My Fair Lazy - Jen Lancaster [8]
This deal tonight could be classified as less of a party and more of a soiree.15 Boring fusion jazz, which I despise, plays in the background. If I want to hear metallic clattering, I’ll wrongly install my pot rack again. I hate jazz so much that I won’t even go to brunch most places. Thanks a lot, Miles Davis. You’ve totally ruined waffles for me.
Waiters circulate with shiny silver trays covered with something yellow and trendy and lovely served on a bed of something green and crisp. Is it a cube of cheddar? Because I’m all about cube cheese! I glom onto a toothpick as the waiter cruises by and stuff the contents in my mouth when I hear someone exclaim, “Ooh, fois gras!” Then I promptly hawk it back up into my napkin and hide the whole thing in a potted plant.
I’m pretty sure no one saw me.
Scratch that: Stacey saw me.
Fortunately, she just laughs.
Even though we get along famously, I suspect I wasn’t her first choice of companion for this evening. She says I’m a bad wingman because whenever we’re together in public and someone weird corners her with something like four thousand handwritten pages about the history of masonry, I run and hide in the bathroom, giggling until the coast is clear, while a good wingman would swoop in and explain to the bricklaying scribe that our publishers don’t let us read unsolicited work. Fortunately, this is a private event, and the only one liable to create a socially uncomfortable situation is me.
Stacey’s having an animated conversation with one of the clever, pretty people about Chef Grant Achatz. She had the twenty-course tasting menu at Alinea in Old Town recently and tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t quite understand all the fuss.
“Molecular gastronomy is foams, like what Marcel kept using on that season of Top Chef, right?” I asked. “Did you eat a whole meal made of foam? Because that sounds gross. What, were they all, ‘Hey! Have some Caesar salad. It’s foam! Would you like a steak? A thick, juicy, foamy steak?’ How about some pie? It’s foam-tastic. Finish up with a cappuccino. (No foam.)”
Patiently, Stacey explained, “There may have been one dish with foam, but that’s it. You know, Jen, molecular gastronomy’s more than just food infused with air. It’s really about changing the chemical makeup. For example, it can take a solid and turn it a liquid.”
“I can do that with a blender,” I countered.
“No, you can puree something, but you can’t change its physical properties. Each of the tiny bits is still a solid. Chefs use liquid nitrogen to make liquids into solids—”
“I can do that in my freezer.”
“—solids into gases, et cetera. For example, one of the dishes was ‘the soup course,’ which was a tiny bubble filled with tomato water. You put it in your mouth, and the second it hits your tongue, it transforms into a liquid.”
I can do that with my teeth—it’s called chewing—but I suspect Stacey is not so interested in my editorial commentary. Instead, I said, “Like the juice on your cutting board after you slice a tomato?”
Stacey considered this for a moment. “Kind of, only condensed and amplified.”
“And you just get one bite? Wouldn’t you rather have a whole bowl of delicious soup?” I asked.
“I might not be explaining this right. Another course was a lozenge made out of pineapple and bacon. What looked like a tiny piece of candy turned out to be an explosive mouthful of flavor.”
I simply shook my head. “I understand the words you’re saying individually, but together as a concept? No.”16
“Try it sometime and you’ll get it.”
“Sure,” I agreed. But, honestly, why would I spend four hundred dollars for a bacon cough drop when I can get a beautiful, nonexplode-y steak dinner for two at Morton’s for a quarter of the price? No, thanks.
While I shift awkwardly and mainline my Diet Coke, Stacey’s conversation partner eventually drifts away. She turns back to me expectantly, so I lean in to ask her the one question that’s been plaguing me all night.
“Hey, can you smell my feet through these boots?”
Food snobbery aside, she’s still a great friend. She