$40 a pound for steak is cheap

This column is true.

Unfaithful readers may object that my scribblings have occasionally included what Mark Twain called “stretchers” — my interview with big dogs, for example, or claiming that Mr. Ed translated Roman historians.

But this one is true.

I know it because the flavor chemist who told me was my stepfather, the late Ira Litman. And my mother would have killed him if he’d lied to me.

Flavor chemists knew Ira as the man who invented strawberry.

Ira didn’t invent strawberry flavor, of course: He copied it. And for those of us who, like me, consider(ed) flavor chemistry a way to poison us with insidious toxic substances, Ira had a story about that.

Long time ago — 60 years or so — the makers of RC [Royal Crown] Cola gave Ira a generous allowance to come up with a flavor that did not exist in nature, but that people would like.

Two years later, Ira told RC it could not be done: Any flavor that tastes good is already out there in nature.

All Ira could do was to figure out what those tasty compounds are, and try to copy them.

Ira spoke sooth, for the walls of his lab were lined with more than 60 compounds, every one of them bearing the name of a plant, or a living organism. Ira compounded these essences to make flavors.

Of course the essences were chemicals. We’re all made of chemicals. So are plants and puppies and clouds.

Eating dinner with Ira was a guided tour through flavors.

“Don’t you love those fatty esters?” he asked, as we chomped into steak.

“Umm,” I said, reaching for salt (NaCl).

Ira said — and how could I deny it? — that grapes taste like methyl anthranilate, or that methyl anthranilate (C₈H₉NO₂) tastes like grapes.

So, methyl anthranilate is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen, and it tastes like grapes. I can’t riff on that. Bet you can’t either. But Ira could.

Ira’s nose was like Charlie Parker’s ears. He could smell anything’s chord changes, then riff on it.

Many a food conglomerate paid Ira to make such and such a flavor, and he did. Sometimes they would patent Ira’s formula in the company’s name.

“But, Ira,” I asked, “aren’t they ripping you off? What if another company wants to buy that flavor?”

“Then I’ll make them a better one,” he said.

Bird would have loved that guy.

Another flavor chemist told me that Ira was the last chemist to get royalties on his flavors.

Toward the end of his career, around 1990, McDonald’s and Burger King both approached him to make a lard-flavored French fry.

They did this because fast-food joints had stopped boiling French fries in lard due to health concerns. So they switched to vegetable oils.

But vegetable oils do not give French fries the flavor that we love(d). So they asked Ira to make a French fry that tasted like it had been deep-fried in lard.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Ira found that there are two giant potato wholesalers in the United States: one based in Idaho and one in Maine. What these corporations do, Ira said, is buy up each year’s potato crop and store it in massive warehouses, temperature-controlled to about 33 degrees Fahrenheit. Then they release the potatoes to the market when the price is right. (True confession: That was then, this is now. I do not know if that still holds.)

So Ira found himself in a bidding war between McDonald’s and Burger King. And Ira damn sure would have asked for his cut, his royalty (as king of flavors) from either or both of them.

What’s 1% of a billion French fries?

But he couldn’t figure out how to do it. The problem was where to insert the taste of lard.

He couldn’t do it in boiling oil, because the flavor would disintegrate in the heat.

He thought he might could do it by infusing the chilly potatoes with tasty gas in a warehouse in Idaho or Maine, and let them absorb the flavor for weeks or months. (Might could do it is a legitimate grammar construction in several states.)

But none of the potato magnates would turn over control of a warehouse, and millions of spuds, to Ira, even for a little while. So that project collapsed.

This explains why I am writing this column for you today, and paid fairly for what it is worth, rather than lolling in warm surf among lovely women in Aruba.

But to return to the subject of our symposium. After Ira retired, he was hired to advise flavor companies around the world.

In Moscow, Ira schooled Soviet scientists. And after the seminar, the banquet: where the state and its approved entrepreneurs served flavor chemists with mammoth steak.

I have no idea how many rubles it cost Russia to excavate a mammoth, 20,000 to 40,000 years after the poor critter died — dreaming of a better future? Aren’t we all? — or why, or who decided it was OK to slice off a bit of mammoth meat to feed flavor chemists, rather than turn over the whole frozenthawingbloody corpse to other scientists.

But — remember, I am not making this up — they served Ira a steak from an ancient mammoth, that had died and been preserved in not-quite-eternal ice.

A loin? A rib? Who knows?

But Ira and the Soviet chemists chowed down. As who would not.

I asked Ira: “What did it taste like?”

And Ira said: “To tell the truth, Bob, it was kind of tough.”