Perhaps you've found yourself in this situation: you have guests arriving in 5 minutes and you're pulling a soufflé from the oven. It didn't rise quite like you thought it should but you know the flavors are stellar. You can't very well toss a dish with friends on their way, and frankly, it still tastes great. What to do?
Have you had a similar experience? Maybe your stuffed peppers collapsed for some reason. A family recipe for chocolate candy didn't harden. Or perhaps the cake your husband made was delicious but a bit puddly in the center.
I've had a funny experience in cookbook writing-land lately. I've had many successes that I can't wait to share with you all. But I've also had some recipes that end up tasting great but aren't quite what I expected them to look like. The gingerbread bars are really more of a cake. The clafoutis is far more of a custard.
So imagine my delight when Melissa Clark touched on this very phenomenon in her column in The New York Times last week. Her suggestion, when you get an unexpected result: keep the recipe, just rename it! If you get right down to it, your guests will never know. We often think they'll guess something went awry, but they really won't.
→ Read the whole article: A Dish Gone Awry by Melissa Clark at The New York Times
I always remember something my mom told me once when I was worrying about what to wear on my first day of teaching: no one is paying as much attention to you as you think they are, Megan. It's true, and it's largely true for the food we serve friends when they come over, too. A good dinner party at our house is so much more about the company than the question of whether the salad is over-dressed or not.
So forget the apologizing or pacing back and forth in disbelief that your soufflé has fallen, your stuffed peppers are flat or your cake seems a touch underdone. We can all settle in with our delicious-tasting recipes and rest soundly knowing that they'll simply find a new name and live on. In cookbooks and dinner parties all the world over.
Related: Thanksgiving Fail: Tales From the Front Line
(Image: Nealey Dozier)
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My friends and I would all laugh about it, and yeah, probably come up with a new name for whatever it was. I'd tell them the story about how it went wrong, because I choose my friends (in part) on how kind they are. No meanies allowed.
I made chili to take to visit my husband's grandmother once, only to learn on the way there that she dislikes chili. So we called it 'stew' and she ate it! ;)
Oh, this makes me laugh thinking of one of my own mishaps: When in college and experimenting with all-whole-grain bread baking (in the days before I discovered white-whole wheat flour), I incidentally killed the yeast with too-hot water while making dough for a round of bread. That thing was a brick. I named it Kitley and said it was an unleavened Irish bread. In the end, no one, including me, would eat it, including the ducks that I tried to feed it to.
I did this once with gougères! I have NO idea what went wrong, but instead of fluffy puffs of cheesy goodness, they were almost totally flat. They still tasted fantastic, and we just started calling them gourmet Cheez-Its.
I had thirteen ladies from my stitchery group over for lunch. I baked an apple pie for dessert, but forgot to put a bit of flour in with the apples for thickening. When I cut into the pie, it was veeerrry liquid. I brought out bowls and called it apple soup. It was delicious, and we all had a laugh about it.
One desert that was supposed to be a roulade wound up as dark chocolate cake pieces served with bowls vanilla whipped cream and raspberry coulis. The strategy: choose a piece of cake, load it with whipped cream, pool raspberry coulis atop it, and stuff it into your mouth before it falls all over you. Tenth grade Christmas party at its finest!