Hot foods should be served hot. “Well, of course,” you say, “any gibbon knows that.”  Ah, but the devil is in the details.  As discussed in Fundamentals 101, the first mandate is taking a dish off heat when it is done.  The second is reheating it in a timely manner without recooking it to death.  This is not too hard when serving a sit-down dinner, if your timing reflects serious forethought and you have a warm oven and a simmering range top. 

The buffet dinner, however, is tricky.  The number of guests is higher; all the food has to be laid out to await their arrival; and the serving time following the stampede of guests to the buffet table can drag on and on.  The result most often is tepid food.  Now consider the patio dinner and the picnic! Potential horrors!  What to do? 

A good menu helps. Select casseroles and avoid fragile dishes like fish fillets that dry out or heavily creamed pastas that morph into concrete.  And again, of course, a good sense of timing is critical.  So too is the selection of heat retaining serving dishes like porcelain-clad cast iron casseroles and Dutch ovens by Le Creuset.  You might also use chafing dishes equipped with Sterno cans or similar sized flamers.  The problem with them is that they are too small and the heat source is wimpy, uneven and unsuitable outdoors.

You might also consider purchasing a portable butane burner. “Good grief, another gadget from the Geezer.”  Yes, but this thing cooks as well as warms in the dinning room, on the patio or picnic table, at the campsite and in your all-electric kitchen when the power goes out.  It's light, reliable, versatile, reasonably priced (about $80) and sort of cute.   Its rather cheap construction is offset by good design—it’s well made where it needs to be.  The Burton Portable Burner is a stove-top-like gas burner that puts out a respectable 7280 BTU’s.  It weighs about 5 pounds and takes up about a square foot of space.  It is fueled by an inexpensive butane filled cartridge that lasts a couple hours at high flame and much longer when set to simmer. 

We had a couple of these “gas chafers” at school where they were much used in the pastry kitchen.  Caterers use them a lot.  We had a half dozen at A La Belle Cuisine where they were taken to the catering site and used to quickly heat meatballs, coq au vin and the like, and to fire up single-serve omelets and Fettuccini Alfredo.  In Washington, we used them to scramble thousands of eggs at the annual White House Easter Egg Hunt.

So, why did I buy one at this late date?  Each year in May, The Little Woman and I will command the food stand at the  Friends of Pleasant Grove Day in McLean, Virginia.  Along with grilled hot dogs and hamburgers, we always offer pulled pork barbecue that, previously held in a couple of electric crock-pots, was never hot enough.  Now the pork barbecue is hot and ready in a shiny copper pot atop our Stainless Steel Max Burton Pro Chef Butane Burner.  Aha!

When you're hot, you're hot!