tuna fish or a portion of some dense, cooked egg mixture. There were a couple of graham biscuits, several envelopes of sugar, powdered coffee or lemonade and a fruit bar. The packages differed. Sometimes they had cheese, a chocolate bar that wouldn’t melt, bouillon cubes, matches, four cigarettes and toilet paper. They always contained chewing gum because the K-ration was packaged by Wrigley.

  VIVE LA FRENCH FOOD

  Call me disloyal, say I’m unpatriotic, charge me with being a turncoat: I feel about the French the way we all feel about difficult members of our family: They are infuriating but we love them anyway.

  Following are some notes I made—mostly about French food:

  Whatever else you think about the French, they are incomparably better with food than the people of any other country. They enjoy it more. They savor each morsel and make an event of the simplest meal. Americans gulp it down on the run.

  At noon, you see people everywhere walking home in France for lunch with long sticks of crusty bread under their arms. French bread is so much better than ours we should be ashamed of ourselves for eating Wonder Bread.

  Their cheese and their fruit are served soft and ripe. Too often our fruit is green and our cheese hard.

  We ate in Alain Ducasse’s restaurant in the Plaza Athénée Hotel, considered by some to be the best restaurant in the world. It was a wonderful experience.

  Wine costs more in a restaurant where the waiter leaves it on its side in one of those wine servers than it does if he stands the bottle in the middle of your table. A French waiter puts less wine in a glass than a waiter does in a New York restaurant so a bottle seems to last longer.

  Several restaurants we ate in served both sweet and salted butter. That’s classy.

  The charm of truffles escapes me.

  Dinner in any good restaurant in Paris costs almost twice as much as it would in New York. I don’t know how Parisians afford to live in Paris. Everything costs more. I priced men’s shirts in a store on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honore and they were 120 Euros each. One Euro, the money system that has replaced francs and other European currency, cost $1.19 when we were there. I didn’t buy a shirt.

  I went to the French Open one day. Out back, I had an ice cream bar for $6.00.

  Ice cream is the only food better here than in France. Theirs is more like frozen custard.

  One restaurant served “Curdled ewe milk, caramel-parfait honey ice cream.” Vanilla will be fine, thanks.

  I wanted to see the prices of basic groceries like sugar, flour, meat and vegetables so I asked the people at the desk in the hotel where I could find a supermarket nearby. The two men looked at each other and shook their heads. There are no supermarkets in Paris. To some extent, this is true of New York, too. The markets in the suburbs are much more super than those in the city. New Yorkers, like Parisians, often shop at the little store around the corner on their block.

  I made dinner reservations for 8 P.M. every night and we were always the first ones in the restaurant. They gradually filled up by 10 P.M. I don’t understand what time people get up and go to work if they don’t finish dinner until midnight.

  French food is better than French plumbing—but I don’t want to go into the details.

  Restaurants include a tip on the check for “service”—usually 18 percent. It makes it easier for those of us who are never sure how much to tip. I think that’s almost everyone.

  I am alternately charmed and infuriated by the French, but I like to go to a foreign country once in a while to make sure I still like it better here. I only go to countries I’ve been to before and I spent a year of my life in France during World War II. You don’t get over spending a year in France when you were twenty-three.

  FOOD FOR THOUGHTLESS

  Few writers who’ve written a book can resist going into a bookstore to see where they have it displayed. Usually the author finds it hidden away in the back of the store where no one’s going to find it. I always thought some store manager decided which books to put in the window and in the front of the store, and was disappointed to learn that publishers pay bookstores to display a book in a prominent position.

  There were dozens of diet books in one store I visited, and a short distance away there must have been 100 cookbooks. The Joy of Cooking and Fanny Farmer are still going strong. It’s ironic that the bestselling books anywhere are No. 1, cookbooks—books on eating—and No. 2, diet books—books on not eating.

  I was surprised to see they’re still selling the Atkins and Pritikin diet books and Dr. Herman Tarnower’s Scarsdale diet book. The first Atkins book was publishing in 1972. Since then, millions of copies have been sold. He allows a lot of fats but few carbohydrates. Pritikin advises eating a lot of carbohydrates.

  Both Atkins and Tarnower died badly. Tarnower was murdered by Jean Harris, and Atkins fell on an icy sidewalk in New York and died of a head injury. I met Tarnower at dinner on several occasions because Jean Harris was headmistress of a girls’ school where Margie taught math. I remember being nervous about my eating habits in the presence of the eminent diet doctor.

  There have never been any surveys done on what long-term effect diet books have on overweight people. Not much, I suspect.

  Cutting down on the amount of food you eat takes more willpower than most of us can muster for any length of time. It also seems apparent that genes have as much to do with a person’s weight as his or her eating habits. If your father or mother was fat, chances are you’re going to be fat. It isn’t so much the inclination your body has to be fat as it is your brain’s inclination to goad you into eating too much.

  There’s a lot of flimflam in most diet books. The actual text of The South Beach Diet is very short—fewer than 100 pages. The rest of the book comprises fillers like recipes and lists of recommended and prohibited foods. The author, Dr. Arthur Agatston, also includes testimonials from eleven anonymous patients of his listed as “Paul L., “Kate A.,” “Daniel S.” and “Judith W.” The most interesting thing about the segments Dr. Agatston claims his patients wrote is how much they all sound like Dr. Agatston. The writing style, phrasing and punctuation are all similar to his. I asked the publisher if Dr. Agatston would provide me with the full names of those people and was hardly surprised when he would not.

  I think I’ll just avoid diet books.

  BETRAYED BY AN APPETITE

  Our shape is always a matter of concern to us. We’re confronted with what we look like naked every time we take a shower. There aren’t many of us who are satisfied with what we’ve got in the way of a body. We have too much of it here, not enough there. Clothing is for more than warmth.

  I am moderately overweight and have been since I was a small boy. My mother, who never had a negative word to say about me, used a collection of euphemisms to describe me. She’d say I was “stocky,” “heavyset” or “big boned.” “Fat” she never called me. I played football in high school and college and at 5-foot-9 and 185 pounds, I was hardly tall and thin, but I was in good shape. Unfortunately, the muscles I had then are long gone or much diminished so, like everyone, I’ve occasionally considered “going on a diet.” My firm belief that diets are nonsense and don’t help has saved me going on any of them.

  There have been half a dozen diets over
the years that have been wildly popular. One of the earliest was called “Fletcherization.” A man named Fletcher had the theory that if you chewed your food for a long time before swallowing it, you’d lose weight.

  My theory is that diets work—if they work at all—not because of what they tell you to eat or not to eat but because they get you thinking about the food you’re taking in. That’s the secret in any diet.

  If you’re going to lose weight, you can’t do it sensibly the way sensible doctors recommend that you should. They tell you to simply eat less of everything. Easy for them to say. If I sat down to write a diet book to make money, I’d push my theory that you can’t lose weight sensibly. You have to adopt some crazy plan like the South Beach or the Atkins Diet, so I’d make up a new but crazy diet. It doesn’t matter what diet you decide on, it has to be something you can be proud of yourself for following. I suspect that if you ate nothing but Hershey Bars, nothing but bread and butter, nothing but beets or potatoes or eggs, you’d end up losing weight.

  When you consider how fine-tuned the body is in many ways, it’s surprising that it’s so dumb about what it tells us to eat. You would think that our appetites would direct us to the foods that fulfilled our individual needs for nutrition and vitamins. Why does our appetite so often misdirect us and make us want something that isn’t good for us? I don’t understand that. If we get a speck of dust in an eye, the eye waters to wash it out. If our body needs fluids, the sensation of thirst comes to us. Why then, do we have a desire to eat more than is good for us? Why are foods that are not what our body needs often so appetizing?

  When I have a small, simple lunch in my office, I often start back to work with the feeling I’ve done the right thing. Then, within minutes, I find myself overcome with the desire for a cookie, a piece of candy or a dish of ice cream. My body can’t need whatever the ingredients are in anything I want and I’m already overweight so why would my brain play such a dirty trick on me as to create the sensation that I want something more to eat?

  It would be better for our bodies if eating wasn’t so much fun.

  COOKING’ S THE THING WHEN VACATION COMES AROUND

  When I am at work, I write. When I am on vacation, I cook. I hope I write better than I cook, but I’ve done a lot of both. (It bothers me, in observing myself, to note that I eat more than I read.) Over the years, I have learned more about cooking from eating in good restaurants than I have learned from cookbooks. Every city has a couple of good restaurants, and New York has hundreds. It is now the best restaurant city in the world.

  Paris has some of the best, but the best in Paris are all French. New York has a great diversity. One of the interesting things that has happened in this country is the growing number of Japanese restaurants and the diminishing number of Chinese restaurants. Monosodium glutamate was the beginning of the Chinese decline.

  When you’re cooking, it’s fun to borrow a little from the cooking styles of other countries. You can take a little French and mix it with what you know of Japanese or Chinese. No one borrows in the kitchen from the Germans or the British, although there are some uniquely good German dishes.

  I often buy one of those little pork tenderloins. They’re deceptive because they’re solid meat with no waste, so they’re bigger than they look. Mine was a pound and a third, more than enough for four people. I cut it into cubes and stir fried it briefly and made a semi-Chinese dish with rice, onions, mushrooms and teriyaki sauce.

  I use rice more than potatoes, and pasta about as often as potatoes. I buy Basmati rice in twenty-pound bags because it’s so good and, while it costs more, the price of rice doesn’t have much influence on what dinner costs. I don’t follow the instructions anyone gives for cooking rice because they all tell you to use too much water. If you’re cooking one cup of rice, a cup and a quarter of water is enough. Add maybe half a teaspoon of salt. I like to cook rice in a broad-bottomed frying pan with a tight cover.

  Bring the water with the rice to a boil, then turn down the heat and leave it for six or seven minutes. Turn it off and forget it. Don’t remove the cover to look at it! Leave it for fifteen minutes and, anytime you’re ready, take off the cover and shuffle it off the bottom with a spatula. I add a little butter.

  When I cook potatoes, I either bake them until the skins are hard or cut them into half-inch cubes and put them in the oven on a sprayed cookie sheet at about 400 until they’re brown. You have to shake them up once in a while. In a separate pan, I cook a chopped-up onion in butter and mix it with the browned potatoes. If I bake the potatoes, I cut them in half lengthwise when they’re done. Then I scoop the potato into a bowl, mix it with butter and sour cream, salt and pepper and put it back in just half the skin so it’s heaped up. A little paprika on top doesn’t taste like much but it looks as though the cook cared.

  Blue cheese is good in either a salad or baked potatoes. Blue cheese is American and pretty good. Stilton cheese is from England and is better. Gorgonzola, from Italy, is excellent, and French Roquefort is much the best, but we got into a fight with the French about something and put such a high tariff on Roquefort that you can’t afford to buy it.

  Lettuce is better than it used to be, but tomatoes are worse. Like melons, you hardly ever get a ripe one. For years, I used nothing but romaine but now there are a lot of different kinds of greens that are good. I used to use mayonnaise in my dressing but now I just use olive oil and vinegar. Expensive olive oil is like a good bottle of wine but cheaper and worth it. Fancy vinegar is a waste of money. Sometimes I chop up a small red onion and put that in.

  Last night, two grandchildren were here for dinner, and I made ice cream from a quart of cherries Cecile bought.

  Today, I’m making bread. Making bread is one of the most satisfying little jobs anyone can do—better even than washing your car in the driveway. Rising bread could make an atheist believe in God. It’s like magic. My bread has been a disappointment over the years, though, and I’ve decided I’ve been trying to do it too quickly. So I’m letting this batch rise four or five times. What I’m after is sourdough. I hit the dough mixture in the bowl with no stick spray before covering it with plastic so the top doesn’t dry out.

  Maybe you’d like to come over for dinner some night.

  THE KITCHEN SINK IN COOKIES

  A lot of people enjoy cooking because it’s a creative hobby that can turn the chore of getting dinner for the family into a good time for everyone.

  I cook on weekends and miss once in a while because I don’t use a cookbook. If you need a cookbook, you may produce some good meals but you probably aren’t a real good cook.

  We have half a dozen cookbooks on the shelf in the kitchen and I’m puzzled by the fact that none of the recipes in the cookbooks use the ingredients they put in so many of the things we all buy in the grocery store.

  Look at the ingredients listed on a box of any popular cookie, Fig Newtons, for example. I have a box in my hand. Nabisco, the company that makes them, doesn’t have to worry that they’ll be driven out of business by people who make their own Fig Newtons. No kitchen I know has the stuff they put in them.

  Here are the ingredients listed on the Fig Newton box: “Flour, niacin, reduced iron (I could probably get some iron but I wouldn’t know how to reduce it so I could put it in my cookies), thiamine, mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid.” We don’t have any of those in our kitchen. (Everything seems to have those same ingredients, even though I can’t find a reference to any of them in the cookbooks of Fanny Farmer, Julia Child or Martha Stewart.)

  The ingredients are listed, by law I think, in the order of their volume. Nabisco proudly announces on the Fig Newton package that the cookies are “Made with REAL FRUIT.” In other words, no fake figs. “Figs preserved with sulfur dioxide” are listed among the ingredients in Fig Newtons. Apparently some of the fruit is not fig.

  The cookies are artificially flavored. Does artificial flavor come in a bottle or a box? It must be cheaper than real flavor but what�
��s it made of? Fig Newtons also contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil, calcium lactate, malic acid and soy lecithin.

  I also looked at the ingredients in a typical loaf of white bread in the supermarket. It’s terrible bread but it must be what people like. I often make bread, and all you need is flour, yeast, a little salt, a very little sugar and milk or water. A lot of the taste depends on letting the yeast and flour mixture mature together for a while, but look what was in the supermarket loaf: “Flour, iron, niacin, thiamine, riboflavin” . . . that same old list again. My dictionary says riboflavin is “the principle growth-promoting factor in vitamin B.”

  I bought a box of Famous Chocolate Wafers. They are thin, crispy and good. Sometimes, for a party dessert, I whip heavy cream, add a tablespoon of sugar and a little vanilla, and then “butter” the cookies with the whipped cream. I stand the cookies in a row, the way they were in their box, on a long plate, and cover them with more whipped cream.

  These cookies are totally different from Fig Newtons, but they seem to have been made from a lot of the same ingredients.

  A box of Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes contains, in addition to corn flakes, niacinamide, reduced iron, pyridoxine hydrochloride, which they identify as “vitamin B6,” “riboflavin” and many of the other things that are in Fig Newtons and Famous Wafers.

  A jar of peanut butter also has “partially hydrogenated oil” in it. I looked up “hydrogenate.” It means, “to infuse with hydrogen.” So I looked up hydrogen and it says, “A colorless, highly flammable gaseous element.”

  Why in the world would Skippy put a colorless, highly flammable gaseous element in its peanut butter?

  SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT DRINKING

  In the middle of the night when I can’t sleep, it seems to me I do my best thinking. The thoughts that seemed so bright and good in the middle of the night never seem so good the next morning. Often I can’t even remember some of the most brilliant ones I had.