Page 29 of From Paris, with Butter
The sudden silence, now that the fire alarm had stopped blaring, felt oppressive. I was acutely aware that my dress was crumpled, my face was flushed, and my hair was dripping with cooking oil. Laurent looked hardly better with his clothes greasy and wrinkled.
We stared at each other, both panting slightly.
Laurent cleared his throat. “I think the oil might have been just slightly too hot.”
Just then, a glop of oil plopped from my hair to my shoulder, and theabsurdity of it all was too much. I looked around my formerly-pristine kitchen and started laughing to cover my embarrassment. I kept on laughing as my stomach ached and I gasped for breath, until I had to lean against the counter to prevent myself from toppling over.
It must have been obvious to Laurent how close my laughter was to turning into tears because he came over and patted my shoulder awkwardly.
“Don’t worry, it all turned out alright,” he said.
“We haven’t even started dinner!” I wailed.
“Well…yes, that’s true,” Laurent conceded. “How about this: I’ll get my deep fry thermometer, uh, and maybe take a quick shower. Then we can resume.” Laurent smiled bracingly. “It’s just a slight delay.”
After checking that oil was no longer exploding across the kitchen, he left. I half-expected to never see him again.
Nevertheless, as soon as the door closed behind Laurent, I sprang into action, quickly wiping down the kitchen and blowing out the candles (I wasn’t risking any more fire-related mishaps this evening).
I checked the photo of my mother that hung over the counter and heaved a sigh when I saw it was unscathed. I pressed the glass briefly with my fingertips, then went to take a shower. That got rid of my nicely-styled hair and makeup, but at least I wasn’t dripping cooking oil anymore.
I put on a new dress and combed my wet hair but didn’t have time to do anything else before I heard Laurent’s knock.
Greeting him was even more awkward than it had been the first time. We appraised each other, damp and fresh-faced, until Laurent raised his hand, showing the thermometer he held. “Want to give it another try?”
I was tempted to just throw the towel in on this whole dinner and ask Laurent if he had any more frozen pizzas lying around, but I figured I couldn’t send him away without providing a single bite of food. We stood together by the stove, and there Laurent taught me the very important skill of measuring oil’s temperature before you drop food into a searing vat of it.
“I can’t believe I never thought to check the temperature,” I said, laughing to cover my embarrassment.
“It happens to everyone,” Laurent said. “You should have seen the disastersI made my first few months at culinary school.”
Once we’d hit the optimal temperature, I dropped in spoonfuls of batter. This time they did not explode but only sizzled enticingly and turned a pleasant golden brown.
“I think they’re excellent,” Laurent said, once we’d sat down to eat the acras. “Beautifully flavored.”
I tried one. It tasted alright, but the texture was off, maybe because the batter had sat on the counter for such a long time before I’d started frying.
Laurent was highly complimentary of the fritters, and the salad too, which I’d brought out at the same time since it was so late and I was starving. I thought I’d done a good job with the salad, but even a perfect green salad is still just a green salad. It could never really impress a chef of Laurent’s caliber.
That meant it all came down to the main course, the tarte flambée. I’d made the dough before Laurent had arrived, and it had rested longer than it was meant to, but I thought it was still salvageable.
Laurent poured us each another glass of wine, the red this time, and we went into the kitchen. There, we made stiff small talk as I spread the dough onto a baking sheet, trying to get it as thin as possible so it’d have the traditional cracker-thin crust.
I mixed together fromage blanc, crème fraiche, salt, pepper, and a tiny grating of fresh nutmeg, then spread it across the dough. After sprinkling bacon lardons and thinly-sliced onions across the top, I put it in the oven (which I had made triple sure was set to the correct temperature).
Tarte flambées don’t take long to cook, but Laurent and I struggled to fill the silence.
It was mostly my fault. I was so anxious about the food I had already ruined and the food I was sure I was about to ruin that I could barely pay attention to what Laurent was saying. I was on my third glass of wine now, every atom in my body screaming out against the awkwardness of this evening.
Laurent had been excruciatingly polite all evening, but in the way you would be to a boss or distant cousin. He had probably decided I was an idiot after the debacle with the cooking oil and was counting the minutes until he could return home and make his own palatable dinner.
He seemed nervous himself, straightening my row of spices and aligning my cookbooks so each spine was perfectly perpendicular to the counter. Or maybe he just thought I was a slob on top of being a terrible cook.
I tried to hide my relief when the timer went off and I could pull the tarte flambée out of the oven. In my anxiousness to move dinner along, I forgot to check the bottom of the crust the way I’d done every other time I’ve made this recipe. I didn’t realize it until we were sitting down to eat.
“It’s underbaked,” I said, letting the piece I’d just taken a bite from drop back onto my plate. I ducked my head so that Laurent couldn’t see the color rising in my cheeks.
He was, again, full of compliments, but we both knew it was a less-than-stellar rendering of tarte flambée. This was supposed to be the showstopper of the meal.
