The Flame

Right about the time I was straining some lasagna noodles into a colander, I recalled the ancient culinary advice: Never pour boiling water onto your foot.

In the next few milliseconds, I wished I could halt the march of time. The water was streaming away from its goal, glistening and twining, a study of wetness in all its beauty, and I-until it made the floor anyway-a man at the height of his powers, able to think fine thoughts about the nature of fire and its consequences.

Exhibit A. If the knife is the heart of cuisine, then fire is its soul. Without fire, one is left with a dangerously tough potato.

Exhibit B. It's fire that gives cooking its resemblance to the performing arts. No sooner does the burner go on than the clock is ticking, the bomb is waiting, the kitchen is live. For the irreplaceable thrill, what you want are eight burners going at once, two orders in the oven and three waiting, a symphony of items entering and leaving your grasp at the stroke of serendipitous will. To get up to this speed, you have to get pretty hot and bothered, of course. But that's all right. The fire gives you energy. You just have to direct it back into the food, or suffer the consequences.

And suffer them we all do. The most common-and least spectacular-version of the flame gone astray is the burned meal. Most everyone has produced one of these. Let the casserole stay in too long and the smoke detector will soon be taxing its tonsils. The expectant diner, following the arc of his appetite to a surefire bull's eye, will fail to conceal his disappointment, and you, the cook, will just have to look sheepish. No major crisis-just a mild blemish on an otherwise perfect world.

But there are times when fire leaves a narrative mark.

Allow me to protect the innocent and guilty alike by calling them Alice and Ken. One day Alice, a waitress, came into a restaurant where I was working cold side, and got wildly upset when she learned that Ken, a line cook, was working the day shift with her.

I didn't know about this until I talked to the head cook. Ken and Alice had been at a party the night before, he explained, and Ken apparently, supposedly, had tried to rape her. The owner, for his part, had looked up from his coke habit just long enough to fire Alice for making a scene at work.

I'm not especially given to Henry Fonda moments. In fact, I didn't even know Alice. If we had ever exchanged words, it wasn't much more than a civil hello. So my parents must have done something right.

If she's fired, I said, I'm gone in 10 minutes.

The head cook bridled. I was overreacting. I had my own interests to think about. But I didn't really have my own interests to think about. I was always on the verge of quitting anyway.

In the end, my stand wasn't critical. Most of the other workers felt the same way I did, and Alice was reinstated pretty quickly. It bothered me that Ken himself wasn't fired, but at least the two never had to work the same shift again.

Two months later, Ken was talking to another line cook, no doubt imparting a strong impression of the magnitude of his genius through his superb verbal skills. In a gesture meant to convey confidence and languor at once, he punctuated this flight of fancy by resting his palm on the kitchen counter. Except that instead he put his full weight, and thus his entire forearm, into the Fry-o-lator, nicely warmed to a caterwaul waiting to happen.

That was both poetic and just. Somehow I had converted my Henry Fonda moment into a Tin Drum-style disaster by proxy.

My cooking teacher, for his part, knew how to apply fire to justice without the aid of karmic middlemen. Hiroshi Hayashi will get more ink in these pages in time. For now, picture a headstrong Japanese man in his 20s, working his way through a 10-year apprenticeship with a master chef, having arrived the rank of soup chef.

There he was one day, talking to someone in the kitchen, when one of the apprentices under his watch came over and asked him to taste the soup. Hiroshi paused to try a spoonful, told him to add more salt and resumed his conversation. But he kept watching the guy out of the corner of his eye. I guess Hiroshi already knew something was up, because the other apprentice went over to his station and only pretended to add salt before bringing it back for another review.

As this trickster approached and offered the pot again, Hiroshi just kept talking. Then, without breaking stride of breath, he grabbed the handle, wheeled around and threw the soup straight into the guy's face.

Exhibit C. It is an interesting fact that one often sees firemen shopping for cooking ingredients in the supermarkets of New York.

Years ago, my now-wife Claudia lived in the wilds of the Lower East Side, in a building made of nice dry wood. One day, her neighbor interrupted her kitchen ministrations to go downstairs and get her mail. Turns out she also left a towel fetchingly close to an open flame-just for a second, mind you.

Through some unknown enterprise, Claudia managed to call me from the street. "You might want to come over, if you have the time," she said, cordial as ever. "My building is burning down."

I had the time. Out of breath, I arrived to see the lifetime of regret that a moment of pleasure (or mail) can bring: charred timbers, broken glass and muddy puddles where a stack of apartments had been.

All very fine thoughts indeed. But sadly, I didn't have time to think any of them. The water hit the top of my foot and forced a uvula-shaking scream from my lungs. Faster than you can say second-degree burn, I pulled off my sock and ran to the bathroom, to immerse the offended limb in a column of ice-cold New York City tap water, a galapagos of blisters already rising from the surface of my skin. After a while, I felt ready to brave the kitchen again, and for the better part of an hour, I tended to dinner and wound in turn.

When we finally cleared our plates, Claudia insisted the lasagna was excellent. But my foot, parked at a right angle and banging hard from within, told a different story. At least half of the talent, I knew, had gone there instead.