landscape of.
Soltner arrived and Melissa, in spite of my warnings, said she wanted to prepare him an omelette, if he wouldn’t mind, and she was wondering if he wouldn’t mind showing her how he makes them. She enlisted the instructor in him. And he was glad to oblige, but asked her to prepare hers first. So she made her omelette the way we do at home, perfectly delicious, dragging the beaten egg in from noon, three, six, and nine o’clock in the pan until all the loose egg had run into the pan and set. She let the omelette get a touch of golden color on the exterior. Then she filled the omelette, turned it in half making a half moon, slid it onto a plate, and kept it warm in the oven.
Andre Soltner picked up one egg and cracked it on the edge of the counter. With two hands, he split the egg open and deposited its contents into a bowl. With each thumb, he reached into each half of the shell and scraped out the remaining albumen that tends to cling to the membrane until he had thoroughly cleaned out the egg.
He said, “When I was growing up, this is how my mother got thirteen eggs out of the dozen.” Then he put the shells in the trash.
I acutely remember how badly I wanted to be able to crack and split eggs with one hand when I was coming up. I had seen guys cracking eggs by the crate into large white buckets over a china cap using one hand to do the whole process and then flinging the shell into a trash bin set farther and farther away—which was part of the fun in an otherwise tedious task. That’s how I’d seen it at Mother’s and that’s how Greg and I did it at Jake’s, cranking it out to Guns N’ Roses. I have become totally competent at this one-handed maneuver, regularly wiping down the streak of watery white that ends up on the fridge door or stove lip with every toss into a remote garbage can. But this story stopped me in my hot speedy tracks. I felt this strange mixture of admiration and contrition. I had lately been fascinated by the deconstructed, dehydrated eggs Benedict at the newest temple of molecular gastronomy. And had even been thinking that I wanted to learn how to copy the sous-vide seventeen-hour egg at the trendiest restaurant downtown where you will never get a reservation. But this story of this seventy-five-year-old man, cracking an egg slowly and accurately with his two hands and using his thumbs to get the thirteenth egg as his mother had done during wartime food shortages, put me right back on track.
He beat the eggs and poured them into the prepared pan and then he agitated the eggs with a fork, constantly, over low heat until the curd was soft and tiny, and when the egg had adequately set, he tapped the pan, with gusto, on the burner to take out any last tiny gasp of air and then—did he flip it in the air, did he set it on fire, did he get out the chemical compounds to make omelette “eggs”? He did not. He grasped the pan in his left hand and tilted it slightly toward the back of the stove. With his right hand, he tapped his left wrist, like a junky searching for a good vein, over and over, causing a little vibration in the pan that pushed the omelette incrementally with every tap up against the lip and then, when cresting, back in over itself until the whole omelette was folded over into thirds, a perfect football shape, absolutely no color on it, just perfectly cooked yellow omelette, and he put the little torpedo onto the plate for lunch. The omelette. As prepared by Soltner with just two hands, a fork, and a sauté pan.
12
I MET MY HUSBAND WHEN HE STARTED COMING TO PRUNE TO EAT. HE was on his way to a popular crappy Italian spot around the corner where, even though it was a nothing place with cheap German “Parmesan” standing in for the real thing and commercial balsamic vinegar in industrial-sized plastic jugs, you had to wait an hour on the sidewalk for a table, naturally.
Michele does everything, no matter what, in Italian. He picked our pediatrician because she’s Italian, he buys only Italian wine, he roots for Italian soccer teams, reads Italian newspapers, and though he