Flavoursome blunders

Several years ago, before cordless phones were a standard household appliance, I was busy cooking a starter – crunchy lentils salad with shrimps – when the phone suddenly rang. The caller turned out to be someone with whom I’d had a misunderstanding. It was important and urgent that the matter be ironed out, and I didn’t think it advisable to put the caller on hold while I went to turn off the hob under the lentils. By the time the call was over, the matter had been clarified aright, but in the meantime, back in the kitchen, the lentils had overcooked. I was initially in a fix as to what I should do: refuse to accept the outcome and stubbornly cook the dish all over again or give in to the frustrating turn of events, and indeed see how they might be turned to good account. After pondering awhile as to the best course of action, I settled for plan B, quickly taking down the processor and whizzing the lentils with their cooking water to a fine purée. Later, my guests were served the newly invented starter – crunchy shrimps on lentils dip – in small bowls.

In the kitchen as in life, errors can be a source of new discoveries deserving new names. Indeed, tagging a new term onto an error is a way of overcoming the mistake and can be the beginning of a new success story. Legend has it, for instance, that we owe that gastronomic cold-meat speciality called “culatello” to a young medieval apprentice, who messed up the carving of a leg of pork for curing. Anyone who enjoys a slice of Tarte Tatin can thank a distracted French cook by the name of Stéphanie Tatin (hence the name of this culinary delight), who at some stage early in the twentieth century placed an apple tart upside down in the baking dish. Those big-time favourites, the biscuits au chocolat fondant, owe their soft and yummy chocolaty heart to the time Michel Bras made the mistake of taking the small chocolate puddings he was baking out of the oven too soon. When the prongs of the fork cracked the crusty shell, out oozed a luscious chocolate sauce, and it has not stopped oozing ever since!

In a way, it may be said that assigning special names to one’s blunders is a clever ploy for optimising one’s energies and resources. What good is it to stubbornly grind away at something that hasn’t turned out the way one expected if the unexpected outcome works just as well and can simply be given a different name? For one thing, it saves having to scrap the result of a slip-up and starting all over again, thus making good the effort so far expended. What’s more, one can even deny having botched things up in the first place, or at least alleviate the frustrating sense of failure. Better still, even if something new and different is merely the vagrant upshot of a mistake, calling it by a new name can witness to open mindedness.
Exasperatingly accidental, unpredicted and unpredictable it may be, but there’s no need to write it off as an utter flop. An undesired result can prove just as good as the desired one, and indeed even better. In which case the mistake by another, face-saving name can turn into a new recipe. As such, it can start out on a career of its own, where every step in its making is a right step. That is, until other stumbling blocks are encountered along the way, spelling, perhaps, disaster, but giving rise to yet other new and different recipes as well.

Actually, we probably don’t even get to know of the truly big flops for which there’s no remedy. They end up in mute bins and their remnants get washed away under gushing cascades of sudsy water. What in fact gets disclosed to the general public are those new recipes that even if born of freak circumstances end up being classics, milestones of an ever-changing tradition, stretching over centuries even, and longsellers on the best menus.

Having said as much, though, I can’t help noting the different way in which women and men, female and male chefs talk of their mistakes. Let’s take a few examples.

Massimo Bottura (La Francescana, Modena, Italy): “I was thinning out and saucing some foie, but instead of a light brown demi-glace I poured a partially caramelised sugar syrup onto the liver in the saucepan. And that’s how I came up with my sweet foie gras bavaroise.”

Moreno Cedroni (La Madonnina del pescatore, Senigallia, on the Adriatic Coast in Italy): “One day, I overcooked a purple cabbage and to my surprise it turned blue. My first thought was to dip something into the concoction, and that’s how my blue squid was born.”

Christophe Felder, pastry cook, Paris: “I messed up a chocolate mousse one day, so I said to myself, “why not call the result crémeux au chocolat?” It was back in eightynine. Since then it’s become a popular cream world-wide, and in France it gets used a lot for making cakes and other sweetmeat desserts”.

And the ladies? How do they react to their mistakes in the kitchen?

Skye Gyngell (Petersham Nurseries, Richmond, London): “I always tell my young kitchen-helpers that mistakes don’t necessarily come for the worse: they’re very much part of the learning process. If you discover two ingredients just won’t stick together, and you discover it hands-on, then you’re sure you’ll never forget it.”

Carme Ruscalleda (Sant Pau, Sant Pol de mar, Catalonia): “Truffling an egg-yolk is a drawn-out, high-precision affair calling for lots of patience. Drawing up the eggyolk with the syringe is a delicate operation. Clearly, you can’t pull it off every time! I use the egg-yolks that break to make tortillas”.

Loretta Fanella, pastry-chef (Pinchiorri Wine Bar, Florence): “Once, by mistake, instead of mixing the coffee with the passion fruit I put in some liquorice… and what did I discover but that it was a great combination!”

True, a statistically significant sample it may not be, and yet it reveals a typically feminine attitude wherein there’s no need to respond to an error by making a personal pitch to come out on top despite one’s slip-up. Women simply own up to their mistakes, and if possible try to mend them. As Heather Carlucci (Lassi, New York) once told me: “First thing, you have to know how to fix food”. It takes far more than a Michelin star to snub countless centuries of getting several meals ready everyday to feed famished offspring.

Ernesto Illy was fond of saying that women are gatherers and men hunters. Even when it comes to making mistakes, men, it would seem, look upon the fruits of their blunders as if they had caught a succulent prey; women instead gather up the broken pieces and strive to make sense of them.