The Sweet and Savory Sublime

When I was a little boy, my parents would occasionally bring me along to their office building after school so that they could continue being insane workaholics- and so that I could ostensibly toil away on my homework unfettered by such distractions as Sega’s Alex Kidd in Miracle World or Randee of the Redwoods' latest bid for the Presidency.

But since my father is a doctor, and doctors tend to have waiting rooms piled high with People magazines, I actually spent most of my time flipping through “Star Tracks” and reading celebrity interviews. At that time, Luther Vandross had recently lost a ton of weight, so People ran an interview with him to inspire others to follow suit. Instead of finding inspiration in his successful weight loss program, however, I was awed by the so-called “Luther Burger,” a proprietary sandwich whose legend has apparently spread widely enough that it even merits an entry on the indispensable Snopes.com.

The “Luther Burger” is every fat little boy’s (and I most certainly wore Husky pants) concept of what the freedom that comes with adulthood must entail. That is, the freedom to dispense with a boring old hamburger bun, and instead enjoy your bacon cheeseburger as Yahweh surely intended . . . between two Krispy Kreme glazed donuts. There it is, the most sublime combination of sweet and savory since the Monte Cristo, or the Elvis with bacon for that matter (the latter of which, AK and I actually shared one time at Peanut Butter & Co. in New York).

Flash forward to a couple of years ago, when I found myself musing on the “Luther Burger” and wondering if I might conjure up my own sweet and savory food atrocity to bestow upon the world.

And then it hit me: French. Toast. Steak!

There, I said it.

What could be better than bathing a steak in a traditional french toast batter consisting of a couple of eggs, some whole milk, a little nutmeg, and a tablespoon or two of honey, then cooking it up with some butter in the frying pan, and finishing it off with some powdered sugar? Would the batter adhere to the steak anywhere near as well as it does to bread?

Well, I resolved that some day I would test this theory out in the real world, but here we are nearly three years later and the French Toast Steak is still but a dream. I simply don’t have the arterial fortitude to see this vision through. So I freely offer it to the world where some enterprising huckster, perhaps even the corporate test kitchen at IHOP (yes, the same sick minds that produced the french toasted cinnamon bun), can turn my dream into a mass market reality- or, at the very least, some post-collegiate loser can turn it into a late night drunken debacle. -AC