We didn't know if the thing could be done. Other than old engravings
from Larousse we'd never even seen anything like what we were
attempting. There was no suitable spring-form mold, something we
could line with foil and fill with beans and then blind-bake. We couldn't
cook it together with the blanquette; it would never hold. The bubbling
velouté suspending our medley of fish and shellfish and wild mushrooms
would make the walls too soft. And the dough: what crust could support
the weight of 5 gallons of molten stew?
As game time approached, we were getting worried. We set up our
operations center in our client's restaurant kitchen and promptly
bivouacked to a bar for some serious strategizing.
In the end—as it so often does—it came down to Julia. Julia Child's
recipes have little snob appeal, but they also tend to work. We took a
recipe for dough from her book on French cooking, and after rubbing the
outside of a large lobster steamer with shortening, stretched and patched
our dough around and over it. It was exactly the opposite of the
prevailing wisdom; fortunately, we didn't know that at the time. For our
dome, we used the top of the pot, and the same principle, laying our
dough over the outside of the round lid and baking it until firm.
When we finally slid the things off—very carefully, I can tell you—
Dimitri was characteristically pessimistic. Would it hold? He didn't
think so. It was a lot of stew we were planning on pouring into this thing,
and Dimitri was convinced it would crumble at the table mid-meal,
boiling hot fish and lavalike velouté rushing onto the laps of the terrified
guests. There would be terrible burns involved, he guessed, "scarring . . .
lawsuits . . . total disgrace". Dimitri cheered himself up by suggesting
that should the unthinkable happen, we were obliged, like Japanese naval
officers, to take our own lives. "Or like Vatel," he submitted, "he ran
himself on his sword over a late fish delivery. It's the least we could do."
In the end we agreed that should our Coliseum of Seafood Blanquette
fall, we'd simply walk quietly out the door and into the bay to drown