Alton Brown couldn’t get dates.
It was the 1980s; he was a dirt-poor college kid.
And so — even though guys didn’t cook a lot then — he turned to the kitchen and invited girls for dinner, Brown told a Penn State audience Wednesday night.
He looked up French recipes. He scoured Bon Appetite magazine. He soon found a recipe that included ingredients useful not only for dinner, but also for breakfast. (Cue the audience: ‘Oooooooooh.’)
‘I counted recipes like other guys counted bases,’ Brown said. ‘All I really wanted was to get to third,’ en route to a breakfast-recipe ‘home run.’
The audience — just more than 2,000 people in Eisenhower Auditorium — roared with approval.
Brown, a best-selling author, magazine writer and Peabody-winning Food Network personality, appeared at Penn State as part of the annual Distinguished Speaker Series. He spoke for about 50 minutes before opening the floor to a 25-minute question-and-answer session. (To open a photo gallery from his University Park visit, click on the large image above.)
From his opening one-liners — ‘So it’s raining, and there’s nothing to do in this town’ — to the very end, the whole event was quintessential Brown: edgy, spontaneous and semi-risque, with two parts humor and one part practical advice. (Make no mistake, he said: College students should learn to cook.)
He offered some light insight into his upcoming projects — including, he said, a book about how to cook in college. On that front, Brown offered more than a half-dozen tips for ‘college culinarians.’
Among the tips: Crash art-gallery openings and pot-luck dinners, eat at retirement homes, snag unwanted room-service food and go Dumpster-diving for gourmet leftovers.
But do not — DO NOT — embrace Ramen-noodle-eating culture, Brown warned.
The trouble with Ramen, he deadpanned, is that it’s made partly with baby panda. (He flashed a huge photo of a wide-eyed panda on a projection screen.)
Some of Brown’s other wisdom:
- ‘I don’t believe in college students’ having microwaves,’ he said. Inevitably, he added, college guys will try to microwave stuff that’s not supposed to be microwaved — like raw, intact eggs and Marshmallow Peeps.
- A super-cooled solution in a blender can offer a speedy method for cooling a can of room-temperature beer. Brown demonstrated this skillfully. An audience member who presented Brown with identification was allowed to chug the cooled brew.
- Diet sodas are ‘bad; they’re evil,’ Brown said. In adjusting his own diet to drop 50 pounds, he said, he decided he’ll never drink diet soda again. He’s also cut way back on his meat and milk consumption, he said.
In a press conference before his talk, Brown said he was in State College for less than a day. (He had a Thursday-morning television appearance with Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa scheduled in New York.)
But he didn’t leave before having a State College meal: a cod dinner at the Nittany Lion Inn, with a sauce so hot that it numbed his tongue, he told reporters.
Asked if he could explain the U.S.’ unyielding fascination with cuisine, Brown said food is a unifying element in a society otherwise fragmented by politics, religion and other forces.
‘We all need to eat,’ he said. ‘ … We still need to have something that’s the same for all of us in this room.’
He soon added: ‘The real power that food has is the power to bring people together.’
