The 18th century gastronome, Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote that "the truly dedicated chef or the true lover of food is a person who has learned to go beyond mere catastrophe and to salvage at least one golden moment from every meal". The chef who discovers that he has accidentally used baking soda instead of confectioners' sugar in preparing a dish may find it difficult to smile, as may the customer who has just had a bowl of hot soup spilled on his lap by a clumsy waiter. If the truth be known, however, such occasions can provide us with a marvelous source of humor.

There is practically not a soul, for example, who does not realize that chefs take themselves and their work seriously. Just how weighty a load may fall on the shoulders of a great chef was demonstrated in the spring of 1671 when the renowned Vatel, then the chef of the Prince of Conde was told to prepare a reception for King Louis XIV and an entourage of 200 guests. Vatel, reputed for his poise under pressure, dedicated himself to raising the standards of the prince's chateau at Chantilly to those of Versailles and went beyond his duties as chef by taking complete charge of the arrangements.

He saw to it that the lawns were mowed, the carpets had been cleaned, the linen were fresh and the curtains were dusted. He ensured that the candle holders were filled and that the furniture was oiled. He prepared the menus, ordered the food, supervised its cooking, tasted the sauces and carved the roasts.

The king arrived in the late afternoon of April 23rd and went hunting in the evening with his party. Afterwards, a light supper of turtle soup, creamed chicken, fried trout and roast pheasant was served in the daffodil garden. Because seventy-five guests more than anticipated had arrived, there was not enough pheasant for several of the tables. Vatel felt that his honor had been stained, but the prince, on noting his chef's agitation, went out of his way to praise him for the dinner.

The next day was a Friday and a shipment of forty baskets of fish was expected in the morning. When only a few baskets arrived, Vatel became distraught. His mind reeled with visions of the king and his court sitting down to empty plates. As he wrote in a brief note: "The shame is too much to bear". Vatel retired to his room and there committed suicide by stabbing himself eight times. Shortly after his body was found, the rest of the fish arrived.

Although his death caused a small disturbance, the king praised him for his high sense of honor. Madame de Sevigne, a guest at the party, wrote to her daughter about the event and concluded "the man protected his honor, of that one can be certain. ...The incident did, of course, spoil the party somewhat".

Whatever one thinks of Vatel's act, he started what has become a tradition among French chefs who consider themselves dishonored. During the height of the turmoil of the French Revolution, Antoine Brossard, the chef to the banker Reyniere, found that he could not locate any Nantes ducklings to prepare for dinner. Brossard pre- pared a light dinner for his employer, wrote a long note of apology and then hung himself in his kitchen. And, in 1967, the chef at the Relais de Porquerolles restaurant shot himself after the disgrace of losing his stars in the Michelin guide. ?????

Not all culinary catastrophes end as tragically. In his diary Paul Magny recalled an incident in 1840, when he was chef of Paris' Restaurant Philippe. Magny had been preparing a potato and leek soup for the evening and, when it was almost ready a bowl containing nearly a kilo of salt fell into the kettle. Knowing that the soup would be inedible, Magny simply placed the kettle to one side, thinking to throw it away afterwards. When the evening ended and the last diner had left, Magny noticed that the large soup kettle was already empty. Because he had forgotten to mention the accident to any of his staff, they had simply gone ahead and served the soup as usual. Not a single client had complained.

Edouard Nignon, a great chef and owner of Restaurant Larue in Paris recalled an evening in 1906 when he was to serve dinner to the President of France, the Prime Minister of England, and the Archbishop of Paris. "All was going splendidly", Nignon wrote, "when suddenly the oven in which the quails were baking burst into flame. The birds were instantly burned to a crisp, the potatoes that had been next to them were reduced to lumps of charcoal, and there was nothing left of the carrots that had been placed in the oven to glaze". Knowing that there was no time to prepare a new dinner, Nignon sent an emissary to the nearby Cafe de Paris, there to explain the situation and plead for assistance. Within half an hour, Nignon's guests were dining on sole with shrimps and sauce Riche and a magnificent shoulder of lamb.

The dinner went splendidly. Afterwards Nignon asked Georges Lemblin, the colleague who had come to his rescue how he had - managed to "perform such a large miracle in such a short period of time". Lemblin, then chef at the famous cafe smiled and explain- ed: "My dear Edouard, it is all quite simple. You were serving people who make history. I was merely serving a group of American bankers. When I realized your predicament, dear friend, I went, with no shame to their table, announced that we had had a fire in the kitchen and would be unable to serve them that evening".

Fires have played a role in more than one kitchen-based catastrophe. During a dinner where wealthy Englishman Harry Cust was entertaining Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and sixteen other male friends, the second story of the house caught fire. The great chef Auguste Escoffier was supervising the kitchen staff at Cust's home that evening. The next day, in a letter to a friend he wrote "the house was ablaze but my food was so brilliant and the conversation of the guests so engrossing that no one took any notice". The meal continued while servants distributed large towels so that the diners could protect themselves against the water from the fire- men's hoses.

At times a fire can actually be the highlight of a meal. Once, when he was living in Paris, gourmet food-critic James Beard and a group of American journalists were invited by a French col- league to an intimate dinner to be held in a small bistro famous for its simple but excellent cookery. Beard later wrote in the New York Times: "The dinner was an absolute fiasco from start to finish. Our host failed to arrive, the chef was absent because he was suffering from influenza and the waiter was depressed because he had just returned from the funeral of his mother. The lobsters were overcooked, the soup had gone sour and the lettuce was limp. The steaks were tough, the sauce had curdled and the sorbet had melted. The red wine was too cold and the white wine was too warm. No meal could have been worse. The evening ended marvelously, however, for precisely at 11 p.m. a fire started in the kitchen and by midnight the place had burned to the ground."

Beard was no stranger to culinary catastrophes. Once in the middle of a demonstration on a live television broadcast, Beard realized that the souffle he was preparing was simply not going to rise. An embarrassment such as this was more than he could face so, at just the moment his assistant began to remove the souffle from the oven, Beard gave the poor man a painful kick in the shins, forcing him to drop the souffle on the floor. The audience never realized what happened and Beard's reputation was saved.

On another live television show the end result was not quite as satisfactory. Max Boyce, the host of a well known Australian talk-show, once appeared with a Greek restaurateur who proceeded to cook one of his specialties, calamari (squid) in spicy tomato sauce, in an electric skillet. Unknown to the technical staff of the television station, the thermostat was not functioning correctly, causing the dish to cook much too slowly. At the moment when it should have been done, the restaurateur asked Boyce and one of the other guests on the show to sample the dish. Because it was underdone, the calamari was barely cooked and completely rubbery. The guest took a large mouthful, chewed for a few second and then proceeded to throw up in full view of more than three million viewers.

Not all of the problems that a chef encounters take place in the kitchen. In his memoirs Gabriel Tschumi, the chef to England's King Edward VII and Queen Alexandria recalled an occasion when a distinguished visitor from Polynesia was invited to dine at Buck- ingham Palace. One of the dishes prepared was asparagus served with butter sauce. The visitor had never tasted them before but found them delicious. The only problem was that when he reached the hard, inedible ends of the stalks, he began throwing them over his shoulder onto the carpet. The servants gaped in dismay, but the king proved master of the situation. In order not to cause his guest even the least bit of embarrassment the king also threw what he had not eaten over his shoulder. Within a short while, all the other diners were behaving similarly. Later when the cleaners ar- rived, the usually spotless carpet was a mess. Tschumi says that there were a few grumbles from those who had to remove the stains, but when the story went the rounds of the servants' quarters, there was nothing but admiration for the king's presence of mind.

Italian chef Marco Frascatti has a marvelous collection of tales about how he was embarrassed not by his cooking but by the behavior of his guests. Once, when he was the chef at Madrid's luxurious El Gato restaurant, Frascatti was invited to have a glass of cognac with Eva Peron and General Franco who had just completed their dinner. Frascatti noticed that several guests waved their fists at Peron and shouted at her "Puta, Puta". Peron asked Franco: "Why do they call me a whore?" To which Franco replied, "Never mind, Senora. I've been retired for years but they still call me General."

On another occasion Frascatti was present when Lord Alington was dining out with his wife. When his former lover, actress Tallulah Banhkead entered and passed Alington's table the peer hurriedly looked the other way. After a few moments, the actress, known to be completely uninhibited, left her table and going over to her former paramour, asked huskily: "What's the matter, dar- ling. Don't you recognize me with my clothes on?"

Some dining catastrophes are based on deliberate acts of maliciousness. Jacques Monselet was a well known restaurant critic and journalist who claimed to be an expert in gastronomy. The truth, as many of his colleagues suspected, was that that the pompous, self-promoting Monselet did not really have much sense of taste. Joseph Favre, the author of the "Great Dictionary of Cuisine" was a gifted cook and he and a group of other gourmets decided to have their revenge. When Monselet arrived at a dinner Favre was giving "in his honor", he was presented with a menu that listed, among other things, burbot liver, escalopes of salmon and an omelet with ambregris. Monselet raved about the livers, detected a Scottish flavor in the salmon and was quite certain that the ambregis had been imported from the northern coast of Japan.

After Monselet finished dining he was informed of the truth of the matter - that Favre had been to the Paris zoo and there had purchased a crocodile that had died of old age. The "livers" were actually the brains of the crocodile, the "salmon" was really sliced crocodile tail and the omelet had been made with the stale eggs of the same creature. To add to his dismay, his host dis- closed that the butter was margarine and the sausage on which the noted food critic had dined had been made of the cheapest horse- meat.

And then there is a series of stories of happy accidents that have brought about great culinary discoveries. There is the story, for example about how, when Henry Charpentier first invented crepes Suzette, he was not quite satisfied with the final taste of the sauce. It was only by accident, or so the story has it, that when the brandy he was using to flavor the sauce became overheated and burst into flame, that he attained both the precise flavor and spectacular effect that he was seeking. The story is charming, but is simply untrue. Charpentier had been flavoring sauces with brandy and serving flaming desserts for nearly fifteen years be- fore he invented crepes Suzette.

There is also the tale about how, because fresh strawberries were not available, the great Auguste Escoffier had to send an assistant to a small grocery store near the Savoy Hotel to purchase a jar of strawberry preserves so that he could invent the dessert he dedicated to the great soprano, Dame Nellie Melba. As the story has it, the grocer only had raspberry preserves and it was these that went into the preparation of the sauce. Again, a nice story, but one with no basis whatever in fact. First, because strawberries were out of season when he first prepared the dish, it is evident that Escoffier never had the slightest intention of using them in his masterpiece. Second, one need not be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was never a grocery store adjoining the Savoy Hotel. Finally, Escoffier only started to use raspberry or currant preserves in making the sauce for Peche Melba three years after the dish had first been presented.

Lest we laugh too hard at the catastrophes of others, it may be well to reflect on Sidney Smith's dictum that "the catastrophes of others frequently entertain us. Alas, we never seem to realize that the next catastrophe is probably going to be ours".

© Daniel Rogov