mcaloo tikki sandwich
lucky peach presents: power vegetables! (2016)
I didn’t want to tell you to cook with what’s in season (you have already been told to do this) or to treat your beautiful in-season vegetables simply (ditto). I didn’t want to put together a vegetable/vegetarian cookbook for its explicit healthfulness or wholesomeness, though I appreciate and welcome those qualities in any dish, vegetable or not.
I wanted this book to be 98% fun and 2% stupid. I wanted something that took the sweaty, anxious what-are-we-going-to-eat-this-week feeling that sometimes casts a shadow over a Sunday trip to the supermarket and answered it, yelling WE ARE GOING TO EAT VEGETABLES AND THEY ARE GOING TO BE AWESOME. — Peter Meehan, in the introduction to Power Vegetables!
It seemed like Peter Meehan just couldn’t fail. In 2004, still in his 20s and without any qualifications other than being Mark Bittman’s assistant, he was hired to replace Pete Wells at the $25-and-under restaurant column in the New York Times. He co-wrote the original Momofuku cookbook before launching Lucky Peach magazine with David Chang in 2011. When Lucky Peach folded in 2017, due to vague “creative differences” between Meehan and Chang as well as the economic reality of being a print magazine in 2017, Meehan landed on his feet again, getting the plum job of food editor at the Los Angeles Times after Jonathan Gold’s death from pancreatic cancer. He revamped the food coverage at the Times, creating its first standalone section in almost a decade and using the same “edgy” aesthetics that became synonymous with Lucky Peach.
All seemed to be going well over at Meehan’s NYC abode — he never moved to LA, despite suddenly becoming the most influential and highly paid food voice in the city — until former employee (and current Grub Street columnist) Tammie Teclemariam accused Meehan of all sorts of bad behavior on Twitter.
The thread is still up if you want to read it. Teclemariam details Meehan’s abusive yelling, the disgusting sexual harassment, the blatant racism. The shoe dropped on June 29th, 2020, the height of everybody going a little crazy due to, well, you remember. And Teclemariam was on a tear. Just a few weeks previously, she posted the photo of Bon Appetit editor Adam Rapoport in brownface that led to his resignation and the sudden collapse of Condé Nast’s burgeoning Youtube takeover.
Other post-#MeToo and COVID-era food media cancellistas — Rapoport, Mario Batali, Ken Friedman of The Spotted Pig — are still around. Batali is making a fortune doing online cooking classes. Ken Friedman was a silent partner in LA hotspot Horses, which still plugs along after suffering its own horrific sex/animal cruelty scandal. Rapoport is supposedly “very active on LinkedIn,” though I will not be researching that claim. Meehan’s former partner David Chang had to apologize for his own abusive behavior before having to apologize again for colonizing chile crisp. And he’s still one of the most ubiquitous faces (and voices) in food media. But Meehan has completely disappeared from public life. Where is he? What is he doing? When will he reappear? Because YOU KNOW a psycho, angry, ambitious workaholic like Meehan will not be satisfied living in obscurity for the rest of his life.
So, until Meehan pops up and terrorizes a whole new batch of employees (btw it looks like the White House is currently without an executive chef — Does Trump like Japchae?), let’s take a look at Peter Meehan’s (almost) vegetarian 2016 cookbook Power Vegetables! Turbocharged Recipes For Vegetables With GUTS.
This has to be one of the ugliest cookbook covers ever committed to print. The black background, the haphazard pile of vegetables, the science fair plasma globes: what is going on? Love it or hate it, Lucky Peach magazine had a keenly articulated sense of style, and this is not it. Vegetarian cookbooks written by straight men always have to over-assert their masculinity. I wrote a little bit about this phenomenon in the Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall newsletter from a few weeks ago. But Meehan goes much further, diving headfirst into self-parody without ever winking or seeming like he’s in on the joke. He takes himself very seriously, and I’m afraid he takes this heinous cover art just as seriously.
2016 was right before Trump’s first election win, right before #MeToo got off the ground. It was a moment where the slow cultural trickle of feminization seemed inevitable, where “serious” books like Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men quaintly predicted the actual end of the patriarchy. Men like Meehan and Rapoport, working in the most historically feminine sector of the media, cooking, were explicitly rewarded by the powers that be (The Sulzbergers, Condé Nast) for being stereotypically masculine. They weren’t the faggy James Beards and Craig Claibornes of the previous generation of food editors. And they certainly weren’t actual women. Sy Newhouse tried that for a hot minute when he made Ruth Reichl editor of Gourmet, and then he ended Gourmet, put all his resources into Bon Appetit, and hired (GQ editor, not much food experience) Rapoport to basically replace her.
As for Meehan’s “turbocharged recipes for vegetables with guts,” they look a lot like other popular 2016 vegetable recipes. Though he created parameters like “no pasta” and “no grain-bowls,” perhaps a subtle dig at (noted woman!) Jessica Koslaw’s then “super-trendy” SQIRL grain bowl, the recipes in Power Vegetables! are a greatest hits of mid-teens ingredients and flavor profiles. We’ve got pickled napa cabbage, “corporate juice bar” kale salad, carrots in carrot dashi, zucchini mujadara, lots of capers, fish sauce, kombu, and yes, chile crisp.
There’s only one veggie burger recipe in the book, and it’s not even a real veggie burger. The McAloo Tikki Sandwich is a riff on a North Indian snack, aloo tikki, a potato/pea/cashew/cheese patty sometimes served in between two pieces of bread. Traditionally, you cook the potatoes and mash them up with the other ingredients, creating a soft, burger-like disk. Meehan simplifies the process by eliminating the nuts and cheese. Instead of boiling and mashing the potatoes, you grate and fry them, like a latke.
The result, a crispy potato and crunchy fried pea pancake with cumin, coriander, and turmeric, works better as an interracial Hanukkah treat than it does as a veggie burger. I understand that peas are legumes and contain protein, but veggie burgers should have more protein than a few scattered peas. There’s a satiety that needs to occur after eating a great veggie burger, a feeling of indulging and a contrasting yet complementary feeling of moral superiority. You naughtily ate a burger, but you didn’t give into your basest (carnist — my favorite slur uttered by angry vegans) desires. The McAloo Tikki Sandwich doesn’t quite accomplish the satiety or the superiority. But if you’ve ever wanted to put a latke on a hamburger bun and slather it with ketchup and mayo, you could do worse.
One of the cheffiest, most East Coast instructions Meehan gives is to put these suckers on potato buns. Potato on potato. Though he doesn’t mention the brand by name, he clearly means Martin’s Potato Rolls, the bun of choice for Danny Meyer at Shake Shack and David Chang at his own short-lived Fuku. Lucky Peach even wrote a profile of the Pennsylvania bun factory in 2014, which, along with the rest of its articles, has been scrubbed from the internet. But, alas, Martin’s got into its own cancellation snafu in 2022 when it was revealed that the executive chairman Jim Martin donated $100,000 to far-right Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
I’m no saint. I bought Meehan’s cookbook back in 2016. I made Meehan’s whitewashed Indian latke burgers two days ago. I spent $9 at McCall’s on a pack of fascist potato rolls flown in from Pennsylvania, furthering right-wing causes and contributing to the warming of the planet. But, I do this as an academic exercise, to record food history as it was, not as we’d like it to have been. Meehan and his brethren were major players in recent restaurant and media culture, even if we want to think they’ve been scrubbed away, sequestered on overpriced Zoom cooking classes and in the bowels of LinkedIn. I have a feeling we haven’t heard the last of them.
Unlike the cover, this article is a work of art!