THE GREAT GOOSE CONFLAGRATION OF 2005 (2/25/05)

Somewhere, I have a picture of family sitting at a long table in our backyard, waiting as my father cooked hotdogs on a primitive grill – a “feuer-topf” (fire-pot), as my mother called it – that we had purchased at the drugstore. It was simple fare, but memorably surrounded by extraordinary potato salad and garlicky pickles.

What happens, though, when a prodigal son strays too far from the values of his childhood? He moves to suburbia and purchases a twelve-foot grill, supercharged by jet propellant, blasting to 1600 degrees in 2.5 minutes. He is no longer daddy in a faux-toque. He is a nuclear engineer at his control panel.

I am that prodigal son. I have become proficient in grilling steaks, fish, poultry. I have even succeeded at shoving a beer can up a chicken’s derrière and grilling it upright, so it looks like it’s begging for life.

But, when did I stray too far? I have it on Sinaitic authority that it was when I attempted to cross the line between grilling and smoking. I almost paid with my life. It was swift. It was a precognition of Hades. It made me scream for my sainted parents to cradle me in their arms.

My own blast-furnace was equipped with a smoker-box. The allurement was irresistible. I had heard through my culinary meanderings that smoked goose was the apex of charcuterie. Kosher goose is hard to find, but I had one airlifted from Brooklyn. Early the next morning, the hickory chips were well soaked and thick blue-gray smoke filled the chamber. The recalcitrant goose would not stand upright, so I laid him flat. Then I swabbed the victim with a brandied brown-sugar glaze. Two big mistakes.

I had yet to offer my morning prayers, but I was already smug with self-adulating metaphors: I am Moses leading the Israelites toward the pillar of Divine smoke. I am Aaron the High Priest gaining his people’s atonement, presenting a cloud of incense in the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur.

Moments later, I peeked out the window. I beheld the altar engulfed in flames and realized that this was not a replay of God’s fiery approval of Elijah’s offerings on Mount Carmel. Having flaunted basic safety rules, a fire extinguisher was nowhere in sight. I grabbed a towel and beat the fire out from around the poor goose, which by now looked like bowling ball.

But, the orange glow persisted from the bowels of the console that housed 20 gallons of propane, poised to bring an ignominious end to me, the house and . . . the goose. I fell and twisted my back. Linda came in from her workout and ran for the fire extinguisher, which only she knew was in the deepest recesses of the garage. I promised her a week of no manic outbursts for not regaling me in a litany of “Now have you learned your lesson?”

The goose, you ask? I refused to let his death be in vain. So, I scrubbed him with a Teflon pad until he looked like a refugee from a Siberian gulag. I roasted him to a mahogany-brown. To my amazement, the meat was succulent and delightfully smoky.

That night, I thanked my parents in heaven for one more chance to return to the humble virtue of grilling hotdogs on a feuer-topf from the corner drugstore. I promised that I would get rid of my turbo-charged model; maybe try to sell it to some guy from NASA, who already knows what it’s like to be blasted into another galaxy. I assured them that the closest I’d come to smoked-anything would be lox and bagels.

To this I finally heard my mother respond, “Sometimes a piece of sable is also nice.” Then and only then did I know that once again everything was right with the world. The Prodigal Son had returned.