Smoke From a Distant Fire
Marcia, over at The Pink Shoe wrote a little story about a cooking event that culminated in The Firemen coming over and evacuating her apartment building. It was funny, and rather than tell this story in her comments, I’m using her tale as a springboard to tell you all about The Night The Firemen Came To My Dinner Party.
It was long ago, and not so far away, and I was living in a wreck of an old house in Coconut Grove. It had peeling, cracking walls, and wooden floors and an old, beat up stove with a short and one melted burner (that is another story altogether) in a tiny galley kitchen.
I was separated from the Antichrist, and my girlfriend Rocky was living with me until she got the tickets to move to LA. It was late in December and I was hosting my annual goose dinner; the first without the Antichrist (and it was him and his raised-by-wolves family that prompted me to begin holding annual goose dinners, but that is yet another story for another time). In celebration of my liberation, the guest list had grown to where I needed to roast two geese. And there began my problems.
I didn’t have a roasting pan large enough to hold two geese, but I’m a resourceful girl, and made one out of two disposable foil pans, using tin snips, tin foil and some foil pan origami. Side by side, they filled my little oven completely.
Have you ever cooked a goose? They are Very Fatty, and need constant attention so that they don’t cook up greasy. This attention takes the form of repeated poking with a sharp object to drain the fat from the skin. This rendered fat, by the way, is a most excellent cooking fat, and adds a subtle flavor to things like soups, when you use it to saute the onions or vegetables before adding them to the stock. Using a tablespoon of goose fat also makes for the world’s best matzoh balls. But I digress.
So there is soup, there is home made bread, there are vegetables and desserts all cooked. The table is set, the ice bucket is full. Rocky is showered and dressed, and I’m about to go and do the same. I poke the geese a few more times for good luck. Which does not come. No. What comes is very bad luck, in the form of the sharp object going through the bottom of the thin foil roasting pan. Which then proceeds to drip goose fat onto the heating elements. Which then proceeds to burst into flames.
Well. I am on that issue like white on rice. I slam all the doors to the kitchen shut, open all the kitchen windows and the back screen door and start yelling at Rocky to bring me every fan in the house, and point them out the windows, blowing the smoke out of the house and away from the fire alarms.
She does that, but she also (and I’m sorry to say this Rocky) panics. I, on the other hand, am remembering everything I ever learned about cooking fires in home ec. Here is what is going though my mind:
Do not open the oven door. That will only cause the fire to flare up and burn off your eyebrows and eyelashes. (And the geese, which cost a fucking fortune.)
If you are foolish enough to open the oven door, you have to throw baking soda on the fire to put it out, because it is a grease fire. (And if you miss, you will throw baking soda all over the geese, which cost a fucking fortune, so you really don’t want to do that.)
Turn off the oven, and don’t open the door. The fire will (eventually) run out of oxygen (in theory, because I’m not sure how good the seals are on this old wreck) and the heating elements will cool enough that the grease will not continue to burn. This is my best option, because the geese are almost done, and they will continue to coast on the retained heat.
Ergo: do nothing except turn off the stove and wait. Except. Remember I said that Rocky had panicked? She’d called the fire department and was now trying to tell them where I lived. I grabbed the phone from her and started negotiations with the fire department.
“Yeah. A grease fire. No, it’s almost pretty much close to being out.”
“Yeah. Wooden floors.”
“No. I won’t give you my address. Not unless you promise that you won’t send a truck. I’m having a dinner party and the guests are due any minute and having a fire truck in the driveway just Will Not Do.”
“No. No truck. No lights. No sirens. No guys in raincoats.”
“Look, if you insist on coming over, just send a single guy on his way home. There’s room at the table.”
Well, I go off and shower and dress, and the guests, in fact, do start arriving, and every time there is a knock at the door, I say, “O, that must be the firemen.” and everybody chuckles. Until there is a knock on the door, and there in my driveway is an entirely too large red fire truck, with its lights flashing and about six guys in rubber coats in my front door. “YOU LIED!” I shriek.
In they come, I pretend to be Noel Coward, and sashay through the living room, trailing a string of firemen behind me like baby ducks in their yellow rubber coats. “Firemen,” I say, “these are my guests. Everybody? These are the firemen.”
They follow me into the kitchen where they allow as yes, I have had a grease fire which is now entirely out, and the geese are entirely gorgeous and maybe they need to take them (or at least one of them) back to the station for evidence of said fire. I tell them over my dead body, and at that moment, the last pair of guests arrive, pounding up the back steps and into the kitchen in a panic because the entire driveway is filled with a red fire truck flashing its lights. “See?” I say to the firemen, “this is EXACTLY what I did NOT want.”
Well, the firemen left (without the geese, but with a little something to tide them over), and more martinis were poured, and good times were had by all and my friend the Chuckster to this day says those were the Best Geese Ever, and could I figure out how to replicate that smoked flavor without burning up my kitchen?
