The perils of making cream sauce

Friendship means food

As you'll gather from a previous post, one of the features of ex-pat life here in SW France is getting together for meals. Before I had a home here, I was a bit snooty about Brits who choose to live abroad and then huddle together in ghettos when they get there, having no real contact with the natives. I still hold that view, but living here has also made me value a strong friendship network with people who literally 'speak my language'. And friendship involves food.
If you're the host, that means planning food, preparing food, serving food - and repairing to the kitchen every now and then for a quiet nervous breakdown. Incidentally, I never want a kitchen cum dining-room. My nervous breakdowns are strictly private affairs.

Feeding the kitchen sink

So, last Friday, it was my turn to host. I scoured the cookery books. The key is courses you can prepare ahead. What the recipe called luxury lasagne appeared to fit that bill. But luxury lasagne means cream sauce and that's where things began to unravel. I was supposed to keep stirring, not multi-tasking. A subtle burnt milk aroma reminded me that rinsing a casserole dish at the sink was not part of the recommended process for making cream sauce. I grabbed the pan from the hob and tasted a spoonful, then another. I needed a second opinion. Now my husband has learnt a few things in 36 years of marriage; one of them is: avoid post dinner party post mortems at all costs. You know the kind of thing:
"That went well didn't it?" (says he innocently)
"Mmmm. The lasagne was a flop though."
"I thought it was fine." (Fine? Fine! Whoever invented the word 'fine'?)
"It wasn't fine. The sauce was burnt. How can you say it was fine?"
Etc, etc -I'm sure you can supply your own variations on the script.
So my husband has come up with an avoidance strategy: brutal honesty while there's still time to change things is better than a painful post mortem when it's way too late.
"You can't use that, it's burnt," he said, after one sip from the spoon.
It was true, but not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to be told it tasted all right to him, or maybe a hint of something, but you'd never notice when it was mixed with other stuff, or a bit more nutmeg will mask it - but no, I got it between the eyes. It's burnt, throw it away, start again. So I poured it down the sink and started again. Back to square one, I thought, thumping pans around.

Novels and cream sauce

Later, when the second attempt had worked and my luxury lasagne was smugly luxuriating in its dish, it occurred to me that the process of making cream sauce could teach me a thing or two about the process of producing a novel. You spend time and effort. You graft away and try to make it perfect, but something's not quite right. You desperately want a second opinion, but you don't want to be told to pour it down the sink and start again. You couldn't stand going back to square one and re-drafting, so let's just get it out there to agents and publishers, and hope none of them notice the acrid flavour of burnt milk. I know, I've done it. And the truth is, nobody goes back to square one the second time around. When I made my second batch of cream sauce, I chose a pan with a more solid base; I was in less of a hurry to add the milk; I added it gradually; I kept the heat much lower and I didn't stop stirring for a second. I'd learnt all that from making mistakes the first time. And the second time around, the sauce was destined for the table, not the sink.