Meat Me At The Plaza

  

Suzanne served me sauteed kale and veal cutlets for my birthday dinner last month. It's hard to imagine two dishes further apart on the gastro-political spectrum and it's a sign of the times that, whereas veal was available everywhere, I had to travel some thirty miles to three markets to find a bunch of kale. Not because Mainers are averse to kale or haven't kept au-currant but because the kale kraze has boosted demand way beyond supply. Recently, kale has been lauded with such beneficial attributes – from oxidants or anti-oxidants to epidermal unguents – that it's beginning to threaten the standing of the Chia and Quinoa seed. There's probably an all kale, cleansing diet out there by now, replacing the all cabbage diet of yore.

    

   

Harper, my four year old Golden, loves kale, too. He comes by it honestly, though, as a result of growing up in the garden and taking an epicurean interest in everything that sprouts as a result of our handiwork. Oddly, whereas he loves the string bean or carrot, his passion is for kale. Actually, when you consider his kibble, Harper is pretty much a vegetarian and is delighted to supplement his diet with the stumps of lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage and kale, all of which he can distinguish the sound of my preparing from three rooms away.

  

    

I spent nearly nineteen years as a vegetarian; from 1971, when as a young hippie it seemed a good tool, together with a Jackson Browne record, say, to have in ones dating arsenal, to roughly 1990, when traveling in Indonesia and Australia it finally just became too complicated. There wasn't much of a vegetable culture Down Under in those days and in Bali, well, if one were to ask if there's meat in some dish or other, the waiter would invariably respond with whichever answer he thought you might want to hear. I never had any particular moral or salubrious reasons for going green, but tried it for a few weeks as an experiment, kept going and eventually bought into the myth that I had lost digestive enzymes due to lack of use and would become ill should I return, as it were, to the flesh. Which I'm here to say is nonsense.

    

    

Along the way I had to juggle the ubiquitous social issues inherent in vegetarianism: putting hostesses to extra trouble on my behalf while saying something like, “ Please don't bother; I'll just have crackers...”, enduring the evident scorn of countless waiters and enraging my father at every restaurant he ever took us to. One particularly humiliating event actually involved a friend's father who had been Hemingway's personal physician and was cut entirely from the same cloth. White-bearded, burly, and quintessentially Western, Doc Saviers, father of my old friend Georgia, invited me to lunch one day when they were both passing through New York. We dined in the venerable Oak Room at the Plaza, which I suspected just from the décor would prove to be problematic. Sure enough, faced with a choice of such delicacies as Loin of Mutton Tartar and Lamb Kidney Provencal, I spent way too much time hiding helplessly behind the menu, forcing Georgia to eventually lean in to have a quiet word or two concerning my dilemma. As the minutes ticked by the good doctor offered some suggestions and the jig was clearly up. “You're not one of those God-damned bird-seed eaters, are you?” He demanded in the tenebrous hush of the Oak Room, and, to the hovering waiter, “ Have you any trout? He'll have the trout. You'll have the trout, won't you?” So I had the trout. And picked at it.

    

    

In retrospect it's probably safe to say that those years without meat have done my health some sort of foundational, if not lasting good. It remains to be seen what benefit will accrue to Harper; he's out in the garden with Suzanne even as we speak this morning. I'm pretty sure vegetarianism did little to advance my case with the ladies, certainly not, it must be said, with Georgia. I do know that in all those long years – my salad days – nobody ever ate kale.