The Man Who Ate Everything - Jeffrey Steingarten [200]
I stood staring at my bowl of bungled batter. I poked it with a spoon. I splashed it with a whisk. Not even a tiny triumph appeared. Two fleeting hours stood between me and Thanksgiving dinner.
Most kitchen manuals are full of advice about what you should have done in the first place to avoid fiascoes, failures, and flops (run a knife around the outside of a cheesecake as soon as it is baked or it may crack as it cools and shrinks) rather than how to repair them (hide the cracks with sour cream or sliced fruit). A handful of strategies do work amazingly well. Wilted salad greens perk up nicely when immersed for an hour or overnight in ice water in the refrigerator. Coffee does taste a little less bitter if you put two or three cardamom pods into the pot as the coffee brews. If you transfer burned soup to a clean pot and simmer it for another hour or two, the burned taste often disappears and seems like a deepened level of flavor.
The most popular kitchen tragedy appears to be the over-salted soup, vegetable, or sauce. The solutions fall into two categories. You can add and then discard something starchy (raw potato, beans, or bread crumbs) to absorb the salt. Or you can add brown sugar, parsley, or vinegar to fool the tongue. I have tested them all, and although the absorptive starch method sounded terrific, it failed in all its forms. Oddly enough, parsley and brown sugar work best.
The second most popular is the curdled, broken, or separated sauce (of the butter or egg variety, like hollandaise, mayonnaise, béarnaise, and so forth). Many of the proposed solutions actually work. At the first sign of trouble, remove the pan from the heat and whisk in a few tablespoons of ice water. Or immediately put it into a blender or food processor. If neither works, beat an extra egg yolk with a pinch of dry mustard and very gradually whisk in the curdled sauce. Or vigorously whisk together a little lemon juice and a tablespoon of the curdled hollandaise in a bowl, then gradually beat in the rest. But there were no solutions anywhere, before or after, for separated cake batter. I briefly swelled with pride as I concluded that I was the first person in the one-hundred-thousand-year history of cooking to have experienced this disaster.
Then it struck me. Why not try to repair my cake batter as though it were a curdled sauce! With seventy-five minutes left before dinner, I whirred the greasy, lumpy mixture in the blender in two batches. The result was wonderful—a smooth and shiny golden cream, ready for the addition of flour and baking powder. Into the greased and floured cake pans the batter went, three at a time. An hour later, six layers sat upon the cooling racks, ready to be glazed, filled, stacked, and frosted.
We arrived at dinner an hour late, giving holiday traffic as an excuse, and my fresh coconut cake was greeted with gasps of awe. But when our feast was through, I was depressed about the cake. In taste and texture, it could not have been the cake we had eaten at K-Paul’s New York. Nobody asked for seconds.
Just before Christmas, another cake batter cataclysmically separated. I had just learned about Dial-a-Chef at (900) 933-CHEF, which you can call for cooking advice at $2.95 a minute. Speaking quickly, I told Dial-a-Chef about my problem. Just five minutes later they called back with the answer. Don’t worry, add the flour and baking soda and proceed. Everything should come together nicely. And it did.
February 1996
Big Bird
My second-favorite Thanksgiving dinner took place eighteen years ago inside a midsize maroon rent-a-car. The sun had never shone more brightly than on that Thursday morning as the three of us set off from Manhattan for our friends’ farm in upstate New York. But two