Volume 30 · Number 2 · Winter 2013
Too many cooks
How a student cooking challenge became a recipe for disaster
Humility is not one of my greater failings when it comes to cooking. In fact, I can remember only one major flop…and it happened my sophomore year at UC Davis. Even then it wasn’t my fault — really it wasn’t.
The fatal catastrophe occurred during a competition not-so-subtly instigated by four bachelors living at the Drake Apartments. Their clever method was to descend upon Gilmore Hall where many of their female friends lived, and go from room to room signing up cooks for the week on their little black meal calendar.
The ringleader, now a physician at Stanford University, would first throw out an offer: Look, no dishes to do, the meal is free and you can skip eating a dinner in the cafeteria. Then he would seal the bargain by casually mentioning how delicious Lana and Nina’s chicken Kiev and grasshopper pie were the night before. Wouldn’t we like, he would ask innocently, to show up our friends down the hall?
I fell for the ploy — more than once. But, after hearing about Lana and Nina’s latest gourmet dinner, I remember feeling a mix of competition and panic: I had already used up all my favorite recipes on those guys, and here I was one-upped again.
I settled into a grim resolution and went home to my mother.
Susanne Rockwell recreates cheese sauce the way her mother made it —"by pinch, by guess and by golly."
(Gregory Urquiaga/UC Davis)
She and I worked out a battle plan: her famous broccoli in a cheddar cheese white sauce, hamburger stroganoff (after all, we were college students) and chocolate cake.
I planned big. I enlisted three friends as assistants and prepared for the most delicious meal ever. That evening we crowded four cooks — along with the resident bottle washer to keep up with the pots and pans, and three critics — into the five-by-three-foot kitchen.
One person was frying hamburger, another mixing the cake. I put my best friend, Kathleen, who hated to cook, in charge of boiling water for the broccoli. As for me? Not only was I directing the siege, but I was making the famous cheese sauce the way Mother Rockwell did it: “By pinch, by guess and by golly, I’m going to have to put in a little more milk.”
At the height of the cooking siege, I forgot to tell one assistant to drain the grease from the hamburger before proceeding with the rest of the stroganoff recipe and to warn Kathleen to check the broccoli. I had my own problems: My original “cup” of cheese sauce was increasing cup by cup due to adding just a little too much of the last ingredient to make up for the overabundant previous ingredient of milk or flour.
But leaving the kitchen to consult a cookbook on white sauce was my downfall. When I returned, the cake maker was merrily frosting the two-layer cake, just hot from the oven, the broccoli was overdone, and the stroganoff was sour cream and grease.
The only ingredient done to perfection was a large pot of cheese sauce. I figured my bachelor friends could always freeze the rest to put on the leftover chicken Kiev.
I drained the limp broccoli and was slowly pouring a little of the sauce from the pot over the vegetables when someone (I don’t want to cast aspersions on my college friends) thumped my elbow. I suddenly had broccoli soup.
As I began to bewail having lost the battle on the stroganoff and vegetables, the top layer of the cake began to slide in a northeasterly direction, sending eight people to the dining table to witness a moving disaster. With quick decision, one of the roommates (who, like the ringleader, went on to become a physician) grabbed a knife and stabbed the cake to secure the layers together.
Unfortunately, the cake slowly cleaved in two, revealing a San Andreas-like fault, molten chocolate frosting flowing into the crevasse.
For the remainder of the school year, I was politely invited over for dinner at Drake, but a restraining order from the four roommates prohibited me from entering the kitchen — unless I wanted to volunteer to do the dishes.