Ten or twelve years ago, having never before attempted to prepare the dish, I made a crème brulée so good it could have brought peace to the Middle East. No extremist from either side of the religious divide would deny an erstwhile enemy’s divine right to live free from fear of his neighbors once they’d felt the platonic smoothness of this crème brulée spill over the tongue and fill the cheeks. Men would shave their beards and women would drop their veils to taste this stuff; imminent “martyrs” would unfasten their explosive vests for the opportunity to lightly crack its crystalline sugar glaze; and the wolf would lie down with the lamb, their little scalloped round white porcelain crème brulée dishes littered carelessly around the forest floor beside them as they slept.

And I did it without the little scalloped dishes—I floated a demi-tasse in each cup of a muffin tin, Magyver of the Upper West Side. And I did it without the blow torch—I’d lucked in to a perfectly calibrated broiler and, drawing on either sheer intuition or specific intructions from The Joy of Cooking, placed the oven rack for the ideal flame-to-custard-surface distance. My girlfriend and her roommate were jubilant. Verily I say unto you, this dessert was brought forth from my hand and my girlfriend’s dad’s apartment’s kitchen only by the grace of God.

Here’s the thing, though: so awesome was my creation, I dare not attempt to replicate my virgin crème brulée. I have not cooked the dish since. I will not even order it in a restaurant. I know I’d suffer a disappointment akin to when I ate at California Pizza Kitchen right after my honeymoon in Tuscany. I know any other crème brulée would be dry or grainy, or too much vanilla, or too eggy. I know I would no longer be able to tell the story about the time I was 22 and I made the crème brulée that could have saved the world. More than anything, though, I know that my success was an absolute fluke.

I was way out of my league trying to cook crème brulée— even for professionals, to realize the right consistency takes Carnegie-Hall practice, and before the mini-torch made the leap from the crackhouse to the superfluously-appointed kitchen, getting the top just right was a mother, too.
Because around the time of the blessed crème brulée my main contribution to the culinary arts was couscous and tomato sauce from a jar. I was unable to manage the girlfriend with the killer apartment, either—she fired me just months later. I didn’t have much appetite for cooking for one after that, which is fine because I couldn’t have made anything decent anyway, and I developed a cynical theory that anything taking more time to prepare than to eat wasn’t worth it.

Which is about as much wisdom and reflection as went into my personal life at the time. So I spent a year, brokenhearted and unemployed, sitting on the floor of my ground-floor apartment in San Francisco, switching off the Playstation once or twice a day to stand and take the three steps to the stove to make an omelet or a pot of rice.

Then, on the night before my 25th or -6th birthday (I can’t remember which now and though I could consult my journal I think the inability to recall lends a certain authenticity to the exercise), I met S— C—, who lived up the street with a friend-of-a-friend from college and had a cat identical to mine, and my sister’s birthday, and was— is, I’m sure— beautiful. We kissed. On future occasions, intimacies progressed. She always wore matching underwear.

Perhaps if more significant details about her had been impressed upon me, S— wouldn’t be figuring in this story in the same way: One night she told me her next boyfriend would probably be the father of her children. Unable as I was to sufficiently convince her of my noble intentions, which were entirely ignoble, she thereafter resisted my many wooings.

After moving to a loft in Potrero Hill, I made one final attempt at impressing S— (and we both knew it would be final). I decided I needed to cook for her to impart a favorable impression of domesticity. The loft’s kitchen was fully equipped— glass burners on the electric stove, grey marble countertops— all mod cons. Out of a cookbook my mother had given me I concocted a pesto-cream sauce with sautéed corn and asparagus over pasta. Burned the corn; asparagus: mushy, stringy; spaghetti: in clumps. A complete disaster start to finish. Following a courteous postprandial interval, S— craned her head toward me for the goodnight kiss so her breasts wouldn’t compress against my chest and gave me the, “awww… you’re not gonna get laid tonight, are you?” pat on the scapula.

Years later I fell in love with my roommate’s dog-walker. She had a bob haircut and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago. She moved in, we wed. She taught me more about myself than I had known, and slowly I brought my life into order: less brain cell depletion and sleeping till noon, more fruit and exercise. When she started working an office job, our weekday brunches ended abruptly, and the frequency of her cooking for me tapered off. Gradually I learned a few simple dishes to serve her after she’d changed out of her skirt at the end of her commute: Tuscan-style baked fish fillets, sauce moutarde, sautéed spinach and tomato with nutmeg. Eventually I was ready to reopen the page with the pesto-corn-asparagus recipe; I chose a random night, not a special occasion, to deflate any significance my success or failure might imply, and …. pulled it all off with aplomb.

Two weeks ago I decided to make a tomato bisque. While Ericka trudged along the 101, I boiled and cooled 4 or 5 pounds of non-heirloom techno-matoes while the onions and garlic cooked over a low flame. Peeling each one, then chopping a Le Crouset-full of vegetables for the lentil salad that would accompany the soup, I thought about the crème brulée. These dishes lacked the sweetness or flamboyant presentation of that dessert, certainly. But the wholesome ingredients in front of me and their laborious preparation, compared with the over-ambitious, improvisational cheffery of that day long ago, neatly paralleled my personal growth. Where I had once jumped headlong into a too-sweet affair whose complication had exceeded my grasp or even my expectation, now I consciously and methodically developed what was actually good for me. Moreover, I could repeat the performance, and I could tell someone else how to do it.
So I made the crème brulee…

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about when my wife arrived home and told me she was pregnant.