‘Manifold Destiny’ a strange book about car engine cooking

1989’s Manifold Destiny, a pun on the pervasive American early-settler doctrine, is rooted in a wacky idea: cooking cuisine using your car’s engine. As silly as it seems, this book turns thoughts of an absurd, hypersomnic nightmare of oil-and-grease food poisoning or an out-of-control filet mignon fire under your car’s bonnet into something actually plausible. It’s beguiling to think the dream could come true, that car cooking might not be impossible, that it could actually work. It is funny when the publishers’ notes say to slap a chicken breast topped with prosciutto and provolone under the hood of your car, hit the gas and drive until you reach delicious, but it also borders on inspiring.

Manifold Destiny’s third edition, re-published to celebrate the seminal cookbook’s 20th birthday, is a modernised version of the influential original. The first edition’s origin story is of two young men in Montreal, packing freshly purchased deli meats for their road-trip rest-stop lunch and recalling lonely old trucker’s tales of hot-dogs and beans heated on old diesel engines. They knew that their smoked beef brisket would be more delicious steaming hot, so they triple-wrapped it in aluminium foil and found the perfect place to cook it – underneath the air filter of their 1984 VW Rabbit.

This lit a flame, metaphorically, as the two men – the book’s authors, Chris Maynard and Bill Scheller – continued to outdo each other with more ambitious recipes. They felt like they’d attained MasterChef status (or is that ‘MasterChevy’?) when they took part in the famous Cannonball One Lap of America car marathon. While other exhausted drivers pulled into truck stops or subsisted on muesli bars, Chris and Bill always had something delicious in ‘the oven’, ready to eat when they liked. Features in the The New Yorker, appearances on the Today Show and even admission to the Library of America’s anthology American Food Writing soon followed.

The cookbook’s third edition came about in response to the first two editions selling online for far too much, such is their rarity and popularity. That, plus the simple fact that the world has changed a lot since 1989: SUVs and hybrids rule the roads, and so too has food changed – from the rise of veganism and raw food to the phenomenon that is MasterChef. The third edition still carries a lot of the book’s original features, announcing that this is more than a funny recipe book. There are stories of provincial American recipes cooked under a hot hood hurtling along an American highway, historical tales of small-town America and it’s more-varied-than-you-think food culture, and funny anecdotes. It’s humorous, like the story about the toll collector who could swear he smelled garlic coming from the author’s car as he paid his fee. It’s practical, with diagrams and different techniques for different car models – and instead of cooking time, you measure in miles. Thanks to Manifold Destiny, a car is measured not by sedan, hatch or engine displacement but by serving size.

The verdict: Would you cook yourself some Prius Pork in your car’s engine bay? Probably not, but for novelty’s sake this book is a killer read. In a pinch, you might wrap a potato in foil, stick it in a secure part of the manifold and drive until it’s ready to garnish. For now, we should just be happy that someone took the time to write Manifold Destiny, the unlikeliest of auto-publishing success stories. As the authors say: “Car-engine cooking is probably a lot safer than reading map screens or watching dashboard TV.”