Essays

Aphrodisiacs

(See also: magic, elves, winning lottery tickets, and other elusive dreams.)

The word derives from Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and sex. And as with many potential aphrodisiacs, her origins prove disturbing on second glance. Conventional wisdom says she simply appeared in the ocean waves on a roomy scallop shell, but Hesiod's Theogony reveals a gorier birth: the goddess of sexual desire was born where the severed testicles of the god Uranus were hurled into the sea. Uranus suffered this loss during a heated coupling with his rebellious wife, Gaea, who had exhorted their son Cronus to ambush his father with a sickle. After years of bobbing in the sea water and generating much white foam, the testicles were gone forever but the goddess swam ashore.

Now consider the famed Spanish fly, or cantharides, an erotic treat derived from the pulverized bodies of the North African blister beetle. As the Marquis de Sade and his unlucky prostitute cohorts discovered, Spanish fly can deliver more than a strategically-placed rush of blood: it is an inflammatory agent, the effects of which include irritation, vomiting, and kidney damage. Spanish fly literally creates an itch one has to scratch. Frankly, when you think about it that way, you can buy a cream for that.

Humans have contributed other shortcuts to bliss, but they're often just as graceless, even crude, whereas nature's gentler aphrodisiacs are merely direct. Man-made Viagra and other "ED" treatments go right to the source and engorge it; the commercials are all smug silver-fox boardroom types, waltzing or suggestively hurtling a football through the placid hole of a tire swing. We've also come up with pornography, of course, which walks a fine line between ridiculous and effective. A few shutters in the brain must close before a dirty film can work its magic, and the effort required to overlook the mullets and simian dialogue disqualifies porn as a transporting sex-enhancer.

Other so-called aphrodisiacs abound, it's true, but I am sorry to tell you that you probably know them all: time and vacation and doors that lock, a little wine, a few tokes of good weed, but not a stuporous amount of either, a fig and a square of chocolate but not a belly-full. You want that first flush of heat, the hibiscus-flowering of blood vessels. You want the throb that fills the eardrums and everything else. And you can have it, but it's a bit like when your mother told you Santa Claus is a spirit of generosity that lives in all our hearts. It's not what we were hoping to hear.

Therefore, I suggest less time on the pharmaceutical and the order of Coleoptera and more on the culinary. Here the effect is not so much the medicinal magic and overriding urgency promised by a true aphrodisiac. It's more suggestion. You present your companion with a reminder, silent but absolutely clear, of what else you might be doing. Consider the classics: the plump, glistening salinity of a little oval oyster seems like something Prince might have sung about back in the days of songs like "Head" and "Soft and Wet." A spear of asparagus is suggestively elegant, but disqualified by its disheartening tendency to droop. Some suggest carrots. Where's the sensuous nuance in a woody pointed stalk? Forget the carrots. Look to the fig, which everyone agrees is so overtly sexual the Italians use the word for fig as slang for vagina. And wisely so: rounded at the hip, meltingly soft, velvety outside with a juicy flare of rich pink within; the tanginess of actual sex is here made textural in the tender pop of a fig's soft-skinned seeds. It's as frank as eye contact, so clearly a call to action that it's enough to leave you speechless.

Just as bold but less commonly mentioned is the scent of the crab apple tree. They lined the streets of the neighborhood I grew up in, and each spring they flowered and released a tangy, humid, musky scent, enough to paralyze me beneath their branches, head surrounded by blossoms and feet by petals that had swooned to the dirt. The air was pollen-drenched and hazy with a fragrance somewhere between baking bread and overripe fruit and sweat and smashed, tart berries. Mentally, I couldn't quite merge that scent's deliciousness with its slight unpleasantness, its too-muchness, and the way it suggested an intense need for privacy—I could not define its allure back then. Now I can.

Nature can get away with such overt displays of sex and ferility. She probably has to: unaided, humans run around feeding each other dried beetles. Yet her most fetching overtures—and ours as well—are not pure sugar: think of chocolate's dark notes and the slow heat it needs to melt; think of the faint leather-belt backnote in a mouthful of red wine. The finest aphrodisiacs utilize a little yin with their yang, and those that try for mere sweetness are missing the point. Just as Aphrodite herself came from someplace much darker, even bloodier, than a scallop shell, an effective aphrodisiac has a little bite, is just a bit uncomfortable. Like sex itself, it is unseemly in the wrong context—too moist, too salty, too fecund.

But why all the striving in the first place? Mere consciousness has never been quite enough for us as a species—we alter it any way we can. Mere pleasure is never quite enough, either—we want the overpowering thrum, the surge all the way out to the edge, but we're always dismayed to find more than happiness out there. The ongoing search for aphrodisiacs is proof that when we hear a story like that of the god Uranus, no one thinks of the blood—just, with thrilling envy, of the pleasure of being so dazed and unwatchful with lust that it's impossible to imagine the sickle.

Essays

The Tastiest Cheese Ever

When I was 26 I got married, moved to Yonkers, New York, and tasted devastatingly fresh mozzarella for the first time. The cheese remains the most vivid memory of the three.

It came from the tiny Little Italy neighborhood in the Bronx, which is far superior to Mulberry Street's gaggle of hawkers and shamefaced tourists. My husband, Steve, and I would make the 20-minute drive there every month for olive oil, pasta, cured meats, and mozzarella. The store we always went to, Casa Della Mozzarella on East 187th Street, is essentially a long, packed hallway, and at the back men stand over vats of water, stirring and ladling balls of cheese. The choices are large or larger, salted or unsalted. I tried unsalted once, thinking vague thoughts about purity and simplicity, before remembering that if anything improves pure and simple foods, it's salt. No one bothered to tell us to eat the cheese immediately, or not to refrigerate it, both of which we learned through trial and error. At the height of my devotion I would save that store for last and dash back to the car, cradling my cheese like an infant.

I soon realized that there is a ruthlessness to fresh mozzarella, much as there is with tomatoes: The best of science and ingenuity cannot fake that optimal moment when the food is at its peak. From the second mozzarella is formed, it is never again as good as it was the moment before. It's not that mozzarella gets bad after a few hours in the fridge, but it becomes...less. The delicacy of the flavors begins to blend into an overall mildness, the texture firms, and the cheese ceases to release those silky ivory droplets that give the impression of a food so dense with glory it cannot help sharing a little. I'm pretty sure this is not hyperbole. The stress I felt just trying to orchestrate my cheese-eating makes me glad I never tried to be an EMT.

The day I learned how much timing matters to a mozzarella, Steve and I had purchased our cheese and then hurtled back up the Bronx River Parkway. Still wearing our coats and surrounded by unpacked grocery bags, we each tore off a velvety shred. The cheese glowed on the cutting board, demurely shedding whey.

At the first taste, we both said, "Oh my God" and locked eyes. The cheese was barely springy but yielding, with a gentle, fresh, milky tanginess. Silently, dazedly, we nibbled another piece. It was difficult to believe that something so pillowy in texture, so graciously light, was in fact a dense concentration of butterfat. When I turned away for a split second, Steve lost all reason and took a bite straight from the cheese, as if it were an apple.

Ever since I learned to cook, I'd pursued gastronomy's holy grails—the elusive raw milk Camembert, the enormous black truffle. The actual encounters were often disappointing—perhaps the result of a subpar specimen, perhaps of my subpar palate. Either way, like an agnostic slipping toward atheism, I had begun to wonder if nothing was as glorious as everyone said, a melancholy view I renounced that day. It was like finding out unicorns had been hanging out in the Bronx all along.

After seven years in New York, we moved to Madison, Wisconsin, where I had gone to college. Of course I knew there were certain areas in which Wisconsin could not compete—but I hadn't expected one of them to be cheese. I could buy "fresh" mozzarella, but it tended to be a week old, a touch sour, and sometimes mushy. It's the dairy version of those Mulberry Street tourist-trap restaurants, and the cheese and I both felt a bit degraded in the end.

Then tomato season arrived, and the lack of that celestial mozzarella took on phantom-limb proportions. I felt a great weight lifting once I accepted the eventuality that I had to make my own. The very idea made me feel both homespun and chic, a self-sustaining hippie with a yen for cocktail rings and leather boots. A little research turned up Ricki's Cheesemaking Kit, for both ricotta- and mozzarella-making. Inside a box replete with hearts and stars and cows were citric acid, cheese salt (no additives), cheesecloth, tablets of rennet (an enzyme that separates curds from whey), a dairy thermometer, and directions. I headed to the farmers' market for local milk, which tends to be pasteurized at a lower heat; ultrapasteurized milk may be spot-on for transcontinental journeys but is of little use for cheese.

The process seemed simple on the page: Add citric acid to the milk, heat milk to 90 degrees in a stainless steel pot, add rennet, stir for about a minute, then back off. After several moments, big, soft curds were supposed to separate from lemony-colored clear whey. I would fish the curds out with a slotted spoon and heat them in the microwave, knead the hot curds and pour off the whey, repeat, then cool my cheese in ice water. Ricki emphasized the cheerful ease of the whole process.

My first attempt was marred by uncertainty and a small pot. Pouring the milk mixture into a larger pot devastated the nascent curds, which are apparently temperamental and wary of bonding, like hollandaise or sixth graders. My beautiful golden milk remained mostly milk, but was now shot through with tentative pearls that dissolved on contact with my slotted spoon. I drained the mixture, hoping for ricotta, and ended up with what I can only describe as firming glop.

Did I mention I had invited people to a dinner featuring homemade cheese? Secreted in my refrigerator was subpar water-cheese from the supermarket, as if I'd known all along I couldn't hack it. I was tempted to ditch the entire mozzarella-making idea, but I washed all my pans and thermometer and cleaned the kitchen counters and took a breath.

This time I got tough; I doubled the rennet and let the mixture sit for twice as long before draining. Now soft, breakable curds did form, so I made a desultory stab at the microwave method. It was late in the day and I was getting sweaty and depressed.

After heating and kneading, the curds became marginally firmer and more cohesive. But then, somewhere between the second and third heating, something happened: I suddenly was holding not a bunch of dissolving curds throwing off milk but an amorphous ball of something that was having a distinctly cheeselike moment. I began to see just what one should see in fresh mozzarella: the paper-thin layers of stretchy proteins that allow you to smoosh the hot cheese around like bread dough.

At this point things became extremely exhilarating. I began to knead and heat compulsively, even breathlessly, maybe for a bit too long, and soon I was cradling an ivory orb the size of a small grapefruit.

An hour or two later, I cut the mozzarella into chunks to serve with fresh tomatoes and pasta. It was compact and mild, with the firmness of a provolone, a tangy, dairy-sweet kind of flavor, and not quite enough salt. It was cheese, but not quite the cheese—the rapture—I'd envisioned. My guests, tactfully silent about its unorthodox solidity, marveled at the fact of its existence.

Not long after, I stopped at a midweek farmers' market and for the first time noticed a table bearing ziplock bags of the satiny white grail itself. The cheese had been made two days earlier, and I guessed it would have about the same texture by now as what I'd made at home. I considered explaining to the cheesemaker that I used to procure a truly life-changing cheese in the Bronx, or that I had made some mozzarella one time myself, which he would likely greet with the same expression I have when people tell me they've always thought they'd get around to writing a book someday. In the end, I bought half a pound. It couldn't compete with the freshly made cheese in the Bronx, but it was nice. It was better than mine, if you must know.

Now that I've experienced mozzarella's unpredictable temperament and the huge quantity of milk needed to turn out a semisuccessful half pound of cheese, I admit I'm a bit daunted. But there's still no obtaining that perfect mozzarella moment unless I perfect my own. I suspect that the mozzarellas of my future will proceed like clockwork, once I figure out precisely what the cheese wants and when and in what quantity and according to what moods and weather patterns—except that my cheese isn't telling me a thing. That sort of mystique can enthrall a person, particularly when the reward is so transporting. Just the idea of it makes me want to play a little soft music, put up my hair, and saunter into the kitchen to try again.

Essays

Beach Food

Steve and the lobster and I were standing, sweating, in the little beach house kitchen in Delaware. On the counter the lobster arched its back and raised a knowing claw in our direction.

I thought we should kill it with a sharp knife slid into the back of the shell, where the head and sectioned carapace meet, then cut it up and cook it.

"I heard that's more humane," I said. I also thought, for some obscure reason, it might make the meat taste better. I should give this fresh lobster the most delicious death I could. Yet I hoped I might con Steve into being the killer. In the past I had persuaded him to cook and dismember a lobster for paella without any of the requisite tools. It turned out those tools were both well-designed and necessary. A hammer and pliers from the garage were just not the same.

At least here we had the claw crackers, the little silver picks. No respectable beach house, not even this tiny, outdated and slightly musty one, could do without them.

"There's no way I'm stabbing the lobster," Steve said. I lost my nerve too and opened the pot of steaming water.

It was the last night of our honeymoon and we were making seafood soup. (I'd done this back in Wisconsin but it was never what it should be with Midwestern seafood.) We boiled the lobster, cut apart the scarlet carapace and kept it for stock. The rosy-speckled meat we cut into discs. I looked vainly for roe, hoping I could mash it with butter and swirl it into the soup at the end. We added more garlic, the lobster, the shrimp, the crab, and the tomatoes. At the end we threw in tarragon. We cooked together, Steve peeling the shrimp and slicing the garlic into sticky rounds. I chopped and skinned tomatoes and steamed the corn.

When we finally sat down, it was dark, the day losing its heat. We lit candles, opened fresh beers. For an appetizer I had poured the clams in a pot with garlic and shallot and butter, decanted a small river of wine and steamed them open in it. We cooked so many we had to eat them from a mixing bowl.

But the soup—the soup was scarlet, flecked with green leaves and ivory lobster, the yellow ruffled edges of the clams peeking above the surface amid the shreds of crab. It tasted splendid—heavy on the garlic and the red chilies, the briny scent of the seafood, the browned crumb of the bread we'd toasted to go with it. It wasn't delicate, except for the texture of the fish. It's not a soup to get elegant with—no purees, no cream or tiny spoons. It was messy, heady, spicy, speckled with olive oil and herbs.

It was not a dish for someone with a newly diagnosed, unpredictable seafood allergy. A week earlier, I'd discovered—via swelling, itching, and a trip to the ER as my throat began to close—that I was one of those people. I was telling myself the culprit was only a specific type of cheap frozen crab Rangoon. So far on this trip I had eaten shellfish but no crab Rangoon, and nothing had happened. I hoped to continue my streak of luck with the soup, but I suspected the allergy was not as limited as I wanted it to be.

As we began to eat, Steve watched me for signs of a reaction. I was watching him too. It was true I should have been more cautious with seafood, but neither should he have been drinking the beers we'd just cracked or the gin and tonics we'd sipped beforehand. I had just begun to suspect that as well.

Essays

Shock

I am sitting at an upended barrel in a dark bar in the East Village. Every part of me is touching someone else; we are wedged atop our bar stools and servers jostle us as they ease their way through the crowd, holding plates of food above their heads. Aloft in their hands, the wedges of omelet and the dull eyes of grilled sardines nearly touch the fishing nets that droop from the ceiling.

On our barrel is an open bottle of red wine, several empty beer bottles and the remains of our last round of food: empty cockle shells; octopus tentacles sliced into thick white sections, smeared with paprika and stabbed with toothpicks; the feathery spines of small fish whose cheeks have been hollowed out by our forks. A waiter’s disembodied arm nudges a basket of bread aside and sets down a plate of grilled shrimp.

The shrimp are as long as my hand and sausage-fat inside their carapaces, scarlet antennae curled insensible on the plate. Each eye gleams like a lone pearl of caviar. We split their shells with our fingers, tongue the meat from the cavity. We break off the heads and turn them upside down like thimblefuls of soup. Their antennae brush questioningly against our palms, but, unrepentant, we curl our mouths around them and suck the insides from their little skulls. It’s infinite shrimp, tasting of smoke from the grill and the coral-streaked white meat of their bodies, the oceanic sweetness of their shells curving, tough as fingernails, against our tongues.

An hour later, walking briskly up First Avenue, I feel my hair stand up on end. It rises poised and alert from the follicles, and despite the cold a sudden flush of blood heats my scalp and my face. I run my hands through my hair, scratching at my skin to get rid of the tingling. I am too warm. A throb is caught in my throat and I can’t swallow it away. It feels substantial and round, nestled like an egg in my windpipe.

My husband sees me lay a hand against my throat and stops on the sidewalk. My eyelids are growing taut as blisters, my lips thickening. I stand on First Avenue, wondering if I have time to get back uptown. The last time this happened it was so slow I drove across town to the hospital I liked best. But this is moving faster. Steve hails a cab, and as we get in I say to our friends, already speaking with some difficulty, “You go on to the bar. I’m just going to the nearest emergency room.”

By the end of the ten-block drive to Beth Israel my tongue has swelled until it lies across my teeth in a slab and my lips are purple and stiff. The egg in my throat is larger, and with a frill of panic around my heart I realize that until I get to a hospital my throat will just keep tightening. Once this begins, nothing in my body knows to stop. I pray there’ll be no traffic jams.

In the ER they hustle me to a bed and toss a hospital gown my way, leaving Steve to fill out forms. They return a minute later with an IV and injections of epinephrine, Benadryl, and Prednizone. My eyes are closed against the light above me, so I only feel them prodding me, sticking adhesive monitors to my ribs and chest. I open my eyes when someone asks where I ate and what might have caused this. “This” is anaphylactic shock.

“Probably shellfish,” I guess thickly.

“Okay, what kind?”

It seems best to catalogue everything remotely aqueous, so I say, “Shrimp, scallops, mussels, cockles, octopus, sardines…”

The resident and the nurse exchange glances.

The resident looks at me over his glasses. “Never eat shellfish again,” he orders.

“I don’t even want to,” I lie.

After a few minutes the resident says, of the tapas bar, “You know, I keep meaning to go to that place.” It occurs to me that he is trying to keep me occupied and calm. In fact I am fairly relaxed now. I bristle with needles, am swathed in blankets, speckled with adhesive patches bearing jellied circles and metal buttons that send my pulse to the monitors. Things are happening. People are watching.

“Was the food good?” the resident asks.

“Worth it,” I croak, and pass out.

I went into anaphylactic shock once before, in Wisconsin, but somehow it hadn’t seemed to matter. We thought it was crab rangoon, which I only tasted because someone else ordered it. That time I thought my scalp itched from sweat after dancing, so I waited awhile, finished my beer and went home, where I took an Allegra and lay down.

That time I thought there was something caught in my throat, but the something turned out to be my throat. At the UW hospital I sat in a chair and handed over my insurance card and explained the problem, and then we ambled over to a bed and I took a leisurely intravenous cocktail of Benadryl and epinephrine. Every now and again someone popped in to check on me. I slipped in and out of sleep. After a few hours we went home, none the worse for wear. We had just gotten married and were about to move to New York. Other things seemed more important. What were we thinking, we chided each other, ordering shellfish in the Midwest?

After that first reaction they prescribed an Epi-Pen, which is an automatic injection of epinephrine. You drive it down hard into your thigh when you feel the first warnings, like the throat swelling or hair standing up on end, and a needle pops out and jabs through your clothes and into your muscle. It comes in its own little tube, like Pez.

A few weeks after the first attack and months before the second, I tested myself. No crab rangoon, obviously, but at the Delaware shore I whacked fresh blue crab with a mallet and picked out the white shards of meat. After the first bite, it got easier and easier. Fresh seafood seemed so healthful, not like the dicey shellfish I had grown up eating on special occasions in Ohio and later in Wisconsin. I shattered scarlet lobster claws and dug out the flesh with the prongs of my fork, wrenched several dozen clams from their shells and crushed their bellies in my teeth without a thought. I was pretty sure my Epi-Pen was somewhere in my purse.

Steve and I breathed a sigh of relief.

“Good God, can you imagine if I were allergic to shellfish?” I crowed. We were out on a porch, drinking beer and eating from a mixing bowl filled with steamed clams and wine. I held the shell down and wrenched a clam off its tight bundle of muscle, leaving a round wound like a bullet hole in its flesh.

“It wouldn’t have been right,” Steve agreed. He ate a slice of lobster tail. We had killed the lobster first with a headfirst dive into hot water and then cracked open the shells as we looked for roe. There wasn’t any, so we flattened its head and legs and sauteed it in butter and wine. Now it was lobster in lobster stock, scarlet with tomatoes. It was delicious.

“I mean, you can’t not eat shellfish,” he continued, slurping some broth. “We plan vacations around it.”

I have a terrible feeling we then clinked our beer bottles in a nitwitted little toast.

The morning after my most recent trip to the emergency room I wake with my skull heavy and congested.

“Am I still hideous?” I ask Steve.

He looks me over. “You look like you’ve been through something,” he admits.

My eyelids are swollen, changing the shape of my eyes completely, my mouth is lavender and puffed. In my throat the egg has shrunk to a grain of rice.

After this latest incident I have a sheaf of prescriptions and referrals—almost as many as when I was a child. As a kid I existed among a flotilla of specialists around Akron and Cleveland: the ear, nose and throat guy, the optometrist, the dermatologist, and of course the allergist. By age seven I was unimpressed with needles thanks to my weekly allergy shots. At first the nurse told me to kiss my mom when they jabbed me, but soon I was strolling in alone and slouching in my chair, my arm flung out at the nurse, casual as a junkie.

Though I knew the consequences I often couldn’t resist doing things that would send me into allergic attacks. I would count the sneezes, because I couldn’t do anything else while they went on. Thirty, forty, fifty. I reacted badly to pollen, grass and ragweed, but nevertheless at my brother’s baseball games I joined the other kids in hurling ourselves down a steep, weedy hill. Our bodies left a series of flattened lanes in the grass. Clunky in sneakers, our feet kicked up the grass cuttings, and before I finished my first roll I knew I was in trouble. My eyes were beginning to water and I had already sneezed once on the way down. My skin was smeared with green juice and bent sticks of grass like bug legs. Nevertheless I figured I had a couple more rolls in me before I would have to stop and take a few of the red tablets my mom carried for moments like this.

I remember all of that, but until I found myself in the hospital again I had forgotten the hive-y summer when I was three and my doctors forbade me to touch everything worth eating. No wheat, dairy, mayonnaise or eggs, no nuts, no chocolate. (Expensive shellfish, which no one in Stow, Ohio was wasting on a toddler, barely warranted mention.) My parents served me steamed rice, soy milk, carob chips, and fruit. My protests have not been recorded.

The hives went away and the doctors told my parents to give me forbidden foods again, one by one. One week they gave me cheese, then a chocolate bar, then an egg salad sandwich, a few roasted peanuts. I accepted each one contentedly, with no ill effects. We had moved on to new specialists by then, anyway. I needed glasses, I had broken my arm, I was prone to sinus infections and nose bleeds. I was not the pretty toddler I had been before the doctors, but my skin remained clear of hives no matter what I ate. For the rest of my childhood and into adulthood, I forgot I ever had a problem. I learned to eat fearlessly in the interest of culinary research and greed. I tore the heads off shrimp and lobster, ordered tripe and thymus glands. I made noises of distant sympathy for a friend with a fatal nut allergy that required him to tote an Epi-Pen as we ate our way through Italy and France.

Now, after the second attack in six months, I try to be afraid. I fake little shudders when I read recipes for linguine and shrimp, pad thai, any of the things I used to eat so frequently.

I still want them.

When my husband catches me at a restaurant without my Epi-Pen, he scolds me. Thereafter, as we leave the house, Steve blocks the door and says accusingly, “You have it?”

At another tapas bar with my sister I nibble a piece of calamari, reasoning it is not shellfish. Lately I have been eyeing menus at sushi restaurants, wondering how one categorizes a sea urchin. As I spear another piece of squid, my sister looks at me like I’m sipping strychnine.

“It’s a cephalopod!” I protest. For a moment she seems unable to speak.

At least she too is restricted. She is pregnant: no crumbly, damp cheese for her, no wine or margaritas out by the pool. Still, she wins. At a restaurant she orders crab enchiladas and I sigh and look at her plate. She is smiling fondly at it: rich white strands of crab sigh forth from a soft golden corn tortilla, bright with salsa verde.

“That’s just fine,” I tell her bitterly. “You enjoy that crab and I’ll just take a big sip of my wine.”

I have made an appointment to find out exactly what I reacted to. I am hoping for shrimp, just shrimp. I can do without it, however delicious those monumental prawns in the Village were. I have had a lot of shrimp in my lifetime, but there are never enough clams and lobster to satisfy me. I courted my husband with a recipe for garlicky clams, which I never admitted was incredibly simple. When he moved all our things into the first apartment we shared I thanked him with lobster risotto. It can’t just be chicken for me.

Having grown up far from seafood in the Midwest, I have waited a long time for New York City. The best we could do in Ohio was an infrequent splurge on littlenecks and lobster. That was the only time my parents hated to share. Normally I would barge in on their special parents-only meals and get samples of steak and sips of wine, but at lobster time my mother set her mouth, cut me a tiny bit of lobster tail and knocked the excess butter off with a sharp rap of her fork against the china cup.

While it awaited this fate, the seafood went into the refrigerator. There it was disturbed periodically by the children, who were interested in the brown paper bag that moved. We would open it stealthily, look into the bright eyes of the doomed lobster and feel a bit sorry for it as it weakened. It hardly bothered to stretch its antennae after awhile. I ate it anyway.

The allergist enters the room with a rack full of irritants. The nurse has dotted me with black magic marker, four long rows of twelve each on the white flesh of my forearms. The tray holds rows of small plastic rods, each soaking in an individual puddle of allergen. They stab me with them one by one, tossing the used sticks in the garbage. Down row after row, my arm erupts in stings, spreading crimson archipelagos across my skin. Grass, dust mites, pollen—vicious little jabs in some of the most sensitive skin I have. I refuse to cringe. Egg whites, chocolate, wheat. Just like when I was a kid. My arms sting and itch and I am not allowed to move them. Immobilized, I sit with my palms turned up and a pillow in my lap, watching my skin all but bubble in anger. “Don’t move,” barks the nurse. Peanuts, shrimp, lobster.

It’s a bit of a mystery, says the allergist.

In the test I reacted only mildly to foods I have eaten without incident many times. The shrimp barely showed up. He suspects it is an issue of combination: alcohol, an allergen, and exertion like dancing—in other words, “fun”—and next thing I know I am in the hospital. But we can’t say for sure. I could be wrong about the whole shrimp guess. Maybe it’s peanuts. But maybe it’s almost anything.

The allergist gives me a pamphlet on anaphylactic shock. Among the symptoms: “a sense of impending doom.” I remember that cab ride to Beth Israel.

Whatever the trigger is, it’s hiding in my system, warning me to eat the vegetables, the pasta, to sip a glass of someone else’s wine, not to dance. I imagine myself in rural foreign countries, trying to find my way to a derelict hospital with my empty Epi-Pen. I have always wanted to go to Thailand, where the magnificent street food is rife with sprinkles of dried shrimp, which I can’t bring myself to discount. I know enough to fear the French, whose stocks might draw their sweetness from invisible pounds of shrimp heads. It doesn’t matter to me what the allergist said; I’m convinced it was the shrimp we tore apart so happily. So no more shopping trips for giant head-on prawns on Grand Street, no more bragging rights about eating shrimp brains, any more than I still hurl myself down the hill through the grass. I will probably have to prepare flashcards for myself for every foreign country I ever visit. So much for my food writer’s voracity.

Faced with another grilled shrimp, one curled naked and beheaded in rice, I might not fear it. But one that is lipstick-bright, its tough shell shining and its pearly black eye trained on me… I can tell I have grown tentative, still believing that plunge into shock was an issue of offense rather than biology. I have a vision of myself in the tapas bars and sushi counters of the future, watching the people around me scarf up sea creatures while I sip my tea sedately, nibble grilled zucchini or pickled radishes, doomed to maintain a respectful distance.

Essays

From ODE to an EGG

The Garden of Eden was not a good book, but I was so busy reading Hemingway's descriptions of food, especially eggs, that it took me several years to notice. Like so many things, the book begins with eggs: As newlyweds, Hemingway informs us, the Bournes eat them each morning, excited just to contemplate the manner of cooking them. The husband never abandons his joyful consumption of oeufs au jambon and eventually finds happiness in love and work. The wife begins to skip breakfast about midway through. Things turn out badly for her.

In English the word egg is something to cup in one's palm. On the page, the extra g, like a linguistic wink, lends the word the same oblong shape as the thing itself. Egg nestles against the curve of the tongue.

In its shell it is all smoothness and balance. Next to it, other kinds of beauty seem bony and embellished, and at times I think the nutmeg speckling on a blue egg is as much as we can hope for. Yet the egg lends its beauty generously—witness the way egg tempera allows itself to be saturated with color; the chalky aura that bathes a Vermeer, as though the painter has cast his light through a broken shell.

M.F.K. Fisher mused that the egg is privacy itself. As a metaphor for self-containment, only the oyster comes close, but its rough-ribboned shell lacks the egg's tranquility. The oyster must clamp itself closed, while the egg simply has not noticed anyone else.

The Oxford Companion to Food calls the egg an "unintentional gift," which is a self-deceiving way of saying we steal them. In other animals such behavior seems especially rapacious, not to mention sneaky. The dinosaur known as oviraptor ("egg thief"), got its name when its skeleton was discovered on a cache of fossilized eggs. Scientists assumed the dinosaur was stealing them rather than warming them and christened it accordingly. Misunderstood or not, such a creature lacks grandeur. It seems poor sport to eat the unborn. The killers we most admire—the tigers, the grizzlies—are the John Waynes of the animal world. They have no need to assume the creepy delicacy of a mongoose slithering into the hen house.

But we humans, sly lot, are the greatest oviraptors of all, and we will never admit it. We'll never compare ourselves to the mongoose or the weasel, because it might turn our egg-love into something that feels prurient and deceitful. We believe we are in it for commerce or gourmandise, that the matter-of-fact hand beneath the hen is retrieving only what it's owed, or that the pleasure in pearls of caviar bursting against the roofs of our mouths is near-godly delectation.
We are kidding ourselves, of course; the delight we feel at the discovery of an unexpected cluster of eggs is pure animal gratitude for protein, for succulence, for easy pickings. The beachcomber who unearths a clutch of leathery turtle eggs warmed in the sand, the diner who finds a cache of coral upon cracking the lobster shell, and the fishermen who slice open a sturgeon to discover the black burst fruit of its roe all treat the discovery as though it were a pile of gold coins. When it comes to an egg, any egg, humans are pure avarice. Hence, the egg is an animal's most vulnerable possession. The egg is its secret.

The love of eggs is a love for the tiny and tender—pinkie-sized squash, potatoes like marbles, three-week-old chickens, skinny-limbed lambs and calves—but taken one step backwards. To us it feels wholesome, as though there is no kinder thing on earth than to give someone a plate of eggs, but every now and again you get a reminder what you're dealing with. You crack a shell and find the freak egg: its yellow orb twinned like a biology experiment, a bloody vein buried in the meat of the yolk.

Essays

The Last Great Drinkers

Detectives and rock stars linger—grizzled, undaunted, and occasionally crossing paths professionally—as the last great drinkers. The rest of us have begun to abide by the rules, limiting ourselves out of vanity or medical necessity, but not these people. Whether cops, private investigators, or unlucky but bull-headed citizens, they spend their days delving into depravity and violence, faced with lies and venality on every side. Their stresses are greater, their view of humanity crueler, their need for numbness stronger. I don't know what the rock stars' excuse is.

But even the detectives have begun to scale back. Everyone knows the glory days of the genre were gin-soaked and smoky, but apparently so was America. Now in popular mysteries most detectives start their days with a quick three-mile jog instead of a belt. Thank god the heart of the detective hero remains a weary, if healthier, muscle: our hero is still a loner, still alienated by particular ghosts, still rolling into bed with the occasional willing partner who understands the needs of The Job. They're haunted by something, almost invariably, by loss, regret, or rage. Private investigator V.I. Warshawski lost the refined Italian mother who forced her to reach beyond a working class Chicago neighborhood. Rogue Scottish cop John Rebus neglected his family in favor of police work, and now the wife is long gone and the daughter in a wheelchair (yes, it is his fault). For L.A. detective Harry Bosch, the image of a dead girl's empty, reaching hands is the reminder of the unsolved murders accumulated over twenty years of police work. Readers expect a mystery to plague every hero, something to explain how they crossed the line from regular joe to fearless searcher. Hence the endless slew of murdered wives, swimming forever lithe and beautiful through the male heroes' dreams. (Not nearly as many angelic, sexy male corpses litter the landscape.) The murdered wives are such a type that there may in fact have only been a single one in the whole history, reincarnated and killed over and over—maybe the reeling husbands just can't quite recall if her eyes were green or blue, her hair blonde or bewitching brunette. It doesn't matter. The dead wives are not created to matter; they're usually created solely to explain why our heroes have stripped their lives to the bare minimum of work, melancholy, and meals and booze.

With the exception of true drinkers like the Scottish Rebus, whose drinking would once have been a norm of the genre but is now clearly a problem, most are social drinkers with casual standards befitting their outcast status. Lee Child's drifter Jack Reacher, a former Army MP, is just delighted to get some good coffee and a slice of pie between bus rides. Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch usually ponders cases at home over a simple bottle of beer, but in classic cop fashion he does enjoy the occasional martini at a steakhouse. Kinsey Millhone, an antisocial but best-selling investigator, owns one all-purpose black dress which she carries stuffed in her purse and limits her devotion to a handful of people and to her boxes of sweet pink wine. (She drinks it with peanut butter sandwiches.) Lew Fonesca is a former D.A.'s investigator who's ended up asking questions here and there for small amounts of cash. He lives in a rented Florida office above a Dairy Queen after the death of The Wife, but still clings to a couple pleasures: fast food, old movies, and a moderate amount of cold beer. One exception, as befits a detective specializing in financial crime, is Warshawski, whose taste runs more toward good scotch and Italian wine drunk from her long-dead mother's treasured Venetian wine glasses.

Other books can go 200 pages with only passing references to being thirsty or hungry but no detail at all. Yet a detective novel that doesn't tell you what the investigator is eating and drinking is simply not doing its job. How most of them get away with sharing the daily parade of sandwiches and beverages without boring the reader silly is a mystery of its own, but I've come to think the gustatory details have a specialized literary role. Bury the reader in the daily minutiae of booze and meals, and then the salient points don't stand out. Somewhere between the eggs and the Polish sausage on a roll, the delicious first hot sip of coffee and the last cool belt of Macallan, the imperative clue appeared, but readers like me, wondering if there's wine in the fridge or a kielbasa joint nearby, have missed it.

A drink also serves the detective in more ways than a buzz. The pint at The Ox in Edinburgh is one of Rebus's few social outlets. Bosch's time on his deck overlooking the Los Angeles valleys over a cold one is usually at least a step on the path to a breakthrough. V.I. spends so much time muddy and bedraggled that her occasional Barolo is a necessity, a link to her family's past and to the civilized world. The drink is a small shelter, a point of pleasure, prickly alcoholic warmth, and meditative concentration in the middle of chaos. If it comes with a price, then most things do.

In many ways, detectives haven't changed that much. The investigator is still designed to elicit a mix of admiration and bafflement, even superiority. They make logical leaps we never could, brave situations we would flee, sardonic in the face of danger and cool in the face of lust. But they rarely have a good 401(k). Their lives seem deeply lonely, though the detectives rarely allow themselves to realize it, and their ruined bodies are cross-hatched with scars and bruises. Whereas fifty years ago the detective's alcoholic tolerance demonstrated his steely superiority, now their beverage leanings make them human, smaller and as prone to minor pleasures as the rest of us. Who can begrudge them the tenth Heineken, the down-market sweet wine, or the third martini with the porterhouse? Our heroes have so little else.