Cooking to a Truck Call

This is the working document for the food and drink at Tangled Thistle’s The Set Comes Down at Midnight — a dinner served on a theater set that is struck around the guests over the last hour. The creative argument is over there. This is the prep clock, the quantities, the shopping order and the two dishes that are the workload.

The thing that makes this menu different from every other menu on this site is that you do not own the clock. The stage manager calls the load-out from the book, and the load-out is running to a truck with a driver whose hours are legally counted — nine hours of driving in a day, a forty-five minute break after four and a half, and eleven hours of daily rest that has to start somewhere. That is not a preference anybody can be talked out of at midnight. Every timing below hangs off it.

The sequence

Two things in that table are non-negotiable and both of them are about clearing rather than serving. The cutlery goes at a quarter to eleven, before the strike starts, because a fork on a deck during a load-out is a hazard and because a knife on a table locks the room into a format it is about to lose. And the bar strikes at the same time, because the bar is a large object standing on a floor that a truck is waiting for.

The prep clock, counted backwards from the truck

A fortnight out

• Make the brown sauce for the bacon rolls and freeze it.
• Make the semifreddo, in its tubs, lidded, and freeze. This is the single best decision in the plan: the dessert comes off the list entirely, a fortnight before anybody is under pressure.
• Pipe the gougères onto trays, freeze solid, and bag them. They bake from frozen with four minutes added.
• Make the cider reduction for The Half and batch the drink. It improves for the first week.
• Book the ovens. In a theater this means finding out what the green room actually has, in person, with a tape measure, rather than being told there is a kitchen.

Three days out

• Braise the shoulders completely, cool fast and shallow, refrigerate in their liquor. They are better reheated.
• Build the terrines and get them under weight. They want twelve hours pressed and are better on day two.
• Make the bitter orange cordial and the highball base; get it into the keg and onto gas.
• Make both bases for The Iron.
• Toast the crumb for the greens.

The day before

• Char the leeks and make the barley in full. It is better after two hours and fine after a day.
• Make the hot cup and refrigerate it for reheating in the urn.
• Wash, trim and bag the greens. Halve the squash and keep the halves covered.
• Pack the crates. Everything that goes into the building has to come out of it the same night, so pack in the order you will strike, not the order you will use.

The day itself

• Minus 6 hours. Walk the carry route with the production manager. Mark where the pass goes on the same drawing the crew are using. Nothing of yours goes in the route the flats take to the dock door.
• Minus 5 hours. Roast the squash. Reheat the shoulders covered at 300°F.
• Minus 3 hours. Slice the terrines — hot knife, wiped between every slice — and plate them.
• Minus 2 hours. Terrines down on the tables. Urn filled and heating. Keg vented to serving pressure.
• Minus 1 hour. Bake the gougères from frozen. Props table dressed and taped.
• Minus 30 minutes. The safety briefing. Every member of catering staff who will be on the deck after eleven gets the same brief from the production manager that the crew get, with the same map, at the same time. They need to know what the tape means and that a call of heads means stop walking and look up.
• 20:50. Greens on, in waves. This is the only genuinely pressured moment before midnight.
• 22:45. Cutlery, glassware and linen into crates. Bar strikes. From here everything is carried.

Quantities, at the two counts this theme actually runs at

The two dishes that are the workload

The first is the greens, and they are the only thing on this menu that genuinely does not scale. A domestic stovetop boils enough water for 10 oz of greens at a time. A hundred covers is ten waves, twenty minutes of continuous work, and one person who is doing nothing else — at a moment when the pass is about to be moved out of the carry route. At three hundred covers it is not possible in a green room and you should not pretend otherwise: either hire a commercial burner or take the dressed raw and blanched substitution in the recipe, which holds an hour and is a good dish.

The second is the bacon rolls, and they are hard for the same reason at the worst possible hour. Two hundred slices, at half past twelve, in a building that is being taken apart, with the kitchen already half packed. A domestic pan does eight slices; a flat-top does twenty. That is one person for twenty minutes on a flat-top or two people for forty minutes on pans, and forty minutes is too slow for a room that is emptying. Decide which you have a fortnight out, and if the answer is neither, take the cold cured ham roll instead and make it in the afternoon.

Everything else is a make-ahead. The dessert, the sauce, the gougères, the drinks batch and the terrines are all done before the week starts; the shoulders and the barley before the day starts. That is deliberate, because a menu served in a building with no kitchen, on somebody else’s schedule, has to put its labor in the fortnight.

What holds and what collapses

The shopping order

1. Fortnight: the shoulders, ordered bone-in at 6½ lb each — say bone-in explicitly, because a butcher will bone and roll them as a kindness and you lose the moment where the bone waggles free. Tubs and lids, wooden spoons, parchment squares and paper cups with lids: all of these are the format and none of them can be improvised on the night.
2. Week: rye, cider, apple brandy, vermouth, bitters. Dried hibiscus, roasted chicory root, tamarind. Honey, cream, eggs in quantity.
3. Three days: ham hock, leeks, gelatin, barley, hazelnuts, walnuts, hard cheese, flour, butter.
4. Two days: squash, greens, herbs, lemons, rolls.
5. Day of: the bacon, and nothing else. It is the one thing that has to be as fresh as you can get it and the one thing cooked at the last possible moment.

Three service notes that are not about cooking

The pass cannot sit in the carry route. Whatever route the flats take from the deck to the dock door is a working corridor from eleven o’clock, and nothing of yours may be in it: not a table, not a rack, not a crate of glassware, not a person. This gets argued about and the crew win it. Walk it two weeks out.

The caterer strikes too, and probably behind the set. Everything you brought in leaves the building that night, most likely through the same dock door, possibly in a line behind a truck. Ask early who loads out first. A catering van in the dock at midnight is the fastest way to make a crew hate you, and a load-out that runs late because a fridge is in the way costs the production real money in crew hours.

Feed the crew the same food at the same moment. Not a separate crew meal in a separate room at a separate hour. The dessert tray and the bacon roll tray both go to the crew as they pass, without being asked and without anybody making anything of it. Budget for it, in the count, at the start — the numbers in the table above already include twelve crew.

Every recipe

• The Half — rye, reduced cider and amber vermouth
• The Iron — a bitter red drink with no alcohol and no apology
• The Dock Door Highball, poured from a tap
• The Stage Door Hot Cup
• Black pepper gougères, off a props table
• A pressed terrine of leek and ham
• A braised shoulder, run on like a flat
• A whole roast squash, carried on the same board
• Barley with charred leek
• Greens with lemon and a toasted crumb
• Burnt honey semifreddo, in a tub
• Bacon rolls and a quick brown sauce

The design thinking behind all of it — why the food gets less formal as the room gets more real, and why the last hour is one hand and no plate — is in Tangled Thistle’s menu concept and its Occasion Study.

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