The Worst Meal I Ever Cooked

Remembering that dinner is about much more than food and eating

If a dish goes horribly wrong, like a ‘vile' eggs Florentine she once made for a friend, Julia (Child) instructed, 'Never apologize.' (From an interview in the New York Times )

I closed the door behind the last guest to leave and turned to my husband. “Oh my God,” I said, “that was truly the worst meal I’ve ever cooked.”

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” he answered. “Remember that time you served almost raw chicken? And what about all the times you left the bread heating in the oven until it burned and the fire alarm went off?”

He was trying to make me feel better, and at least he did make me laugh. But his comments reminded me of yet one more way that loss and gain mesh in the Third Age.

My husband and I have always enjoyed entertaining our friends at our home. He was the much better cook, preparing delicious, often complicated meals. I fussed over table settings and cleaning the house (not my favorite activity, as you know if you’ve been reading my posts for a while). We shopped for groceries and wine together.

Unfortunately, the physical problems that have accompanied him into the Third Age are now making it difficult for him to prepare the meals, so that has become my job. I’m a competent cook, but I know my limits and I generally stick to dishes that are familiar, comforting, and good, but not gourmet. One irony is that while I’m a vegetarian who eats fish, I don’t know how to prepare any guest-worthy vegetarian meals. Many of my friends are wonderful at trying out all sorts of delicious non-meat dishes when my husband and I come to their houses for dinner, but I stick to the tried and true – often even cooking meat for the carnivores, since that’s what I do when my husband and I eat alone.

The meal that night was an easy one I had prepared many times before. My version of paella, which involves cooking chicken and sausages separate from the rice, vegetables, and shrimp, and having everyone add their choice of meat to their own plates. But that afternoon I was feeling sad about another way in which my husband has become more limited. Until very recently he has been my supervisor and sous-chef, chopping onions, peppers, and tomatoes and helping with other food prep. These days he still supervises, but he’s put me in charge of chopping veggies. He has taken over the job of setting the table and putting out the hors d’oeuvres.

There were seven of us that night. It was a simple dinner, but somehow everything went wrong. The rice was undercooked, the chicken and sausages burned. I had also added veggie sausages, a brand I’d never used before, which fell apart in the cooking process and tasted weird.

Everyone gamely ate what they could. Fortunately the salad, contributed by a friend, was delicious.

Dessert was bad as well. “Bossk” brownies, which I have made many times from a recipe I discovered when my son was little and received a Star Wars cookbook as a gift. This time, they too were overdone. The ice cream and hot chocolate sauce were fine, and I encouraged everyone to crumble their brownies into their ice cream, which turned out to be a good solution. So dessert wasn’t a disaster. But really.

As I continued to criticize myself for the meal, my husband said, “Do you remember how you used to complain about my behavior any time we had people to dinner?” I remembered. I was always a nervous hostess, and I took out much of my anxiety on him, both before and after any get-together. “I knew that as soon as the door closed on the last person to leave, I was going to find out all the things I did wrong.”

“I am sorry for that,” I said, not for the first time. “You got the brunt of my social anxiety…although I think your manners have gotten much better as a result…”

He grinned and continued to reminisce about previous dinner-party disasters, not all of them mine. “Remember the time I made sole bonne femme?” he asked. Unlike me, Joel loved to cook from recipes – in fact, this one was from Julia Child’s classic collection of recipes, which he had bought years earlier. He had perfected a number of recipes from the book. One favorite was sole bonne femme, a dish of fish, wine, cheese, and mushrooms. The final step of the preparation is to brown everything quickly under the broiler. In those days we had a very old gas oven, with the broiler in a drawer on the bottom. For some reason, the broiler oven didn’t have a back. When my husband pulled the drawer out forcefully because he was afraid the fish was burning, the entire casserole slid out of the broiler and onto the floor behind the oven. My husband and a friend who had gone to the kitchen to help laughed so loud that those of us still in the living room flocked to the kitchen to investigate.

Everyone laughed and offered unhelpful advice about what to do. Finally, I turned off the oven and, once it had cooled, stuck my hands through the broiler and pulled out the casserole, which had landed right side up. My husband looked around the group and said, “Do we want to order Chinese?” We all agreed that the sole bonne femme was well worth eating, for the story alone. It was a little overcooked – he had, after all, yanked it out because he had left it in too long – but who cared? The evening was fun, the company was good, and our friends don’t come to our house for restaurant-level food.

Now in the Third Age I can remember the lesson I learned, and forgot, after that long-ago dinner party disaster. We have friends who are excellent cooks and others who aren’t, but their abilities in the kitchen are not what keep our friendship together or why we have dinner at one another’s homes.

Both the long-ago evening of the sole bonne femme and the recent evening of burnt everything had been fun because our friends are good sports and interesting people, and the conversation had been far-ranging and engaging. No one was going to think less of us or stop being our friends because of those cooking failures. I knew this truth at other stages of my life, but I often continued to berate myself anyway. Now, in our Third Age, I can let the self-criticism go (mostly) and appreciate how lucky I am to have my supportive husband and such good friends.

Istockphoto image ID #882101238 . Photographer Rawpixe

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