The Shape of Days

There’s a little TV show on cable’s Food channel — you know, the one with all the cooking shows — that I like to watch from time to time. It’s called “Good Eats,” and from what I understand it’s got quite the following. At least, it seems to, if the sold-out show at the Smithsonian’s Baird Auditorium tonight was any evidence of its popularity.

A friend of mine at the office found himself in possession of an extra ticket to tonight’s lecture by “Good Eats” host Alton Brown, and this afternoon he favored me by offering to take me along. I jumped at the chance. Because it was short notice, I didn’t score any photos or capture any audio or anything; I didn’t even have a notepad. I’ll have to write about this the old-fashioned way: By making a bunch of it up.

First things first: Alton Brown is both taller and chunkier in person than he looks on TV. It befits the host of a popular show about food and cooking to measure a few extra nautical miles around the equator, so to speak, and Brown carries the excess tonnage well. It’s all part of his slightly-larger-than-life persona, from his trademark wire-rimmed glasses to his spiky blond hair to his effervescent attitude.

Okay, enough of that writerly crap. On to the good stuff.

Alton Brown is funny. Seriously, he’s a funny guy. And he knows it too. His lecture — and I’m using the word “lecture” here in its most abstract sense — was a performing-without-a-net operation from the very beginning. He took the stage to enthusiastic applause and confessed that he was going to fulfill two lifelong dreams tonight: He was going to lecture at the Smithsonian Institution — “the frickin’ Smithsonian,” he said with unrestrained glee — and he was going to appear on “Inside the Actor’s Studio” with James Lipton.

Okay, he wasn’t really going to appear on “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” But the stage at the Baird Auditorium — beneath the rotunda of the Museum of Natural History in one of the spaces casual tourists rarely explore — was decked out with a couple of chairs and a table, and the setting was just too close to pass up. Brown called for a volunteer from the audience, and got about a hundred and ten. He pointed to a guy sitting near the front, a lanky, bearded fellow who bounded onto the stage in a flat-footed leap, to the audience’s delight. Brown shook his hand and leaned in to hear the man introduce himself. “Pleased to meet you, Kenneth … Brown?” he said, then spent several minutes vamping for the audience, trying to detect a family resemblance with his impromptu host.

Brown then showed Kenneth to the seat opposite his own and got him miked up, then handed him a stack of blue index cards inscribed with talk-show-host questions. Ken read the questions off one by one, having just a little fun with it. “You’re ad-libbing now, aren’t you?” Brown asked at one point. “You should be careful with that. Because I can turn on you like that.”

The purpose of Brown’s visit was more than purely academic. He was there tonight to pimp his upcoming Food Network show, “Feasting on Asphalt,” a limited-run series that the network describes as “Alton’s search for the best on-the-go grub.”

The production was strictly on the cheap, but surprisingly sophisticated. Brown had his Apple PowerBook laptop on the stage with him, running a DVD he’d made himself. As ersatz host Ken asked the questions from the stack of index cards, Brown ran the laptop, clicking the DVD menu to play selected clips from his upcoming show on a screen behind the stage. We got to see his visit to a St. Louis frozen custard shop called Ted Drewes, an ill-fated pickled pig’s foot encounter, and the eating of a locally produced candy that tasted surprisingly good but that contained a fluffy filling dyed a pink that’s, according to Brown, “not found in nature.”

In other clips, Brown expounded on the history of the automobile cup holder, delivered a short biography of Duncan Hines — “that’s right, the cake-mix guy” — and declared Colonel Harland Sanders to be the Elvis of American road food.

About the first half of the sit-down portion of the evening consisted of video clips introduced by Brown; the other half was comprised of stories of being on the road. Somewhat chagrined, Brown told us about how he’d crashed his BMW motorcycle during his cross-country trip while he was filming the show. A whole family of bunnies, he said, scampered out into the road in front of him, and he was forced to lay his bike down, breaking his collarbone in the process. He spent the rest of the trip riding in the back of a car with his arm in a sling.

Of course, the cameras were rolling when the accident happened, so it’ll be featured in episode four of “Feasting on Asphalt.”

After the conclusion of the faux question-and-answer portion of the show — during which we learned that Brown’s favorite noise is the sound of the engine of his 1979 Triumph T 140 V Bonneville with 1976 carbs and that his favorite curse is “Oh, bother” — Brown turned the evening over to real questions from the audience. And what followed was by far the funniest episode in a night filled with funny moments.

As members of the audience lined up two by two in front of the microphones that had been erected on either side of the auditorium for questions, a tiny English woman who never gave her name rushed the stage and declared, “Here I am!” Brown, and the rest of the audience, looked at her in surprise as she cried, “Tell us about salt!”

At that point, even an experienced lecturer — or, say, stand-up comedian — would have been thrown a little off his game. But Brown took it all in stride, mocking the woman gently before launching into a politely delivered and extraordinarily detailed discussion of the various types of commercially available salt, including refining processes and trace-mineral composition. After Brown finished giving this startlingly complete answer, the woman looked off to the corner of the auditorium and pointed at someone sitting there. Brown looked and saw an empty seat. “It’s my husband,” the woman said. “He’s curling up in embarrassment.” Lo and behold, he really was; curled in a decent approximation of a fetal position, he was all but invisible. “Sir,” Brown asked seriously, “would you like a drink?”

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My personal favorite moment of the night, though, came somewhat earlier. Ken, the volunteer from the audience who was picked to ask questions off cue cards, asked Brown what the strangest food was that he encountered while filming his show. “Is anyone here from Indiana?” he asked the audience in a soft voice. Three or four people clapped enthusiastically. “Is anyone here from Evansville?” he almost whispered. One guy in the back whooped loudly. Brown sprang to his feet. “What is it with you people and brain sandwiches?” he cried.

Apparently sandwiches made from — I’m not making this up — slices of batter-fried cow brain are considered quite the local delicacy in the mid-sized burg of Evansville, population 120,000 and change. Brown told the story of trying one — “jelly-like,” he called it — and getting about three bites in before the diner’s proprietor said, “Now, back before Mad Cow disease …” Brown heroically choked down his mouthful before asking the man to finish. “Back before Mad Cow disease, we used cow brain,” he said. “Slice ’em up nice and thick, you could get five or six sandwiches out of one brain.”

“What do you use now?” Brown asked, eyeballing his sandwich skeptically.

“Oh, them’s pig brain,” the proprietor said. As if that somehow made it all okay.

And as for our friend from Evansville? He said he doesn’t like ’em either.

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“Feasting on Asphalt” premieres July 29th at 9:00 p.m. Eastern on Food Network. As to whether the show features any brain sandwiches, you’ll just have to tune in to find out.

• Circles
• Yes, that’s it exactly
• Drink!