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The way Steve and Polly met always seemed very peculiar to them. She had been driving along the road between New York and Long Island when she ran into traffic – a quite spectacular accident, it seemed. The cars were moving forward in a continual on-off of accelerations and brakings, and at one point Polly looked to her right and saw a scrapyard, and a man dressed in an astrakhan shawl jumping up and down on the bonnet of a car, and surrounded by a small, attentive crowd. The next day Polly read a small article in The New York Times about a chef named Steve Road doing a book launch in a scrapyard; The Cooking With Your Car Compendium, as suggested by the title, was described as a series of recipes to cook on a car engine, useful if at the end of a car journey someone wants a decent, hot meal, but doesn’t want to go in search of fast food restaurants. You wrapped ingredients in foil and placed them on certain parts of the engine, based on the marks on the components. Cooking times were calculated according to the distances driven, and there are as many as 53 recipes for basic, easy-to-use ingredients like potatoes, carrots, chicken, beef, eggs [don’t crack them], various fish such as tuna and swordfish, and all with the added bonus that oil is never needed, and neither are added sauces; a healthy way of eating, therefore. There was a note at the end about the ‘theoretical cuisine’ restaurant run by the artist, Steve’s Restaurant, on Orange Street in Brooklyn. Polly rang the following day to make a reservation.