The guests were due in minutes. I’d pulled a whole beef tenderloin from the oven, sliced it, and arranged it on a platter before running upstairs to zip into a dress for the Christmas formal.

My college housemates had pooled our pennies to host cocktails for our dates—and we’d bet it all on beef. No chips, dips, cheese, or crackers; just rosy pink medallions of beef served with party rye and horseradish.

I knew it would be a hit.

Back in our makeshift kitchen, I grabbed a few sprigs of parsley and turned to the beef, only to find it pooled with blood. My elegant platter of 10 minutes ago now looked more like a crime scene.

In a tactical error, I’d failed to let the meat rest before slicing it. We spooled out paper towels to mop up the evidence. But the beef never fully recovered. Neither did I.

Bloody Saturday was my first holiday misstep. Since then, I’ve set a sweet potato casserole on fire, whipped mashed potatoes into glue, and reached inside a cooked turkey to find, (surprise!) the bag of giblets.

“You’re not alone,” my friend Phyllis told me over lunch. “It happened to Eleanor Roosevelt, too. The White House waiter brought the turkey into the dining room and, as he lowered the platter to the table in front of the President, it slid off and skidded across the floor,” she said.

I felt the dread of a festive meal that hairpins from right to wrong. “What did she do?” I asked.

“Eleanor didn’t miss a beat,” Phyllis said, stirring her tea. “She calmly told the waiter ‘Please take that one back to the kitchen, Charles. Then, bring in the other turkey.’”

I’d like to think she shot him a wink. “There was no ‘other’ turkey,” Phyllis added, shrugging, as she took a sip. “Even at the White House, who has a spare?”

For any host, an unflappable attitude covers a multitude of sins. The show must go on, after all, as it did for my friend Madeline, who lifted a turkey from the fryer only to drop it, “literally, in the dirt,” she tells me. With 20 guests on the way, “I had no choice but to wipe it off and carve it with a smile. Everyone remarked on the crispy skin, which was probably mulch. But I never said a word.”

When our promised offerings go up in smoke, apologies only make matters worse. Instead, take a page from Memphis hostess Peggy Latham’s book. “One year, my mother cooked the turkey the night before Thanksgiving,” her daughter Anne told me. “Then, to save room in the refrigerator, she set it on the back porch to stay cold overnight.”

This foolproof plan was not. “Lo and behold, a raccoon got into it, leaving the turkey with a sizeable hole in each breast,” Anne says. A lesser host might have thrown in her oven mitts, but instead of defeat, Peggy Latham saw an opportunity. “My dramatic, fun-loving mom filled each hole with an apple—and made a bra for the turkey.”

The turkey bra remains forever etched in Latham family history. “Alas, I have no photos of this milestone event,” Anne tells me, “but I sure wish I did.”

Etched in my own family history was an eggnog-making party, where guests took turns dribbling bourbon into a punch bowl, while stirring slowly, to prevent the raw eggs in the ’nog from cooking. One afternoon before a meeting, I mentioned to our publisher that our eggnog party was “the alcoholic equivalent of a barn raising—everyone had a hand in the finished product.”

“We made eggnog, too!” he responded, “for a big party my parents hosted on Christmas Eve.” Then he upped the ante: He was a teenager when his mother asked him to retrieve the five oversized bowls of eggnog from the screened porch, where they’d been kept cold.

By now, the conference room had filled and he’d found a rapt audience. “When I stepped onto the porch, I saw immediately that the covering on each bowl had been pushed back,” he said before offering a second clue: “And in each bowl, the level of eggnog looked low, by a lot, at exactly the same level.”

What had happened, we all wondered?

“I looked down to see Meg, our Chocolate Lab with the milky evidence all over her muzzle,” he said, shaking his head. “As a kid, I’m thinking this is a disaster, so I called into the kitchen: ‘Momma! Meg drank the eggnog!’”

His mother froze, mentally scrolling through the 100 party invitations she’d hand-addressed and mailed on the day after Thanksgiving. “Is there any left?” she asked. “We’ll just skim a little off the top; it will be fine.”

“From the front hall, my father, a surgeon, chimed in: ‘The alcohol will kill any germs!’”

As for Meg, she slept through the party on the living room rug. “The eggnog was Christened Megnog,” he added. “It was a fantastic party.”

This article originally appeared in the December 2022 issue.

Home

Behind the Kitchen Door