My Legacy as a Car Engine Chef Bill Scheller

No Matter What Else I’ve Done . . . My Legacy as a Car Engine Chef

Bill Scheller

I still get the phone call now and then, or maybe an email, from radio stations as far away as Australia.

The question is always the same: “Are you the guy who cooks on his car engine?”

Well, yes and no. I did, and I don’t, not anymore. But the queries are my own fault, because, along with another wise guy, I wrote the book.

The book was Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your

Car Engine! It appeared in three editions between 1989 and 2008 and was just what the title said it was. For reasons I’ll explain later, it will be the last thing anyone on Earth ever hears of me.

It started in Montreal. My friend Chris Maynard and I had just returned from a long canoe trip in northern Ontario and had food – other than lakeside fried pickerel – on the brain. Pulling into the city, we headed straight for our favorite Montreal eatery,

Schwartz’s on Boulevard St-Laurent. Schwartz’s specialty is smoked brisket, ideally ordered “medium,” which means with a good helping of fat left on, and you can get it in a sandwich, on a platter next to a stack of sliced rye bread, or to go. Figuring we’d never make it home on our sandwiches alone, we bought a pound to wolf down along the way.

We hadn’t gotten to the border when Chris said, “You know, the brisket is a hell of a lot better when it’s warm. Remember those stories in men’s magazines, back in the Fifties, about truckers heating food on their engines? Why don’t we . . .”

Why don’t we, indeed. We got off the interstate in Vermont and bought a loaf of rye and a roll of aluminum foil. Out in the supermarket parking lot, we wrapped the brisket in the foil, lifted the hood of Chris’s VW Rabbit, and poked around to find a hot spot where the package wouldn’t fall off. Then we drove fifty miles to a rest stop, hauled out the warm brisket, and made a round of sandwiches.

Mag for people with money

That, we figured, was that.

But that, we should have known, is seldom that. A couple of years later, I got a call from an editor at The Robb Report, a magazine for people with a lot more money than you or me. They specialize in stories about how to spend it, and about cars and boats that cost way more than your house. Somehow they had heard that I had been part of a team that competed in the first running of the One Lap of America rally, and were wondering if I’d be interested in driving the Robb Report entry in the upcoming 1988 event and writing about it. I couldn’t drive the One Lap alone, of course, since it involved completing an 8,000-mile circuit of the United States in one week. I needed a co-driver, and the story needed a photographer. Chris Maynard loved to drive, and he earned his living with his cameras. So there was the Robb team.

We were on our way to the magazine’s office when Chris said to me, “Remember the time we heated the Schwartz’s brisket on the Rabbit engine? Why don’t we take it a step further and actually cookstuff on the motor? We can tell the people at Robb that it’ll be a part of the story –- “One Lap team eats along the way without stopping at fast food joints.”

They didn’t throw us out

“Chris,” I said, “The people who read this magazine are not the car engine cooking type. You bring that up, and they’ll throw us out of the office..”

Chris brought it up. And they didn’t throw us out. Don’t play it up too much, the editor said, but sure, put it in the piece.

The magazine flew us out to Detroit, where we were set up with our ride – a stretch Lincoln Town Car with a big V-8. It wasn’t the usual six-figure Robb iron, but was just the thing to live in on the road for a week. We had a couple of days until the rally started, so we stocked up on ingredients and headed to the home of a friend of Chris’s who wrote for the Detroit Free Press. He lent us his kitchen, where we put together a week’s worth of entrees – boneless chicken breasts, veal cutlets, pork tenderloin medallions, ham steak – all stuff that would cook well on the Lincoln’s exhaust manifold and other hot spots, all nicely seasoned with oil, garlic, herbs, and sprinklings of white wine. We froze it all overnight in our hotel’s kitchen, packed it in a cooler, and set off from the starting line at Detroit’s Renaissance Center.

We didn’t come close to winning the rally, which involved precision time-speeddistance events separated by long, coffee-andDylan-tapes-fueled rides. As I recall, we came in somewhere in the middle of sixty or seventy teams. But we were mildly famous even before we left Detroit. The Free Press guy whose kitchen we used had told a colleague on the paper’s lifestyle page what

we were up to, and she interviewed us, got a few of our recipes, and made us the section’s lead story on the day the rally started. We were newspaper celebrities in Detroit. What’s the half-life of that sort of notoriety?

Longer than we thought, as it turned out. A couple of weeks after we got home – me to Massachusetts’ North Shore, Chris to Manhattan – I got a call from Alan Richman at Peoplemagazine. An editor at Peoplehad seen the Free Pressstory and told Richman to see if he could locate the guys who cook on car engines and write a story on them. Next thing we knew, Richman and photographer Peter Serling were at my house – as was Chris – for a day’s ride up the coast, all the while cooking boned game hens and chicken thighs with oyster stuffing on the manifold of a rented Chrysler New Yorker. The piece ran in People, along with a shot of me and Chris, heads under the hood, looking like two nuts who cook on car engines.

Call from a publisher

Now the thing had taken on a life of its own. Hardly a month had gone by when I got a call from the publisher at Villard Books, a Random House imprint. Could we do a cookbook? Instructions, recipes, the works? And make it funny? Since Chris and I had spent our lives in professions whose motto is “Sure – when do you want it?” the game was on.

Our idea was to make the book not only a collection of recipes that actually worked, but also a send-up of American culinary culture – and culture in general – in that penultimate year of the Yuppie Decade, 1988.

We organized the recipes, each one of which we tested on various cars, according to regions of the United States (later editions included world recipes). And we wrote a lengthy introduction that explained not only our own discovery of car engine cooking, but a history of culinary locomotion that included Huns who heated meat by sitting on it while they rode horseback, and Napoleon’s onboard carriage stove.

And then we got into the recipes: Hyundai Halibut. Blackened Roadfish. Donner Pass Red Flannel Hash. Lead-foot Stuffed Cabbage. Chicken Breast Lido (Iaccoca). Each regional section and each recipe had its own goofy introduction, in which we blathered on about everything from Ralph Nader (“Safe-at-Any-Speed Stuffed Eggplant,” a Middle-eastern dish that, “Like the Corvair, if you handle it right, you don’t have to turn it over,” to our having observed, on a Silicon Valley roadway, a BMW with a crystal hanging from the rearview mirror –“the very spirit of modern California, the perfect combination of mammon and mystery, the Bavarian and the Aquarian . . . emblematic of the California approach to food as well. The idea is to take expensive, high-quality ingredients, and combine them in such a way as to make people burble over how imaginative and creative you are.”

We commented that “fusion” cookery “combines ingredients and techniques from countries that used to know enough to stay the hell away from each other, unless one of them was in urgent need of rubber or silk or tea.”

And the Northeast? “New England is where American cookery was born,” we wrote, before opining that “its simplicity and hearty wholesomeness” had descended into a blandness that “parallels that of the native English stock, who originally must have been an interesting and adventuresome lot despite their wacky religion, but who have long since settled back to clip coupons while wearing high-water pants with whales embroidered on them.”

The publisher titled our book Manifold Destiny, and it hit the stands in the spring of ’89. The PR people at Villard did quite a job, landing us lots of radio interviews – the kind where the host hasn’t read the book, and asks dumb questions about roadkill –

and even a fair amount of TV exposure. I forget which edition it followed, but we even had a spot on “Today,” where we stood in front of a car outside the show’s studio at Rockefeller Center and fed Katie Couric our “Eggs-on Cheese Pie” that we had cooked somewhere else.

Our crowning television escapade was an appearance on a German variety show. We were whisked away to Dortmund, where we cruised around town with the mayor, cooking shrimp on the engine of a vintage Caddy driven by its owner, a German Elvis impersonator. Then we drove into an indoor arena, where the host sampled the shrimp before a live audience. This all involved four days of rehearsals, and a lot of beer.

I even landed a spot on “To Tell the Truth,” then in its umpteenth iteration but still counting Kitty Carlisle among its panelists. For anyone not up on their antique game shows, the idea was to appear with two other characters, both of whom pretended to be me. We were all introduced as the coauthor of the book and scored points by getting panelists to make the wrong guesses as to who was telling the truth. I went home with the smallest purse, because I failed miserably at trying to pass as one of the phonies. When Kitty asked how I’d make sushi, and I answered, “Leave it in the trunk on a cool night,” they all figured me for the kind of smartass who’d write the book.

The book sold fairly well, but there was one big problem that kept it from hitting the best seller lists. People who might be inclined to cook on their car engines weren’t likely to get the jokes, and people who got the jokes weren’t exactly the engine-cooking demographic. With a nod to India’s Tata company’s purchase of Jaguar, we titled an Indian recipe “Jewel in the Crown Shrimp Curry, or, Ta-ta to All That,” and we suggested that readers play Albinoni’s Adagio while preparing abalone on their Cadillac Allante. Any yuks we got from that sort of thing probably came from people who can’t check their oil. And guys running to grab the aluminum foil were, ten to one, lifting their ball caps and scratching their heads.

Skewer a popular diet We did well enough, though, for Villard to ask for a sequel, food-centered but not necessarily involving cars. We came up with the perfect foil to the depredations of the food police, who were then hitting full stride in their attack on good eats. I had wanted to skewer the then-popular Diet for a Small Planetby titling our book Diet for a Large Person, but someone at Villard was probably pals with the Small Planet publisher, and my idea got nixed. We wound up with The Bad for You Cookbook, a compilation of old family recipes, our own creations, and stuff cribbed from cookbooks written back when “You’re too thin” was still part of the American conversation. We collected it all in chapters with titles such as “The Gospel of Heavy Cream,” “If It Can Be Poached, It Can Be Fried,” and “Ethnic Heavyweights.” Where else would anyone find deep-fried sweet potato balls, fruit dumplings with crème anglaise, chicken pudding, or pork cake? Actually, most of the recipes were for dishes that wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow in Eisenhower’s day, but were sure to get an “Eww” from a salad ‘n’ water ‘90s luncher.

Our publisher didn’t help by running a banner “Bye-Bye Health Food! Hello, Heart Disease!” on the back cover, but we did get a lot of exposure. Our TV apex was when, after spending all night whipping up a few of our most outrageous dishes in my mother’s kitchen in Paterson, New Jersey, we lugged them over to Manhattan for an appearance on CBS This Morning. Chris was about to chow down on a big slice of lard cake when sylphlike co-host Paula Zahn said, “You’re going to put that in your mouth?” I was afraid I was going to have to kick Chris, who I was sure had a rejoinder bubbling up out of

his irreverent brain that would have triggered the network’s seven-second delay. But he was a good boy that day.

Bad for Youhas faded into gimmickbook limbo. Chris Maynard left this world –the poorer, in the realms of wisdom, wisecracks, and photography – nearly ten years ago. And what about that leap at immortality I mentioned earlier? That was courtesy of the Library of America, which publishes not only the heavy hitters of our national canon, but the occasional themed volume – collected writings on baseball, the sea, New York, L.A. … and food. Some years ago, when the late Molly O’Neill was gathering material for American Food Writing, she asked me and Chris if she could include the opening chapter of Manifold Destiny. Of course, we said, We’d be honored. And we were – not just in type, but in the paper it appears on. Library of America books are printed on stock guaranteed to last five hundred years.

And that, unless electrons can be sieved through devices yet unknown, is how long Chris and I will last.

Photo ©Peter Serling Chris Maynard (left) and Bill Scheller admire the ample cooking surface on the engine of an '88 Chrysler New Yorker., as it appeared in the July 11, 1988 issue of People magazine.