Raw Eggs in Milk? Trying Marilyn Monroes Diets

In 1952, Marilyn Monroe gave an interview to the now-defunct Pageant magazine. To the gimlet eye of a serious journalist (not mine), it probably leaned too heavily on pictorials and subsections entitled "How to Feel Blonde All Over." But it did have something interesting to report: Marilyn Monroe's daily diet.

"I have been told my eating habits are absolutely bizarre," she confessed, right next to a picture of her dancing on an ottoman while wearing a Hawaiian shirt. "But I don't think so."

So, what were these famous habits? For breakfast, she would have two raw eggs whipped in warm milk: "I doubt any doctor could recommend a more nourishing breakfast for a working girl in a hurry." She would skip lunch, and then for dinner, she would broil liver, steak, or lamb and eat it with five carrots: "I must be part rabbit." And then she would have a hot-fudge sundae for dessert.

Does this sound "bizarre"? Maybe it is. But after my disastrously thrilling experiment with Liz Taylor's sour cream diet, aren't I duty-bound, as a seriously journalistic diet columnist, to test this premise? For ten days, I trained my gimlet eye on living as Marilyn did, in diet and fitness. The result: a harrowing mix of fainting spells, pimples, and salmonella risks.

My biggest worry with this diet is the raw eggs. How do you eat them and not get salmonella? To be s! afe, I b uy pasteurized eggs and discover that they are twice the price of a normal egg. I buy them anyway. I also go to the meat counter and ask if they have any liver. They do not. But they will have it next week. I make a note of it.

To dispel lingering worries, I call my grandmother. Did you ever eat a raw egg? I ask her. No, she says. But it will put hair on your chest. I nod into the phone.

This morning, I start my diet. I am sort of excited but also full of dread, like Anne Hathaway before she hosted the Oscars. I take out the milk and heat it up in a saucepan. Once it is completely heated, I pour it, rather delicately, into a mug. Then I crack raw eggs into the mug and they plop into the milk, like two round globules of mucous. I stir them. The yolk comes apart in dribs and drabs, and the milk is slowly turns yellow. This looks disgusting. I take one sip. To my surprise, it is utterly delicious! Like bland egg nog. I drink the whole thing in less than a minute. Maybe this diet won't be too bad, I think to myself.

Not eating lunch, however, is incredibly hard after I drank my eggs at 9 a.m. and am starving for the rest of the day. By 1:30 p.m., I could eat dinner, but I don't actually eat dinner until 8 p.m., when my friend and I feast on half of a chop and five raw carrots. I am starving after dinner, as if I never ate it at all. Marilyn's life was extremely hard.

This morning, I wake up and know one thing: I am hungry, and today is the day liver comes into Whole Foods. I am very excited because I have never had beef liver before. As I drink my egg milk, I imagine the liver awaiting me, quivering in its meat case. What I should do with it? Could it be good with ketchup?

After work, faint with hunger, I board a bus to the Whole Foods on 57th Street. I arrive, beaming at the meat counter, where my request causes some confusion, nearly bringing me to tears in my fragile state. Eventually, a butcher emerges from the! back ro om with several extremely bloody slabs of flesh. I immediately yip with joy and bring the liver back to my apartment. I wash the globs of blood off the liver and cook it. It is the worst thing I have ever had in my life. Such an odd taste, both bitter and meaty. I eat very little of it. In an effort to avoid waste, I chop it up and put it in the blender with a bunch of spices, old wine, and a stick of butter. I will make pt, which I will save to reward myself when I complete the diet! It is very hard to pour the meat goo into a bowl and refrigerate it without eating it, but I do it.

Ravenous now, I go about making my sundae. Marilyn used to eat her sundaes at Wil Wright's ice-cream parlor, which is a California ice-cream producer known for the extremely high fat content. In the spirit of Marilyn's original sundae, I got the ice cream with the highest fat content and natural ingredients I could find, a chocolate and a bourbon vanilla flavor. They are sort or horrible when mixed together. I eat it all, though.

In order to do research for this project, I watch ! several Marilyn Monroe movies and discover an absolutely unwatchable farce co-starring Yves Montand. Then I google Marilyn Monroe's name and discover a cottage industry surrounding how to affect Marilyn Monroe's style and demeanor. There are a lot of forums and articles with tips