Can't Stand The Heat

by Louisa Edwards

  “That’s it,” he’d told Miranda, who looked unimpressed. “Just cook it until the white is set, but the yolk isn’t.”

  As was usual when Adam was working something through in his head, it all came out of his mouth, no prompting required.

  “They’re the great negotiator, eggs are,” he continued. “They call truce between oil and water, get them to finally mix it up together. They can make a meringue light as air or a custard as thick as wet cement. They pair beautifully with everything from brioche toast to wild mushroom ragout, the perfect snack at any time of the day or night. They’re probably the most versatile ingredient in any kitchen.”

  “And it all starts here,” Miranda said, tongue in cheek.

  “That’s right.” The timer dinged and Adam checked the egg. The white had feathered a bit on contact with the hot water, but hadn’t spread out into untidy fingers. After three minutes on the heat, the white had coagulated into a beautiful sphere around the yolk. Adam had no trouble lifting it out of the water in a slotted spoon and easing it into a bath of cold water.

  “You have to cool it down fast if you’re not going to serve it right away, or else it’ll keep cooking with the residual heat inside it. Which gives you rubber eggs.”

  “Ick.”

  “Exactly.” He lifted the egg gently out of the ice bath and spooned it onto a square of brioche toast he’d prepared while waiting for the water to come up to the simmer.

  “And there you have it,” he said. “A little salt and pepper, and you have a lovely snack. Go ahead, break it open. See if it’s good.”

  Miranda took her fork to the egg and made a soft noise of appreciation when the pristine globe of slippery white parted to let the golden orange yolk run out and soak into the bread.

  “Beautiful,” she said with her usual frank appreciation. Adam was never going to get tired of that. “That seems simple enough. Can I give it a try?”

  He handed her the wooden spoon with a flourish.

  The first attempt yielded an egg hard enough to bounce on the floor.

  “The temperature of the water is key,” Adam told a disappointed Miranda. “Remember that the longer the pot stays on the burner, even at a constant setting, the hotter it’s going to get. You gotta adjust for that. Right? Okay, try again.”

  Miranda bit her lip in a totally distracting way while attempting to maneuver the egg into the pot, so Adam missed seeing exactly what happened. When he finally managed to tear his eyes away from that plump pink mouth, he saw egg white fanning out over the bottom of the pot in a way that would have been sort of pretty if it hadn’t made Miranda scowl so hard.

  “I fixed the water temperature,” she complained. “What went wrong this time?”

  “Too hot and you get rubber. Not hot enough, and the white spreads when it hits the water and won’t coagulate into a nice round shape. You went a little too far in the other direction, is all. Remember, it wants to be barely simmering.”

  She grumbled a little, but fiddled with the burner until Adam thought it was about right.

  But when she carefully—oh so carefully; cracking the eggshell was a surgical act on par with setting a bone—finished her preparations for the third attempt and slid the yellow orb into the water, the white feathered up again, waving its wisps in the current of the simmering pot like algae on the sea floor.

  Adam struggled not to show a hint of the amusement he felt at the look of dismay on her face.

  “It’s not an exact science,” he soothed her. “Cooking’s not like math. It doesn’t come out the same every single time. That’s part of the fun.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. Adam was starting to adore that particular defensive gesture.

  “Not my idea of fun. I have to say, I’m not getting a whole lot out of this.”

  Adam considered. He was well aware this cooking lesson was his own brainchild, not something Miranda had come begging for. Maybe she needed extra motivation.

  “How about . . .” He hesitated, unsure if he could commit to what he was about to propose, then shrugged.

  Fuck it.

  “Okay,” Adam said. “For every egg you get perfect, I’ll answer a question. And I’m telling you now, it’s probably the only way you’ll ever get me to talk on the record for that book of yours. So I’d take me up on it.”

  And if she never managed to figure out poaching, Adam got moral credit for making the offer, but didn’t have to deliver shit.

  “Done,” Miranda said instantly, with a Cheshire-cat smile that made Adam groan around a laugh.

  “Christ. I’m in for it now.”

  Miranda lost the grin and huffed. “Don’t despair. I’ve yet to come close to getting one of my eggs to look like yours.”

  There were no words for what the slight pout of Miranda’s lower lip did to Adam’s brain. Something similar to a short circuit or system overload or something. He didn’t really know tech stuff, but what it felt like was the flare of ceiling-high flame that happened when a cook accidentally sloshed oil over the side of a pan and into the grill.

  Instant meltdown. It was the only thing that could account for everything he was letting this cunning little journalist get away with.

  “Here, try this.” He rummaged through a drawer until he came up with a slotted spoon. “There are a lot of old wives’ tales about tricks for poaching, like adding vinegar to the poaching liquid, but chemically speaking, that’s all bullshit. The only thing that can actually help is a little bit of a cheat—you strain off the runniest part of the white before slipping it into the water. Then, if you want, once it’s in there you can use a wooden spoon to sort of coax the white to wrap around the yolk as it pulls together. Go on, take a whack at it.”

  Miranda followed his instructions to the letter, with that air of total concentration that just slayed Adam, and of course, the result was a perfect poached egg.

  Adam shook his head as they watched the yolk ooze out silkily. When would he ever fucking learn to keep his mouth shut?

  But when he saw the giddy happiness in Miranda’s face as she turned to him with a victorious “I did it!,” Adam couldn’t help but feel sort of pleased he’d made it happen. It took some of the sting out of the upcoming interrogation.

  “Quid pro quo,” Miranda said warningly, after they’d both dutifully tasted and made appreciative noises.

  “Okay, but I never thought liver would go particularly well with fava beans, personally. Chianti, maybe.”

  “Ew,” she told him. “Also, don’t think you’re going to distract me with movie references. I’ve got an answer coming to me.”

  “Fine.” He sighed. “Hit me.”

  He wasn’t sure what he was expecting—some softball question about how he first got interested in cooking, maybe, or something incendiary about his previous bosses at other restaurants.

  Instead, what she asked was: “What’s your all-time favorite dish, and why?”

  Too intrigued by the question to protest that it was technically two, Adam pondered in silence for a minute, running through his own recipes, things he’d tried and been blown away by in high-end restaurants and roadside stands and pastry shops across the country.

  “That’s hard,” he finally said. “Shit, you don’t go for the easy stuff, do you?”

  “Never,” she replied.

  “I didn’t go to culinary school,” he began, aware that he was answering the softball question she hadn’t asked, but the answer to her actual question would be in there somewhere. “When I graduated high school, I took an extended road trip. I had friends come along for parts of it, my parents would fly out and meet me in the places that interested them, but for long stretches, it was just me and the road. I didn’t have a car, so I took the bus everywhere, sometimes the train. Met lots of interesting people.”

  “How far did you get?”

  “Made it all the way to Seattle,” he said, still proud of it. “On the cheap, too. Whenever I ran out of money, I’d get a job w
ashing dishes to save up enough for the next bus ticket. If there was a great restaurant in town, I’d either try to work there or use my earnings to cop a meal before I moved on. It was an awesome education. I saw people doing things with food that I’d never thought of or heard of—and I grew up in Manhattan with parents who liked to eat out.”

  “What kinds of things?” Miranda asked, clearly willing to push the limit on her quid pro quo, if Adam was.

  “Steamed crabs in Baltimore, pulled pork outside of Atlanta, tacos from the most amazing taqueria in Fayetteville, Texas. There was a guy in Cleveland doing things you wouldn’t believe to Great Lakes fish like perch and walleye—seriously haute cuisine stuff with what were basically considered trash fish. And in California . . . hot damn. I know what it was.”

  “What?”

  “The best thing,” he told her. “My favorite dish. I saved and saved to get to eat at Chez Panisse. I’d picked up Alice Waters’s book in my travels and I read that sucker cover to cover and back again, so she was on my list. I hit Berkeley in the summer, and I remember Black Mission figs were all over that menu. It was the season. I’d never really had anything but dried figs, and I didn’t like them. But when I tasted those roasted fresh figs, drizzled with wild honey and dotted with minuscule white smears of triple-cream goat cheese, I just about died.”

  Adam closed his eyes, lost in the memory of that explosion of tastes and textures, all harmonizing together so simply and beautifully. When he met Miranda’s gaze again, she was watching him with a soft smile.

  “Good, huh?” was all she said.

  “Life-changing,” Adam told her, and he knew it was true. “That was the moment when it all came together for me. In my head, at least—it was a long hard road between those figs and getting the whole being-a-chef deal worked out on paper and in the real world—but it was like that afternoon, my brain took a quarter turn to the left and I knew. Food was it for me. And not only food, but local food. Food that tells you where you are, and lets you in on the secrets of the person who cooked it. I ate those figs, and I knew Alice Waters without ever meeting her. I knew myself.”

  Something soft and sweet passed over Miranda’s face, and he thought she might be really getting it. “Sounds like a meal to remember.”

  “It was, although I haven’t consciously thought of it in years.” He laughed. “Those figs are behind a good bit of my own cooking, though, one way or another. The marriage of salty and sweet is one I’m still particularly fond of, and I try to never forget the role texture plays in a dish.”

  “Why didn’t you go to culinary school? It seems like a logical next step for a boy who decided he wanted to be a chef.”

  “Not so fast. No more questions until I see another perfect egg out of you.”

  “Oh, fine,” she muttered, and hurried through the preparations without really checking the water first. She added another rubber egg to the pile in Adam’s sink before turning out a good one. They both looked at the spreading yolk for a moment, then turned away.

  “I’m getting kind of sick of the taste of plain egg,” she confessed.

  “Right. We’ll try something different next.”

  “But first, the answer to my question.”

  “Slave driver.” Adam shook his head. “Fine. I didn’t go to culinary school because I didn’t think they could teach me anything I couldn’t learn better on the job. I’m not so sure that’s true, looking back, but I did learn a shitload on every line I ever worked, in every position from dishwasher to prep and right on up to two years ago.”

  “When you worked at the original Appetite on the Upper East Side.”

  She’d done her research.

  “Yeah, I ran the kitchen for Devon Sparks while he was off opening a new hotspot in Miami and filming that TV show about being the greatest chef alive, or whatever.”

  Adam paused, but Miranda didn’t take the bait. Most food writers leaped on any mention of Devon, hoping for stories of his famous temper and antics in the kitchen. Adam never minded obliging with a tale or two, and he had some whoppers, but for the most part the guy had been decent to him.

  He sort of liked Miranda’s interview style, though, all free-flowing and easy. Although it was getting him to talk more than he would have otherwise, which probably ought to make him nervous.

  “In hindsight, I could’ve saved myself some time, if not money, by doing the formal training thing. I bet I spent as much on books I read on my own as any incoming student at the Culinary Art Academy.”

  “What books do you think influenced you the most?”

  Adam was about to answer when he noticed the crafty gleam in Miranda’s eye. Twisting his mouth shut, he shook his head. “You’re a tricky one. But no dice. Maybe I should ask you a question or two instead.”

  Immediately looking wary, Miranda said, “What kind of question?”

  “We’ve talked plenty about how I know so much about kitchen stuff,” Adam said, injecting enough over-the-top pompousness into his tone to make her smile. “How about you tell me why you know so little about it? How did you and Jess eat?” After your parents died was the part of the question he didn’t vocalize.

  For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer. Her face went kind of blank, but there was a shadow of something like grief in her eyes that made him sorry he’d brought it up. Not sorry enough to stop her when she started to answer, though; this had to be a key to her personality, and Adam wanted to know all about her.

  “Jess was ten when our parents died; I was eighteen. I took night classes, got two jobs, and tried to keep Family Services from coming down on us. With all that, there wasn’t much time for the culinary arts. We ate a lot of frozen pizza.” The flat tone of her voice didn’t invite sympathy or pity.

  Adam felt like a total shit. He’d wanted to get her to open up, sure, but did he have to choose such a painful subject? Obviously noticing his awkward discomfort, Miranda laughed a little and said, “Don’t look like that. It was a long time ago and we made it through just fine.”

  He didn’t buy that for a second—the hollow sound of that laugh told him plenty about the residual effects of those years of struggle and worry.

  “I admire your persistence. Not a lot of people could’ve done what you did, so young. And I bet Jess appreciates it, too.”

  She made a funny little grimace that should’ve been ugly, but instead was ridiculously adorable.

  “I’m not so sure about that. We haven’t talked much since he came home.”

  “He’s settling in okay at the restaurant,” Adam offered, feeling hopelessly inadequate.

  “I know. And I’ve been meaning to thank you for that, for giving him a chance.”

  Adam shifted his weight.

  “Frankie and Grant were pretty insistent. And they were right, he’s smart and quick on his feet, charming to the customers, and gets along with the brigade.”

  That brought the smile back. Adam matched it, relieved.

  “He did turn out pretty wonderful, didn’t he?”

  “You should be proud.”

  “I am. But that doesn’t stop me from worrying.”

  “About what?”

  Miranda shook her head. “It’d be easier to make a list of what I don’t worry about with Jess.”

  “Give me some examples.”

  She started ticking things off on her fingers. “I worry that he won’t finish school, that he won’t get a good job, that he won’t meet a nice girl, that he won’t settle down and have a family—”

  “That he won’t have the life your parents wanted for him?” Adam asked in a burst of insight.

  Miranda paused, arrested. “I never thought about it like that.” She blinked. “And wow, I did not mean to start talking about that. Have you ever considered a career as a journalist? The way you turned that interview around demonstrates a high level of innate ability.”

  Adam laughed. “Nope. It’s the kitchen for me, forever and always.”

  “
Then what are we making next, Chef?” she said with a deep breath, recovering herself. “Because I really think I’ve had enough with the poaching.”

  And obviously she’d had enough with the sharing, too. Christ, getting personal info out of her was like trying to peel a tomato without blanching it first. He decided to let her off the hook. For now.

  “Before we quit, I just wanted to mention you can poach lots of things other than eggs, in many liquids other than water. Every variable changes the outcome, but the basic technique is the same.”

  “Very interesting, professor,” Miranda quipped. “Are you sure you didn’t go to culinary school? You seem to have quite the knack for teaching.”

  “Half of running a kitchen is teaching,” he said, crouching down for another foray into the disorganized mess that inhabited his cabinets. “Showing the line cooks how to do what you want done, how to make it come out perfect every time. I don’t expect my cooks to read my mind and know how I want things. It always drove me bat shit, working for guys like that.”

  Again, no comment from Miranda on Devon Sparks, and Adam quirked a half-grin to himself. It changed to a full grin when his fingers tangled with the spindly rounded end of a whisk.

  “Got it,” he crowed, standing up to his full height and twisting a little to get the kinks out of his back. Waggling his brows suggestively, Adam asked, “Are you ready to give the good people at Hellmann’s a run for their money?”

  FIFTEEN

  Miranda worked to contain her “ick” face.

  “Let me be sure I understand—we’re making mayonnaise? Right here in the kitchen?”

  “Yup.” Adam nodded enthusiastically. “It doesn’t spontaneously generate in those jars with the blue lids, you know. In fact, it’s one of the oldest classical French sauces. And a very cool illustration of one of the wackier properties of eggs.”

  She enjoyed the way he talked about eggs. Such a humble, boring food, but it was as if he could look inside and see the potential for greatness in any ingredient.