Exploding Ducks: A Recipe for Life

Thanksgiving brings back memories of culinary disasters. I can’t help it. Other people remember warm family gatherings full of laughter. Ours are usually that way too except that a lot of the laughter comes from what people remember me doing.

Like the time I left the shells on the shrimp and cooked them in a sweet and sour sauce. Or when I left the giblets in the turkey and we had to pull the paper out of the stuffing. Or the time I made pastry shells that were so thick and overworked that they became like Brighton rock (for those not British, these are boiled candy sticks so hard you can break your teeth on them). Or the first time I cooked a duck and managed to explode it. Grease poured out of the oven and on to the floor. Thick, gray smoke filled the kitchen, and the smell of duck grease got into everything, including the drapes and our clothes.

But embarrassing as these were, the greatest mischief in my culinary life happened when we moved from sea level in Hawaii to the mile high city of Denver. Nobody told me that I couldn’t continue to use my cherished recipe book put out by the Honolulu Advertiser. It’s called “My Favorite Recipe” and includes the best of entries in a cooking competition. I loved the buttered shrimp recipe, and the meat loaf with clams was a couldn’t miss for me. At least until I moved to Colorado.

What I didn’t know was that many sea level recipes won’t work here in the mountains. Among other things, altitude lowers the boiling point of water (try cooking beans) and reduces atmospheric pressure (think soufflés that erupt like volcanoes). Everything has to cook longer because the water doesn’t get as hot, but there are no hard and fast rules for how much. Potatoes break apart and get starchy. Unless you’re careful, pie crusts burn before the contents are cooked. And add onto all this the fact that Denver is cracked-heels dry. Invariably more water has to be added to recipes. Whole books have been written locally on what is called “cooking at altitude,” with conversion tables to make recipes, particularly bread and cakes, work up here. Even then things can be tricky.

Into this, insert me, basically unaware of what dangers lurk in my kitchen and faced with my first thanksgiving “at altitude.”

Well, my turkey had to cook so long the drumsticks fell off the rest of the carcass. My stuffing had a thick toasted crust on it. I was rushed and tried to mash the potatoes in the food processor. The result was something like the consistency of liquid cement. My peas were hard. And I was in tears. The only things that were all right were the pumpkin pie, the rolls, and the cranberry jelly, because they were bought.

“That’s OK, hon,” my husband said as he picked out the edible bits of the turkey carcass and threw the hard bits out for the fox, “We aren’t going to starve.” And we didn’t.

Since then I’ve concluded that cooking’s a lot like life. We take it for granted until something happens to make us aware of it. Some people live life by the cookbook. They wouldn’t have exploded a duck because they would have read up on it and maybe bought duck insurance. Others would have exploded the duck anyway because they hate reading cookbooks and want to do it their own way. Yet others—like me, I guess—learn by trial and error. I read the directions for the duck but they didn’t register until I was cleaning up grease. “Oh that’s what they meant,” I remember thinking.

Now I’m older and can get some perspective, I think that’s maybe how I’ve always lived my life. I wish I could have seen up front what I can see so clearly looking back. I envy the people who have recipes for their lives that actually work. My life at times has resembled that exploded duck.

Well, this year Sid’s family is coming over and we are going to brine the turkey. It will turn out fine because Sid likes to focus. I doubt very much that he’ll let us get to where he has to comfort me about some new culinary disaster. But even as our turkey comes out golden brown and juicy, I’ll be thinking about that untidy, exploded duck and the laughter it has produced whenever I tell the story.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!