The Business of Bad Luck Butternut

Dear Tamar:

I know what to do when a regular day goes wrong: if bang my head, stub my toe, then what I wanted to wear is in the wash, I’m out of coffee, and I get a flat tire. I bail. I stay away from traffic, don’t make any life decisions, and hope tomorrow will be better. But what to do when everything goes wrong in cooking? And it’s a holiday, and you can’t start from scratch, because there’s no time and no money. And every time something goes wrong, it’s a sign that something else is about to go wrong? How do you still get a meal on the table when you can’t bail, like on a standard, run-of-the-mill bad-luck day?

-Bad Luck Butternut

Dear Bad Luck Butternut,

On the morning of the shortest day of the year, I inexplicably removed my frozen mousse from the freezer and put it in the refrigerator, where it promptly lost its form. I didn’t drive to pick up ducks for roasting until a day (and an hour) after I meant to. In an attempt to make up time, I neglected to chill my mint-infused cream before whipping it, so instead of mint-whipped-cream, I produced a good deal of mint butter and mint buttermilk. I scooped what I could into my frozen-thawed-and-refrozen mousse. I cut myself twice, on fingertips of both hands.

I started roasting my ducks at 275, and then turned the oven up after two hours of nothing happening. Then I forgot about them for 45 minutes. No amount of salt would convince my potatoes to become seasoned, even though the boiling water was a salt slurry. The garlic, anchovy, salt, lemon, vinegar, olive oil combination that produces an unimpeachable garlic-anchovy vinaigrette conspired to furnish an insipid one.

The plight described in the question above is my plight. I wrote it myself to stay sane. All day on Thursday, leading up to my Solstice party, I stood in the kitchen as things went wrong with my supposedly simple meal, and wondered what to do. I wrote the question because again and again that day, I asked it. I looked at my slightly icy twice-frozen mousse, and thought: “What now?” And at my mint butter: “What now?” At my bleeding fingers, my hard-cooking duck, my insipid vinaigrette. “What the *%&+# now?”

Luckily—though I use the word skeptically—Thursday’s cascade of mishaps was not my first rodeo. It was probably not even my tenth. Such pear-shaped cooking is such a pattern for me that I consider myself—to continue the metaphor—a rodeo rider: There was when I tried to pickle sardines for my boss, Cal Peternell’s, 46th birthday. After pouring hot brine over them—which pickled them perfectly—I panicked, and poured it over them again so that they overcooked and disintegrated. There was when the extra buttery roast chicken I could make with my eyes closed turned out strangely lean, because I got nervous guests would find it too buttery. When I undercooked ratatouille in France. When I overcooked the world’s most expensive turkey. When I botched fava paste for a $1000-a-head fundraiser. I’ll end the list, but only because my point is made: If this metaphor were an iceberg—not a rodeo—I would be grazing its tip.

Thursday’s cascade, which may have begun on Wednesday night, when I lined the mousse mold hastily with plastic wrap, would have been worse if I hadn’t had so much practice. My husband entered the kitchen midday, saw my bandaged fingers, and asked if everything was alright. To which I replied: Oh, everything’s going wrong. It may be one of those Everything Went Wrong meals.

Two things happened, then. First, I began to move slowly. I usually cook quickly—with focus, but not much conscious thought. I sensed, though, that if my instincts were leading me astray, better to do things incrementally, to remove opportunities for error. I did what needed doing, then set my vinaigrette, and my mignonette, and my not-salty potatoes aside, so that whatever panic came knocking couldn’t find a point of entry. I waited until the winds shifted to do anything that felt permanent.

The second thing was that, as soon as I named it, the predicted outcome seemed not so tragic. I have served, as I mentioned, many meals where Everything Went Wrong. I could always taste it. But they were still good—just not as good as if Everything Had Gone Right. The difference in guests’ experience between was negligible, as long as I kept my nerve.

The mignonette sauce, which had tasted vinegary, was resolved when two guests showed up early, just for oysters and a glass of wine, and I added a splash of the wine and a few ice cubes to the mignonette—which it needed. The only issue with the vinaigrette was salt, amended upon my dressing the chicories. I made my final decision about whether all the duck fat was rendered and the skin crispy enough while asking two four year olds to play tag in another room, and hold a conversation about Georgian wine. The pressure valves were open. Nothing seemed precious. The potatoes never got salty enough, so I carved the duck, and served it in crisp-tender shards right on top of them.

The frozen-and-thawed mousse was a triumph. I covered it in edible sparkles. As we ferried bowls of oyster shells to the back deck and made high stacks of sticky dessert place to deal with the following day, I noted aloud to my husband that the meal hadn’t tasted as if Everything Had Gone Wrong. He agreed. I suppose it was because, once the whole thing had a name, it lost its power.

Dear cook is a term I reserve too often for other people and use too rarely to address myself. On this instance, I remembered that I was a dear cook. I was gentle with myself, which was the answer to my question after all: What to do? Move slowly, be gentle, make the decisions surrounded by friends.