Bad Math

In my most recent Myeloma Beacon column, I wrote about the type of math I increasingly use when calculating energy and stamina against activities. I mused: "Which is greater: the energy expended driving to and having dinner with friends who live 35 miles away, or the energy expended by having those same friends for dinner with me preparing most of the meal, including baking dessert? Solve for x, with x being how exhausted and/or ill I will be the following day."

That equation has nothing on the one I did last Friday night: "If 3 teaspoons equals 1 tablespoon, how much salt have you added if you misread the recipe (which you have made hundreds of times) as 4 tablespoons instead of teaspoons?"

Answer: 3 times too much.

I was making two large batches (two pounds of blacks beans in each pot) of Cuban black bean soup. Truly, I have made hundreds of batches of black bean soup over the last almost four decades. Hundreds. So why this time did I read the salt amount in tablespoons instead of teaspoons? It wasn't that I was distracted by multitasking; I had finished an earlier phone call with my brother during which I set the recipe aside, knowing I would need to concentrate on the seasoning. It wasn't that I blithely assumed I could estimate the salt needed and tossed it in with abandon. No, I have no excuse for calculating "oh, 4 tablespoons equal 1/4 cup, let me pour a quarter cup of salt into each pot." It was only after I poured the second quarter cup of salt into the second pot that the gravity of what I had done hit me. And at that point it was a done deal.

There is not a whole lot you can do when you oversalt a recipe by a factor of three. My first reaction (after four-letter words raced through my head) was to rush to Aldi to purchase a bag of potatoes, remembering an old World War One story about some wartime singer sent to entertain the troops helping peel hundreds of potatoes to reduce salt in an oversalted cauldron of soup. My second reaction (after purchasing the aforementioned potatoes and popping a few in each pot) was to Google how to counteract too much salt in the soup. The potato story was untrue. Add water. Add something sharp (like vinegar) to counteract the flavor. Throw it out and start all over.

You know how this ends.

Even the Mathemagician couldn't save this one (illustration by Jules Feiffer)

Two massive batches of black bean soup, down the disposal the next morning. Because the vinegar (which the recipes calls for anyway), the extra water, and the potatoes did absolutely nothing to cut the saltiness of the mixture.

From a dollar standpoint, that was about $7.50 or so down the drain. (I have a pretty good idea of the cost because the next morning we returned to Aldi to buy more beans and a few other ingredients.) From a personal standpoint, it was an embarrassment beyond cost. I'm good at math. I'm good at cooking. What the hell happened?

As I thought about the soup disaster, a favorite scene from The Phantom Tollbooth kept coming to mind. The Mathemagician serves Milo and his companions subtraction stew when they arrive in Digitopolis. They are baffled as to why they feel hungrier the more they eat, until the Dodecahedron explains it to them:

     "And suppose you had something and added less than nothing to it. What would you have then?"

     "FAMINE!" roared the anguished Humbug, who suddenly realized that that was exactly what he'd eaten twenty-three bowls of." 

I made two fresh batches and trust me, they are what they should be. As I began to type this in the early hours of the morning, I could smell the pungent aroma of the soup threaded through the house. At breakfast, we diced and fried the potatoes with which I had tried to salvage the original soup. They were none the worse for wear for their stint in the salty batches.

While Milo and his companions are in Digitopolis, the Mathemagician demonstrates stunning feats of (simple) math, using his magic staff, which the Humbug observes is "only a big pencil." The Mathemagician agrees, then adds, "but once you learn to use it, there is no end to what you can do."

True enough. But even the Mathemagician could not have saved that soup.