Monday, July 03, 2006
Don't Try This At Home
Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs
edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman Bloomsbury
review by N. Sosulski
Misery loves company. If you are one of us who has had the sauce you made a dozen times break when your boss is coming to dinner, you will enjoy this collection of stories of kitchen disasters from the celebrity chefs that you hear about on the Cooking Channel and the Epicurious website.
Since most of these occur in restaurants that seat dozens, if not hundreds, most mishaps are on an epic scale.
A lobster dinner scheduled for 2500—and the lobster goes off. The fish delivery (somehow there seem to be quite a few seafood calamities) of 500 pounds of live eels spills in the kitchen in the middle of lunch rush. And the chefs recover—or sometimes they don’t. The time that you had to run out to the bakery at the last minute to buy some cake to pour the chocolate dessert you were going to serve over (if it had only firmed up like it was supposed to) will fade into the past, leaving behind only your feeling of fellowship as a survivor of the epicurean wars.
edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman Bloomsbury
review by N. Sosulski
Misery loves company. If you are one of us who has had the sauce you made a dozen times break when your boss is coming to dinner, you will enjoy this collection of stories of kitchen disasters from the celebrity chefs that you hear about on the Cooking Channel and the Epicurious website.
Since most of these occur in restaurants that seat dozens, if not hundreds, most mishaps are on an epic scale.
A lobster dinner scheduled for 2500—and the lobster goes off. The fish delivery (somehow there seem to be quite a few seafood calamities) of 500 pounds of live eels spills in the kitchen in the middle of lunch rush. And the chefs recover—or sometimes they don’t. The time that you had to run out to the bakery at the last minute to buy some cake to pour the chocolate dessert you were going to serve over (if it had only firmed up like it was supposed to) will fade into the past, leaving behind only your feeling of fellowship as a survivor of the epicurean wars.
