The Man Who Ate Everything (57 page)

A cookbook from seventeenth-century England includes tricks for “ye boyleing of yellow peese” and a special way “to boyle Spinage green,” but nothing about bungled batter.

Dinnertime crept closer. As I stood moodily at the window, I considered following the example of the great Vatel. In April 1671, Vatel was chef to the prince of Conde and had been engaged to organize the visit of King Louis XIV and its climactic dinner for three thousand guests. Madame de Sevigne tells the story in her April 26 letter to Madame de Grignan: Vatel had gone twelve nights without sleep. The king arrived on Thursday; there were “hunting, lanterns, moonlight, a gentle walk, supper served in a spot carpeted with daffodils. [But] there was no roast at one or two tables because of several unexpected guests.” Vatel was humiliated. Then the fireworks, which had cost sixteen thousand francs, were a failure owing to fog.

At four the next morning, Vatel rushed madly around, trying to assemble the fish for Friday’s dinner. When a supplier erroneously informed him that only two small loads of fish could be found, the great Vatel “went to his room, put his sword up against the door, and ran it through his heart.” Just then, great quantities of fish began to arrive.

If I lived above the third floor, I might even now be with the great Vatel. But in the nick of time I came to my senses, drew back from the window, and returned to my kitchen manuals.

Some of them specialize in cleanliness instead of cuisine. They say you can shine copper pots by rubbing them with a paste of flour, vinegar, and salt. (It works only a third as well as copper polish.) Or try baking soda, which was used to clean the inside skin of the Statue of Liberty. A Philippine book of household hints recommends rubbing a halved
calamansi
on your wooden cutting board to remove discoloration. But I cannot find
calamansi
in any dictionary. Is Colgate toothpaste ideal for polishing silverware and gold, as one book suggests? Pick up pieces of shattered glass with a slice of white bread, another book advises, and take your dirty miniblinds to a car wash. (Then what?) According to the Wisk 1995 Cleaning Census, 38 percent of Americans who do laundry at least once a month are very or somewhat worried that home entertaining may ruin their possessions. Dial (800) ASK-WISK for
advice about cleaning. But not about hideously separated fresh coconut cake batter. I tried.

Dozens of books concentrate on kitchen tricks, tips,
trues
(French for “tricks”), and
tours de main.
So do the pages of helpful hints in food magazines. Fresh eggs will sink immediately in salted water, but bad eggs will float. (This seems to be true.) Chop onions without tears by wearing goggles, chilling the onion (partially successful), or lighting a candle on the cutting board to burn away the sulfurous gases (small or no benefit). Give gravy a warm, deep color (without ruining its flavor?) by adding instant-coffee powder. Set loaves of bread to rise in your dishwasher (leaving an inch of water in the bottom of the machine from the wash cycle and switching to the dry cycle for a minute or two). For instant whipped cream to garnish desserts, drop dollops (or pipe rosettes) of sweetened whipped cream on a cookie sheet, freeze, transfer to an airtight container, store in the freezer, and
remove as you need them fifteen minutes before consuming (a wonderful
true
that pops up in many sources). Skin hazelnuts by boiling them in water with a teaspoon of baking soda (not a chance). Make it easy to remove whole spices from a soup, stew, or sauce by first putting them in a mesh tea ball. Core and wash lettuces by rapping the bottom on the counter to loosen the core (which can now be pulled out in one piece), inverting, filling the hole with water to rinse out the dirt, and separating the leaves (works well with iceberg).

Keep egg yolks in the refrigerator up to three days by covering them with water (not bad). When you need a small amount of lemon juice, do not cut the fruit in half; just pierce it with a skewer, squeeze out some juice, and then refrigerate the fruit. (A terrific lemon saver. But once, when I squeezed the lemon with excessive force, the entire pointy end flew into my eye.) To cure excessive vomiting, try two teaspoons whiskey, one teaspoon water, and one teaspoon ground cinnamon. (Source: Charlotte,
Michigan, 1909. But what should you do for moderate vomiting?) To remove fat from stock, drop ice cubes into the pot and the fat will cling to them. (You’ll need a lot of ice cubes. And remember to remove them before they melt.) When you water hanging plants, cover their bottom with shower caps. When your bread dough is rising, cover the bowl with a shower cap (not the same shower cap).

Put a bay leaf in flour to discourage bugs. Put an unwrapped stick of spearmint gum in flour to discourage bugs. (I have bought a PlenTPak of Doublemint and a bottle of bay leaves and await the results.) A sugar cube in olive oil keeps it from getting rancid. (I feel a little silly, but I’m trying it.) Freezing nuts makes them easier to crack and to extract the meats whole (slightly easier or not at all). Marinating meat does not tenderize it because the marinade does not penetrate very deeply. Add bread to boiling cauliflower or cabbage to inhibit the odor; add rye bread to broccoli. (The effect seems slight.) The combination of butter and oil does not burn as readily as butter alone. (Another source: The butter part of the mixture burns at the same low temperature as it always did.) Open oysters with a screwdriver instead of an oyster knife. Open oysters with a beer-can opener instead of a screwdriver. Open oysters only after freezing them for fifteen minutes. Do not open oysters by smashing them with a hammer. Give frosted cakes that sultry, molten, silky look with a hair dryer.

Alas, my own coconut cake was still in the embryonic, sepa-rated-batter stage. The only thing keeping me from starting over was that I had no eggs. I turned to books and charts specializing in the subject of substitutions. For croutons, substitute popcorn. If you run out of frozen strawberries, resort to fresh fruit! For whipped cream, follow this scientifically intriguing suggestion: slowly add baking soda to sour cream until it reaches the desired sweetness as the acidity is neutralized. (When the crisis was over, I tried it. The combination fizzed unpleasantly in my mouth, then made me gag and choke as it reached my throat.) I much preferred mixing a smashed banana with one stiffly beaten egg white plus sugar to taste. This was less an equivalent or facsimile of whipped cream than a fluffy white alternative topping that tastes reasonably good if you don’t mind risking salmonella.

Of the thousands of substitutions in my collection, only four referred to eggs. If you need to make cookies and lack eggs (and baking powder and milk), you can try one writer’s handy recipe for eggless potato-chip cookies. If you lack whole eggs, simply substitute two yolks plus a tablespoon of water (thanks a million). Grated carrot is a good substitute for eggs in boiled puddings. (I cannot imagine what this means.) The best suggestion of the four was the last: “Snow is an excellent substitute for eggs; two large spoonfuls will supply the place of one egg.” Be sure to take the snow from a clean spot.

A happy thought struck me. Why not turn my catastrophic cake into a triumphant innovation?

On August 26, 1837, King Louis-Philippe and Queen Amelie of France were aboard the first train to run from Paris to Saint -Germain. A banquet was planned at the destination, and the menu included fried potatoes. When the train was late, Chef Colinet removed the slices of potatoes from the hot oil. The potatoes shrank and wrinkled, and Colinet considered joining the great Vatel. But later when he plunged the potatoes again into the sizzling oil, the slices magically puffed up into crisp and golden balloons! These
pommes souffles
were Colinet’s greatest triumph. Robert Courtine has called them “the poetry of the potato.”

And I have read that fudge was created by mistake in Baltimore in 1886 when somebody overmixed and undercooked a pot of caramel.

And that
tarte Tatin
was discovered when the two unmarried Tatin daughters, in the town of Lamotte-Beuvron, just south of Orleans in France, dropped a pie. (The mechanics of this story make no sense; and a similar
tarte
was already popular throughout the Orleanais.) That Ruth Wakefield invented Toll House Cookies, when, trying to save time in baking chocolate cookies, she added pea-sized morsels of Nestle’s semisweet chocolate
directly to her batter instead of melting them first. And that beurre blanc was invented around 1900 when an assistant to the cook of the Marquis de Goulaine left out the egg yolks while making a sauce bearnaise.

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, bearnaise, 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.

The Dazey Stripper

I
t was in 1972 near the Cenote de los Sacrificios at the ruins of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan—a sacred well or cistern where vestal virgins were sacrificed to the Mayan gods—that I first encountered the automatic fruit and vegetable peeler. After a long trudge under the merciless sun and a cursory glance at the bottomless Cenote, in which not even one vestal virgin could be glimpsed, I saw an old woman sitting nearby on a folding chair behind a shiny steel hand-cranked peeler mounted on a tall wooden stand. For twenty-five cents U.S., she peeled oranges and apples and sold them to thirsty tourists. For an extra twenty-five cents U.S., she let me play with her peeler.

Years later at a dinner party I discovered the Dazey Stripper in my hostess’s kitchen while she was busy serving drinks in the living room. I inserted a nearby apple, stood back, and watched in wonder as the Dazey Stripper rapidly and automatically removed the peel in one continuous band. As I also learned, just as my hostess returned to the kitchen, the Dazey Stripper just as rapidly and automatically splatters ripe peaches all over the wall.

That’s because the Dazey Stripper was designed to peel
firm
fruits and vegetables. It is a compact, white plastic electric instrument consisting of an oblong platform from which a vertical shaft rises. You place a fruit or vegetable between two spiked plastic holders, raise the cutting blade assembly to
the top of the shaft, and let it go. Automatically, the motor starts up, the fruit whirls around, and the cutting blade presses against it, paring an even spiral of skin as it descends. When the blade reaches the bottom, the whirling automatically stops. It works almost every time, even when the fruit is, like a pear, irregular. Watching the Dazey Stripper zest a lemon or an orange, peel a potato, or get an apple ready for a pie has become a source of endless fun and amazement in my household no matter how many times we use it.