All the grills I’ve known before

There is a theory out there, mainly among men, that there isn’t any food that can’t be improved by being cooked outdoors over an open flame. What could possibly be better than steak on the grill? Or fish? Or shrimp?

If only it stopped there.

Cauliflower? Grill it. Mashed potatoes? Grill them. Eggs? Grill them. Salad? Grill it. Soft drinks? Grill them.

Some say it takes men back to their caveman roots. Yet how many cavemen used propane? Or stainless-steel tongs? Or kept their beer in a cooler? When you think about it, grilling a steak 50,000 years ago must have been a pretty dismal experience. No matches, no starter fluid, no wooden deck, no Adirondack chairs, no citronella candles, no aprons featuring ironic wordplay, no Bluetooth speakers, no bug zappers. All they had was a dark, smelly cave.

For all the blather you read about “man caves,” you very rarely hear of a guy adding an actual cave to his house. Why? Because it was no fun being a caveman. Can you imagine having to eat the “Catch of the Day” every single day for the rest of your entire life? Pretty boring. And they only had one way to cook it.

“What’s for dinner, hon?” Mr. Cave asks the wife.

“Same as last night. Giant lizard roasted over an open fire.”

“When is somebody going to invent poaching?” says Mr. Cave. “What this cave needs is a good saute pan. And a window would be nice. And one of those trash cans with a pop-up lid. I’m tired of throwing bones on the floor.

“I hear there’s a new thing over at the Hendersons’ cave: It’s called a spice rub. You take a piece of woolly mammoth meat and rub this powder on it, a mix of secret herbs and spices, and leave it on for a few hours and then grill it. Sounds pretty good, huh? Let’s go over there, club them silly and take it from them.”

“Nah,” says Mrs. Cave. “If we club them, then they’ll owe us a clubbing, and I’m not up to cleaning the whole cave just for the Henderson clan. All she can talk about is how smart her children are. ‘Urlak invented bronze!’ Big deal. Bronze. What can you do with that? What we could use is Tupperware. If he’s such a genius, when’s he gonna invent that? ‘Tamrak invented the wheel!’ What am I supposed to do – jump up and down? Great, we’ve got a wheel. If he was really smart, he’d invent some place to go.

“And she lets the little ones get away with murder. They draw pictures on the walls all day long. Not in my cave, they won’t! What a bunch of Neanderthals they are!”

If anything, grilling is an expression of our desire to get out of the cave. Or, more likely, it’s the desire of women to keep men from messing up the kitchen.

Or it could just be that we like the outdoors. Walk into any home-improvement store at the beginning of summer and you’ll find that the people who have just spent tens of thousands of dollars improving the inside of their homes are now spending tens of thousands more so they can basically live outside.

The aisles are overflowing with hammocks and solar lights, tents and umbrellas, croquet sets and boccie balls. But most of all, they sell grills. The latest things in outdoor cooking are these multilevel, $4,000 stainless-steel grills with bread-warming drawers, extra burners, built-in beer fridges and every tool and accessory imaginable.

Me, I would just like an ordinary old grill with one improvement: I want one that’ll yell at me when there’s not enough propane in the tank to finish cooking the meal I just started.

That, I’d buy in a heartbeat.

2016 United Feature Syndicate