He’d Rather Not Be in That Number When the Crepes Come Marching In

Way down yonder in New Orleans again. Bourbon Street. Dixieland. The French Quarter.

It’s supposed to be the home of some of America’s finest restaurants. I wouldn’t know. I’ve been to New Orleans for five Super Bowls and the nearest thing I’ve had to a gourmet meal was a box lunch.

During Super Week, the only way the common folk can get into one of those tony eateries is with a mop and pail.

It’s all right with me. I don’t think I’d like fried bananas anyway.

In fact, I don’t hold with haute cuisine very much at all anymore. I don’t think even Escoffier would go along with what they’ve been doing to food.

My little granddaughter, Danica, unwittingly put her finger on it one day when she was trying to read “Oriental food.” It came out “ornamental food,” and that’s about what it is these days.

Just ask Dan Jenkins. My pal, Dan, the author and satirist, is, to coin a phrase, fed up with modern food serving. Typically, he has taken out after it in a savagely funny piece in January’s Playboy.

“It is clearly time for food eaters to take a tough stand on the issue of food,” Dan storms. “If we don’t, a hearty meal in another couple of years will consist of a mesquite-smoked quail’s egg sitting on a little bed of tomato ice.”

Adds Dan: “When I say we should take a tough stand on food, what I have in mind is murder.”

Dan would like to trigger a show called, “Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of America?” who he bets are named Duane and Trevor and Colin and Randall. They are, he says, devoting all their energies to “making all food look like Monet’s lilies.”

Dan went to the barricades one night when, he notes: “I happened to gag on a piece of zucchini that some precious chef had cleverly disguised as a french fry.”

He felt even more betrayed when what he took to be a platter of onion rings turned out to be calamari. Dan was thunderstruck. “Squid?!” he demanded. “Like in octopus squid? Like in that thing it took John Wayne and Ray Milland an hour to kill in ‘Reap The Wild Wind’?”

Dan decided it was time to speak out before we became a nation of lotus eaters.

“Let me tell you about food,” he lectures sternly. “Food is brown and white and not crinkly. OK, it’s orange sometimes--if it’s cheese. Maybe maroon--if it’s pinto beans. I’ll give you two kinds of green. Lettuce green--none of that bibb or romaine bleep--and dark green for green beans, which you cook in lard if you don’t have a ham bone or slab of bacon around.

“Don’t get white mixed up with cheese. You want Swiss cheese on a cheeseburger, go to the West Side!”

Dan doesn’t need Julia Child or the Galloping Gourmet to tell him how to cook American.

“The key to good food is grease,” he says. “Grease got us through the Depression. Grease is coming back. You know the first thing grease is gonna do? Go round up aspic and start kicking butt.”

Jenkins thinks the apotheosis of the American culinary art was the chicken-fried steak. Smothered in gravy so thick with flour and cream you could use it for epoxy.

“Food don’t make noise, either,” challenges Dan. “Like, when you bite into some kind of vegetable that’s been steamed and you hear it crack, that’s BS! Only four kinds of food can make noise. A taco makes noise. A potato chip makes noise. Corn on the cob makes noise. And the lower half of an ice cream cone makes noise.

Dan recommends chefs be at least indicted for capital offenses like using seed buns for hamburgers, “putting sweet sauce on any meat, cooking fried chicken in corn-meal batter like it’s some stinkin’ fish.” Green beans, he warns, should be cooked in salt pork instead of Giorgio perfume. He wonders what grapes are doing on plates at any time.

He sneers at foods of the world. Chinese food, he dismisses as “shoelaces and sweet-and-sour coat buttons.” Of French food, he says, “You’re looking at a fat duck or a pureed rabbit.” California cuisine, he describes as “I’ll just have a little dish of feijoas with some fern on the side, and perhaps a tiny glass of babaco. And then, get me out of here, you swine, so I can go get something to eat.”

Jenkins has a point. The great foods of the world never came out of some Parisian’s haughty idea of what people like to eat. They came out of the kitchens of the poor. You think some lah-de-dah chef invented the taco? Pizza? The hot dog? You ever get good chili in a place where you couldn’t eat with your hat on?

Who gave the world the hamburger? Some guy with teeth missing and a tattoo on his arm who worked in the back of an all-night diner, learned how to cook in prison and answered to the name Frenchy is who.

So, I don’t feel bad I can’t get in those places where they put eggs on a bed of spinach. I don’t want to eat any food I haven’t at some time in my life eaten off a paper plate, or in any place where they call chocolate pudding mousse .

I like places where, before you put a fork into it, you yell at the fry cook, “Hey, Joe, how old is this pie and do I get my money back if one of the raisins walks out of it?”