filled Dimitri's head with the idea that what we were doing here, we
could do back in New York—only bigger and better.
Ah, those heady days of happy delusion, spirited argument, grandiose
dreams of glory and riches. We did not aspire to be the new Bocuses. No,
that wasn't enough. Jacked up on coke and vodka, we wanted nothing less
than to be like Carême, whose enormous pièces montées married the
concepts of architecture and food. Our work would literally tower over
the work of our contemporaries: Space Needles, Towers of Babel,
Parthenons of forcemeat-stuffed pastry, carefully constructed New
Babylons of barquettes, vol-au-vents, croquembouches . . . the very
words excited and challenged us to reach higher and higher.
We had some successes—and some failures.
A steamship round (a whole roast leg of beef on the bone) sounded like a
good idea; it was, after all, big. Until we overcooked it. An all-Chinese
meal we did was so overloaded with dried Szechuan peppers that we
could hear the muffled wails of pain from the next room. And I recall
with horror a blue wedding cake, layers of turquoise-colored buttercream
and sponge cake, decorated with fruit that looked more like Siegfried
and Roy's beach house than anything Carême ever did. But we did have
some notable successes as well. Provincetown's first Crown Roast of
Veal with Mushroom Duxelle Stuffing and Black Truffle-Studded
Madeira Sauce for one—and our mighty Coliseum of Seafood
Blanquette.
The client was a restaurant owner, and we oversold ourselves somewhat.
Committed to our pastry terrordome, we soon found that there wasn't a
mold quite large enough for this ambitious effort. What we wanted was a
tasty yet structurally sound "coliseum" of pastry crust into which we
could pour about 5 gallons of seafood stew. And we wanted the whole
thing to be covered by a titanic pastry dome, perhaps with a tiny pastry
figure from antiquity, like Ajax or Mercury, perched on top.