The Monday Night Cooking School - By Erica Bauermeister Page 0,64
the grounds give beneath his finger like fine, warm dirt, the texture comforting, familiar.
How hard it must have been for Antonia, Ian thought, to leap across the ocean and leave all the sounds and smells, the tastes and textures she had always known. More and more recently he realized how much these very things made up his life. If he had told anyone at work about the little burst of pleasure he felt each time he opened the coffee grinder and released the smell of the grounds into his little apartment, they would laugh at him, and yet, these days, he noticed things like that. How his sense of balance was strengthened by the sight of the red walls of the Chinese restaurant below him or by the conversations the students had around the wooden prep counter in Lillian’s kitchen after the class was officially over but no one really wanted to leave.
He placed the pot on the stove and listened again, as the water heated then boiled, rising like a little, contained tornado through the grounds until the coffee gurgled into the upper chamber and the kitchen filled with the smell, riding on the steam, pure and strong, like the first shovelful of dirt after a spring rain.
More than anyone he knew, Antonia carried these things with her, in the million sweet and careful rituals that still made up her life, no matter what country she was in. He saw it in the way she cut bread, or drank wine, in the whimsical tower she had made out of the ripped-up linoleum tiles, just for the joy of it, or perhaps for the expression on his face when he returned to the big old kitchen and saw it, a friendly welcome, a moment of creativity in the middle of a hot and dirty project. Antonia made celebrations of things he had always dismissed as moments to be rushed through on the way to something more important. Being around her, he found even everyday experiences were deeper, nuanced, satisfaction and awareness slipped in between the layers of life like love notes hidden in the pages of a textbook.
The espresso fell in a dark, silken stream into the small white bowl. Ian opened the bottles of rum and Grand Marnier, hearing the slight crack of the seal, breathing in before adding the soft brown and pale golden liquid to the espresso. The alcohol was strong and spicy; it seemed to glide effortlessly from the air into his bloodstream, from the bottle into the espresso, lingering there lazy and relaxed, two ounces of secrets waiting in the bottom of a bowl the size of his hand.
The large white eggshell cracked once against the side of the metal mixing bowl. Slowly, Ian slid the glistening orange yolk back and forth between the two cups of the shell, allowing the clear egg white to fall into the bowl below. The yolks he put in a small metal pot on the stove, spooning in sugar afterward.
And then he entered unfamiliar territory. The recipe told him to heat and beat the egg yolks and sugar until they changed color and formed ribbons, something “partway to zabaglione”—a term Ian didn’t know. Antonia would know, he was sure, but Ian wanted his tiramisù to be a surprise. He took a quick look at the clock and saw with alarm that Antonia was due in fifteen minutes. He turned the heat on low under the pot, and put his laptop on the counter, searching the Internet for “zabaglione.” Before he could get past the impatient prompting of the search engine asking him if he wasn’t actually looking for a word with another vowel or two, the egg yolks in the pot were already curdling into hard, scrambled globs that no amount of frantic whisking could save.
Ian started over. Washed out the pot, closed his laptop. This time he picked up the hand mixer and let the beaters skim lightly over the surface of the egg yolks while they heated, pulling the sugar into the liquid as it thickened, forming small waves along the edge of the pan. He watched as the mixture became denser and he held his breath in anticipation of another catastrophe, but then as he watched, the eggs and sugar miraculously became lighter in color, a comforting yellow, the concoction falling in long, sinuous ribbons when he turned off the mixer and gently raised the beaters from the pot.