In honor of the news that a low-fat diet is unlikely to have any effect on cancer or cardiovascular disease, Iris and I had burgers and fries for lunch yesterday. Furthermore, the burgers were cooked medium.

I recently reviewed a burger place and castigated them for, among other things, overcooking the burger that I ordered medium. This happens to me all the time. I suspect it’s less a liability issue than a careless grill cook issue, because I’ve had it happen even at a high-end restaurant, where a friend and I each ordered a burger medium rare, and mine arrived medium rare while his was well done. Or maybe he found some way to offend the cook while I wasn’t looking.

Anyway, in response to my review I got email from a fan of the place, saying that she liked the burger there, and I was crazy for ordering a medium burger, and probably cooking me one would violate the health code.

Here she was wrong; menus in Washington do have to warn the customer that consuming “undercooked” meat can cause foodborne illness, but restaurants are free to serve a customer who requests a medium rare patty, or steak tartare, or raw oysters.

People (myself included, no doubt) have an amazing capacity to focus in on the risk associated with one particular course of action and ignore other risks. There’s a great essay by Jeffrey Steingarten, of Vogue magazine, in which he decides to give up skiing so he can eat more raw shellfish. (Later he admits that he’s never been skiing.)

Iris and I have a similar deal. We don’t have a car and rarely ride in one, and that’s the most dangerous thing the average non-extreme person does. (Car-riding and burger-eating are both pretty safe on the whole, but it still amazes me that some people put their kids into a car every day.) So we’ll stick with medium burgers, which taste better.

Here’s a burger-making tip. When you have a small mouth and sixteen teeth, it’s hard to bite through a thick patty, but it’s also hard to form a thin patty and have it stay thin while cooking. So I cooked two regular-sized patties, then filleted Iris’s into two patties of half the original thickness. She ate one of the thin patties and I ate the other.

We both put on plenty of HP Sauce. From the Wikipedia entry on HP Sauce, I learned that

> The Aston factory is bisected by the A38(M) motorway and has a pipeline, carrying vinegar over the motorway, from one side to the other.