Eat Like a Man: My Manhood Test

I had a recent run-in with this cookbook.

Cookbooks are an area of interest for me, somewhat because I cook, but more because I'm consistently boggled by the fact that they turn out so terribly.

This one did a decent job with some of the common problems.

For one, it seemed like most of the recipes had pictures, and ones that showed the food looking good. People, for the love of god and everything he has ever cooked up, put a picture with EVERY recipe. I don't know what pozole looks like. Is it liquidy? Slimy? Because mine was liquidy and slimy and I need to know that it was wrong.

The smaller written parts of this book were actually more entertaining and helpful than the recipes. For example, advice nuggets like writing down a simple pancake recipe on an index card that goes in your wallet is a pretty decent idea. You might only use it after crashing at someone's house a half a dozen times, but according to the punch-based evidence, that's twice as often as I use my Jimmy John's punch card.

My issue with this book was two-fold.

One, it had that Esquire feel where it's a little too much about saying, A real man is like this and that. For example, this book is a big proponent of the idea that experimenting in the kitchen off book is the real way to cook.

I hear this kind of thing a lot. This or that person "can only cook from a recipe." That's a silly thing to say, and cooking is one of the only fields where this applies.

At work, gearheads are always coming in to look at our Chilton manuals. It's not because they're dumb or don't know what they're doing. It's because there is a lot to know, and some adjustments and specifications on cars have to be fairly exact. But we still consider these people mechanics.

Cooking is the same deal, if you ask me. And the only people who talk a lot about how cooking off book is the only real cooking are either people who cook and want it to seem more special than it is, or people who don't cook and use it as an excuse to never learn.

I made a polenta from this book, and it was godawful. Mushy, not super flavorful. It has all the looks of something a guy should like, a goldenbrown cornbread bed covered in sausage and cheese. But it's pretty much shit, I have to say.

Second, the recipes seemed a little complicated to me. I wouldn't call myself a total amateur. I've made lots of different shit, and my percentage of good foods is improving. But a lot of these involved marinades and prep work that takes goddamn forever, or ingredients that you're not likely to have laying around.

Which brings us to Coca-Cola Fried Chicken.

Things seemed to be going well. The shit had been marinading, the batter looked good, and I had the oil going strong.

Then, as I was pulling the last piece of chicken out of the fryer, I saw that the thermometer I was using had broken sometime during the cooking process.

Fuck.

So not only was there potentially broken glass in the chicken, but almost certainly mercury.

It's always struck me as hilarious, by the way, that mercury thermometers go in our mouths. Glass and mercury. Go ahead and just stick that in your mouth. Couldn't they have come up with some kind of thermometer made of mace and a cactus?

Anyway, this was the test of whether I was a man, as I saw it. Could a man resist, after standing in a kitchen for an hour or so, frying chicken, at least sampling the meat, despite the potential for horrific internal injury and poisoning that has really, really fucked up a bunch of Asian people?

Of course not.

I took a bite.

Now here's the thing: It was only a bite.

The coke marinade, the big difference between this and other fried chicken? Tasted pretty much the same to me. It was darker, and that was about it. But not irresistable. Not so delicious that it was worth a second bite, and the rest went in the trash.

Two epic failures from one book were enough to have me move on. They may have both been my fault, but I decided to take it like a relationship that starts off with two pretty bad dates. Maybe we could have made many years of beautiful meals together, but hey, I'm a man. Man enough to break the streak before it becomes a pattern, anyway.