What can a cook do when, as it must in the fragile career of all cooks, disaster strikes? August Escoffier, the famous French chef, recommended the following strategy:
When you have worked all day to prepare a culinary masterpiece for an important guest but your masterpiece has been ruined by one of the incompetent assassins on your staff, you can protect your reputation ahead of time by never naming anything until after you've cooked it. This way, the brilliant chef remarked, nobody can criticize your work because they don't know what you started out to cook in the first place.
Quick wit saves gummy rice disaster!
"Of course the rice is gummy, your highness" the great Escoffier once remarked to a disgruntled king, “Of course it's all lumpy and stuck together. What you fail to realize is that I was not making pilaf at all, I was making rice balls, which by their very nature must stick together!"
But suppose your dining room is filled with knowledgeable epicures at an important state dinner, and they know all about Escoffier's old trick. And they have already tortured you into revealing at the very outset what you were preparing for this important state dinner? What then?
Turkey disaster coming right up!
For example, suppose you have already admitted that you were preparing a turkey dinner with all the fixings but then at the last minute you are confronted with the worst culinary disaster known to man, an underdone, bloody turkey.
Disgruntled king sends in the army!
Royalty, when served raw turkey in a foreign land, have been known to swirl their cloaks over their shoulders, stomp from the dining room, leap into their carriage, clatter to the coast, sail across the ocean and command their merciless generals to invade the offending cook's country, pillaging and laying waste to entire cities just to make sure they got the dirty shoemaker who served them that damned raw turkey.
Wah! I want my bloody turkey!
But, suppose you've got a turkey in the oven when Prince Charles pops in (you know how the British are always popping in) and Charlie is so hungry he bloody well wants to eat right now.
As soon as Charlie sits down he starts pounding his utensils on the table in full dramatization of a royal snit. But sacre bleu! you discover to your horror that the bloody bird is not done. What to do?
Solution:
Remove the turkey from the roasting pan. Next, pour boiling broth in the empty roasting pan about an inch deep and put the pan over a hot fire and bring it to a boil.
Now!
While the broth is boiling, hack off the drumsticks and the wings of that bird and slice off the breasts. Break off the whole hind end of the carcass and mash it down with all your weight, breaking its back and flattening it out.
Next!
Put the whole dismembered carcass: drumsticks, wings, breasts and hind end into the boiling broth. All bloody-side down.
I can assure you that in a matter of minutes that bird will be cooked and you can slice it up in the kitchen out of sight and then present the sliced turkey artfully arranged on a large platter, thus escaping Charlie's wrath, which if not pacified would probably have meant sending YOU to the dungeons to get the old bloody turkey treatment yourself, as described above in ghastly detail: break the cook's back, smash his hind end, etc.
But suppose Prince Charlie is rattling his sword demanding instant service, and also suppose that he further demands that the turkey be presented at the dinner table stuffed and splendidly WHOLE, there is only one thing to do: you must do what the brilliant August Escoffier once did in an emergency when he was caught with a raw turkey:
The wily Frenchman shoved the bird back in the oven and turned the fire wide open. Then he persuaded a fire-breathing parson to deliver a half hour of grace.
So powerful was the cleric's oratory that diners later remarked they could actually feel the heat of hellfire. Of course it was the heat from Escoffier's blazing oven.
The bird got done just in time.
