http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/di...tml?ref=dining

December 31, 2008

Whether True or False, a Real Stretch

By DAVID KAMP

"DIAMOND JIM BRADY was famous for three things: making millions selling
railroad supplies, wearing flashy jewelry and eating enormous amounts of
food. This last distinction has made Brady, whose real name was James
Buchanan Brady, a celebrated figure in culinary history. He is routinely
cited as the foremost eater of the Gilded Age, a serial multicourse gorger
(the word "trencherman" always seems to come up) whose excesses were
endearing rather than vulgar - or, at the very least, endearingly vulgar.

In her "Alphabet for Gourmets," M. F. K. Fisher extols Brady (in a chapter
entitled "G is for Gluttony...") as a man with a gift as rare and
preternatural as an Olympic athlete's. Citing a well-worn anecdote in which
Brady polished off nine servings of sole Marguery in one sitting, Fisher
writes, "I myself would like to be able to eat that much of something I
really delight in, and can recognize overtones of envy in the way lesser
mortals so easily damned Brady as a glutton."

Indeed, who among us, especially at this time of year, doesn't fantasize
about simply letting go as Brady did, eating every rich thing set before us,
impervious to guilt, health consequences or vanity? "I'd be obscenely fat,
yes," one thinks, "but I'd be celebratedly obscenely fat."

Still, I am troubled by the lore of Brady-as-glutton, and not for any moral
reason. I simply have a hard time believing that he ate as much as he is
said to have eaten.

In John Mariani's history of restaurant dining, "America Eats Out" (William
Morrow and Co., 1991), Brady is described as having routinely begun his day
"with a hefty breakfast of eggs, breads, muffins, grits, pancakes, steaks,
chops, fried potatoes, and pitchers of orange juice. He'd stave off
mid-morning hunger by downing two or three dozen clams or oysters, then
repair to Delmonico's or Rector's for a lunch that consisted of more oysters
and clams, lobsters, crabs, a joint of beef, pie, and more orange juice."

In midafternoon, allegedly, came a snack "of more seafood," followed by
dinner: "Three dozen oysters (the largest Lynnhavens were saved for him), a
dozen crabs, six or seven lobsters, terrapin soup," and a steak, with a
dessert of "a tray full of pastries... and two pounds of bonbons." Later in
the evening, allegedly, came an après-theater supper of "a few game birds
and more orange juice."

Nearly every account of Brady's eating habits hews to this mega-menu, with
the odd variation here and there. In Michael and Ariane Batterberry's "On
the Town in New York" (1973, Charles Scribner's Sons), the lobsters are
followed by "two canvasback ducks." Jay Jacobs's "New York à la Carte"
(1978, McGraw-Hill) also includes the brace of canvasbacks, and, before
that, "a small lake of green turtle soup," followed by two plated portions
of terrapin.

I've read and re-read these accounts and have always had the same reaction:
Yeah, right. Indisputably, Brady was a corpulent man who ate a lot. But
really, how could any human being have ever eaten so much on one given day,
let alone on a regular basis?

Even one of the biggest eaters currently on the New York dining scene, the
food writer Josh Ozersky - a large man whose blog for Citysearch is called
The Feedbag - said he wouldn't be able to get past "the third crab" of the
dinner described above. "My feats at the table astound regular civilians,
but I really have my doubts about the meals imputed to Diamond Jim," Mr.
Ozersky said in an interview. "I think he and his meals have more in common
with Paul Bunyan than they do with A. J. Liebling."

Could it be that Brady was a gastronomical fraud - a garden-variety
overeater whose feats have been exaggerated? Should there be an asterisk
next to his name in the annals of gluttony?

Looking into the matter, I found that the various descriptions of Brady's
epic consumption had a common source: a biography by Parker Morell called
"Diamond Jim: The Life and Times of James Buchanan Brady," published in
1934, 17 years after its subject's death.

Here we find the original breakfast roll-call ("beefsteak, a few chops,
eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, hominy"), the prolonged multispecies
banquets ("terrapin, oysters, crabs, lobsters, shrimp, or frog's legs,"
followed by "saddles of lamb, veal mutton, venison, or antelope; or else
turkey, goose, or capon"), and a shore dinner where Brady ate "everything
that was set before him - to the sixth and seventh helping." (Hence the
recurring "six or seven lobsters" motif in Brady literature.)

But orgiastic as these repasts are, they take place at different times;
Morell does not conflate them into one single, purportedly typical day in
Brady's life. Aha! The first chink in the blubber!

It must also be said that Morell has a rather florid and hyperbolic writing
style that comes especially to the fore when he gets to the eating parts.
While he ably chronicles Brady's extraordinary journey from rough-hewn
poverty to extreme wealth - born to a struggling Irish-American family in
Manhattan's Lower West Side docklands in 1856, Brady parlayed his charisma
into a lucrative career selling railroad equipment to the big lines - Morell
can't resist an opportunity to embellish a food scene. And so, it's not
enough to say that Brady and his companion, the actress Lillian Russell,
loaded up on corn at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair; no, they "ate their way
through a goodly part of the Kansas corn crop."

Furthermore, Morell's chief eyewitness to Brady's eating habits was another
congenital embellisher, George Rector. The son of the restaurateur Charles
Rector, who, in 1899, opened an opulent "lobster palace" in Midtown
Manhattan bearing his name, George Rector was a fixture of New York's
pre-Prohibition dining scene - and later a prominent food columnist and
author.

IT was Rector who propagated the sole Marguery story so treasured by M. F.
K. Fisher. In his telling in Morell's book, Rector first heard of the dish -
in which sole fillets are poached in fish stock, garnished with shellfish
and served under a rich buttery sauce - after Brady had returned from a trip
to Paris. Diamond Jim "spoke of this dish so feelingly to my father that I
was immediately taken out of Cornell University, where I was in the third
year of law school, and sent to Paris to get the recipe for the fish sauce,"
Rector recalled.

O.K., hold it right there. I checked with Cornell University. Neither its
development office nor its registrar has any record of a George Rector ever
having been enrolled at its law school.

Anyway, if Rector is to be believed, just three weeks after his father's
directive, he had insinuated himself into the kitchen staff of the Café
Marguery, then one of Paris's premier restaurants. "It required exactly two
months of working 15 hours a day for me to get the hang of" the dish, Rector
said, "and finally, when a jury of seven master chefs voted my sauce
perfect, I sent a cable to my father telling him I was leaving on the next
boat for America."

The story only gets cuter and tidier from there. Rector claimed that Brady
himself awaited him on the gangplank, shouting, "Have you got the sauce?"-
whereupon young George was hustled straight to Rector's to get to work. "At
exactly eight o'clock that same evening," Rector said, Diamond Jim and his
chums sat down to their sole-fest. And then, nine servings later, Brady
passed his compliments to the chef by saying, "Even right now, if you poured
some of that sauce over a Turkish towel, I believe I could eat all of it!"

A more plausible and restrained eyewitness description of Brady at the table
comes from his urologist, Dr. Hugh Hampton Young. Dr. Young, a legend in his
field and the chief of urology at Johns Hopkins University and Hospital,
published a memoir, "A Surgeon's Autobiography," in 1940.

"I have seen him eat six cantaloupes and quantities of eggs," Dr. Young
writes in a chapter on Brady. "His principal libation was orange juice, of
which I have seen him consume two quarts."

What a comedown! That's a lot of food and juice, but nothing a 19-year-old
college kid couldn't handle. Whither the chops, the breakfast beefsteaks,
the stacks of flapjacks? Another hole poked in the myth!

Still, Dr. Young notes that when he first met Brady in 1912, the tycoon had
an array of conditions caused or exacerbated by overeating: diabetes,
cardiac disease, high blood pressure. These conditions had scared off other
doctors from treating Brady's foremost medical problem, one unrelated to his
dining habits: a prostate inflammation that prevented him from urinating.

Dr. Young gamely took on Brady as a patient and resolved the issue with an
instrument he devised called a prostatic excisor. (The precise details of
the procedure are best left undiscussed here.) In gratitude, Brady bestowed
upon Johns Hopkins a gift of $220,000 to found the James Buchanan Brady
Urological Institute, which thrives to this day.

Alas, Dr. Young's memoirs do not address another oft-repeated, seemingly
fanciful claim about Brady: that, as Parker Morell puts it in his book,
doctors discovered Diamond Jim's stomach to be "six times as large as
normal."

Absent any hard evidence of this - for a big man, Diamond Jim left behind
little in the way of a medical paper trail - I was left to wonder: Is a
six-times-normal stomach physically possible?

I put this question to Dr. Nicholas Belitsos, a Baltimore gastroenterologist
who went to Johns Hopkins and admits to having been intrigued in his student
days by the portrait of Brady in the lobby of the Urological Institute. ("I
thought he was an unlikely character to have founded a branch of Hopkins,"
he said.)

To my surprise, Dr. Belitsos was not dismissive of the notion. "Six times
might be pushing it, but it's possible," he said. "A stomach is not like a
brain or a nose or a foot, where everyone's is in roughly the same range.
Stomach volume varies tremendously. I spend my days inside stomachs, and
believe me, you could get lost in some of them."

Given Brady's chronic consumption of food in large quantities, it's
conceivable that Diamond Jim "trained" his stomach to accommodate meals of
proportions unthinkable to mere mortals. The stomach, Dr. Belitsos
explained, is simply the digestive system's holding tank - "a receptacle
equipped with the intelligence to meter out molecules to the intestine at a
prescribed rate." While the intestine can't handle an overload of molecules,
the stomach, a highly elastic organ, can be gradually enlarged, via
progressive overeating, to hold more and more food.

Then, factor in that "Diamond Jim was probably one of those fat people who
is missing the nerves between the stomach and the hypothalamus to tell him
that he's full," in the words of Dr. George Fielding, an associate professor
of surgery at New York University. Dr. Fielding meets such people all the
time - he specializes in surgical weight-loss procedures on morbidly obese
patients.

In both his and Dr. Belitsos's estimation, it's entirely possible that
Brady, in one sitting, might have consumed dozens of mollusks, loads of
crustaceans and a petting zoo's worth of warm-blooded creatures.

But Dr. Fielding assured me that there's no way Brady could have eaten on
this scale on a daily basis, as the books have it.

"Every day, for breakfast, lunch and dinner? No, impossible," he said. "That
man would have exploded."

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