When I was working at Audie Michael’s, a restaurant on the Square in Oxford (current site of the City Grocery), we became well-known for two items outside our regular menu. One was gumbo, and the other was lasagna. We ran both regularly as luncheon specials.
Since we were basically an upscale burger joint, we didn’t do a lot of catering, usually only large take-out orders for regular customers. But one day Pat Lamar, a wealthy, socially prominent patron and later mayor of Oxford, sent in a messenger carrying a beautiful, knee-high McCarty bowl with a tapered bottom. My boss came waltzing into the kitchen with this huge piece of pottery and said, “Mrs. Lamar wants you to make lasagna in this for her party tonight.”
“Sure,” I said. “Is this oven-proof?” He looked at me like I’d hit him with a hammer. “What do you mean, oven-proof?” he asked. (He was a nice guy, just lacked focus.)
“Look,” I said. “I’m not about to take an expensive piece of pottery, fill it full of lasagna, and bake it in an oven without knowing that it’s not going to shatter into seven hundred pieces.” Suddenly realizing the situation, he asked, “What are we gonna do?” (In my experience, this has been management’s basic reaction to anything that’s not in the manual.)
“First thing, call her up and see if she’s baked in it before,” I said. A few minutes later he came back and said, “She’s never put it in the oven, but she thinks it will be fine.” I was skeptical. Even if the piece was insured, I didn’t want to have to clean up an oven full of lasagna and broken crockery. So I got on the phone and got in touch with Ron Dale, a ceramics professor at Ole Miss.
“Jesse Lee,” he said, “To be honest with you, I do not know if it will withstand the heat or not. But the one thing not to do is to put a cool piece into a hot oven.”
So I took a deep breath and made lasagna. I filled the bowl with warm water to heat the ceramic up a bit, poured that out and filled it with layers of meat, cheese, sauce, and noodles, all still very warm. The entire ordeal (which took two people to lift) went into a cold oven.
I started turning up the thermostat 25° every fifteen minutes or so. I was on pins and needles. My boss Don positioned himself in front of the oven on a stool staring at the oven door until I ran him out with a mop. After two hours, the lasagna was bubbling beautifully and the bowl was fine. I found a box big enough to hold the damn thing and was just closing the lid when Mrs. Lamar’s people came to pick it up for the party, which had already started.
Once it was out of my hands, I went up to the bar and got good and snockered. I deserved it.
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This article was originally printed in The Local Voice #199 (published March 6, 2014). To download a PDF of this issue, click HERE.
