Friday, December 31, 2010. Secret Sauce. Where The Action Wasn't. I think I know what the secret sauce is. You know: the stuff they give you with the chicken fingers at Raisin' Cane's. With the fried catfish fingers at the Red Lobster. The special sauce on the Big Mac. And with anything fried at a thousand chain restaurants where, if you ask the waiter what the recipe for the stuff is, he'll say, "If I told you that, I'd have to either kill myself or kill you."
Here, then, is the secret formula. I will not kill you, and I assure you that I will not kill myself. In descending order of quantity, the Secret Sauce is mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard, vinegar, salt, sugar and pepper. If there are little bumps of something in it, that's pickle relish and/or dried onions.
Period. That is the secret sauce, the world over. It's shipped in large tanker trucks to restaurants all over America. There was talk at one time of building a pipeline that would connect with all 212,376 restaurants serving secret sauce. But the Arabs got control of the company, and when the word got out President Obama saw to it that the company was denied right of eminent domain.
As obvious as this is, the chain restaurant industry has tried to keep the mystique of Secret Sauce by noting, correctly, that it tastes a little different from one establishment to another. But this is like saying that Clark Kent doesn't look exactly like Superman when he puts his glasses on. Each restaurant adds a few drops of something extra. Worcestershire sauce here, liquid smoke there, horseradish in a third place. Tabasco. Lemon oil. But it all starts with--and remains mostly--the stuff from the tankers. Or so I theorize.
Lunch at the Thai Chili, where I sampled their version of Panang curry. This is starting to turn into a major survey. I think the Thai Chili is very good, but their Panang curry takes third place behind Thai Spice and Thai Thai. Even so, I find myself hooked on this dish, and wonder why it took me so long to get around to it.
Chuck and Desiree Billeaud must have felt sorry for me after I told Chuck last night that I had no place to go on New Year's Eve. They invited me over for a light supper of turkey gumbo (they admitted that it was left over from Thanksgiving, but it was plenty good enough) and potato salad (freshly made). I wondered whether Chuck ate the potato salad in the bowl with the gumbo, as is common in his native Cajun country. He said he never could figure out the logic of that. Neither can I. But then we had a practice just as offbeat when I was growing up. We always ate chicken gumbo with baked sweet potatoes, in the same spoonful. I still love that.
I brought the Billeauds a bottle of Duval-Leroy Champagne--the Design Paris cuvee, whose bottle is decorated in gold paint with a drawing of Paris by the artist LeRoy Nieman. But we never did get around to opening it. This little party broke up around nine, as I was told it would.
My celebration maxed out when Mary Ann called me from the deep exurbs of Washington, D.C. at that city's midnight. She and the kids were partying, and she too felt sorry for me.
I seemed to have been the only one who didn't feel sorry for me. I had the day off from the radio show, and spent the whole day working on a big project I wanted finished before the 2011 began: setting up all my recipes in the new mechanics of the website. I didn't quite make it, but I would on New Year's Day, which had no more on my social calendar than today did.
Thai Chili. Covington: 1102 N US 190. 985-809-0180.
