Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (17 page)

It seemed pretty weird to me. Brunch is merciless for someone allergic to eggs, dairy, melon, and sausage. That was why I'd chosen it. Carla Hall's words had gotten under my skin, and I wanted to see how far I could get in a “normal” gourmet cooking class. No substitutes. No accommodations.

The Sunday seminar was advertised for couples, but I explained to Adam that his job was to stand by and let me do all the hands-on work. If I started to react, he should step in and take over—I didn't want to cause a scene. But the point was to prove that I could, as an adult at the age of twenty-nine, manage one little brunch all by myself.

A few weeks later, we made our way through December sleet to CulinAerie's sleek storefront in Northwest D.C. Five place settings were laid out, one per couple, complete with our own burner, mixing bowls, and spatulas. Adam sat down gratefully with a hot mug of coffee while I stayed on my feet, sizing up the field of battle.

Powdered ingredients had been premeasured and nestled next to a couple of eggs, scallions, and a small pile of shiitake mushrooms. I picked up an egg, feeling its cool heft. I eyed the meek squares of anonymous chocolate and the half cup of milk, which looked like glue in its little plastic cup. I did not touch them.

The chef, who seemed to be about our age, welcomed us. She introduced her white-aproned helpers, volunteers who soaked up the recipes for free in return for offering us help, whisking away food scraps and dirty dishes, and pouring mimosas.
Kitchen elves
, I thought, a label I would not be able to shake for the next two hours.

The advertisement for the class had listed the lineup of dishes: prosciutto and fruit, muffins, veggie frittata, and chocolate mousse. The mousse scared me, but I figured preparing the other three dishes first would build my confidence to the point of taking on milk chocolate, egg, and cream all at once.

“Now,” the instructor announced. “The mousse will need
an hour to chill before serving. So let's get that assembled, first thing, and into the fridge.”

As she starts talking about melting the chocolate in the double boiler, separating the egg whites, and whipping the cream, a low-grade buzz of panic rose in my ears. I stared down into my coffee, then yanked my gaze back to the front of the room, afraid I was missing something. One of the elves approached.

“Hazelnut liqueur?” she offered.

“Yes,” I said gratefully.

She tipped it into the bowl. Oh. She meant for flavoring the mousse.

“What do you want me to do?” Adam asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I'm going to separate this egg.”

“Are you sure? The white's gonna go everywhere.”

I glared at him, then tapped the egg against the edge of the bowl. I could do this. A hairline crack formed. The second tap did nothing. I wondered if the egg would explode in my hand if I tapped harder—fearing not so much an allergic reaction as proof of my ineptitude.

I dug my thumbnail into the crack and pulled the shell apart in my hands, cupping the yolk in my palm while the rest drained down into the bowl, then hurled the yolk into the trash and bolted for the sink. I lathered and scrubbed my palms twice over. While I was slaving over a single egg, the couple next to us had already set up their Cuisinart and whipped their whites.

Adam hunched over our finicky burner, working with an elf to hook up the butane canister. The logistics of the prep were designed for four hands, and we were already behind. I decided
he could take care of anything mechanical, pushing a button or turning a dial. We muddled our way through the mousse, finally scooping the mixture into two triangular cocktail tumblers that we shoved into the refrigerator. One dish down.

“Since we've already got the mixers out,” said the chef, “we'll make cinnamon-sugar muffins next.” More eggs. I raised my hand to request a mimosa.

We were the novices in the room. While others had been slathering decorative curves into the tops of their mousses with a spoon, Adam had been piling ours up like a kid with a sand bucket and a shovel. I tried to grate fresh nutmug into the flour and instead dropped the whole thing in, scattering the cinnamon as I tried to fish it out by hand. As we coaxed the muffin mixture into baking cups, an elf darted in to wipe away drips of batter.

“Or else it will burn,” she explained.

“No, no, that's how I like my muffins,” Adam told her. “That's my trademark technique.” He always had a knack for using hyperbole to escape embarrassment. “This is when I add the pork,” he said.

I get lucky with the fruit. “This is usually done with melon,” acknowledged the instructor. “But I hate melon.” We used grapes and slices of pear instead. For the first time all morning I could unabashedly work the food with my hands—peeling the pear, piercing each grape, stretching and folding the prosciutto with my fingertips so that it formed a wave undulating up the skewer.

“Those look really good,” Adam hinted. I gave him one but was otherwise greedy, eating the skewers as fast as I could
make them. It was past noon and all I'd had were mimosas. Adam contented himself with wolfiing down some very lopsided but (so he claimed) tasty muffins.

“I can't believe they were done so fast,” he said. “I can't believe I baked something. Kind of.”

All around us, couples were relaxed and chatting. This was what I've always envied about gourmet eating—how a meal can stretch into hours. The lazy pace is the goal, the preparation a kind of appetizer foreplay. I wish I could make a bowl of oatmeal last this long, or look this sexy.

“Are you ready for the frittata?” the chef asked.

I was. I ran my knife through the fleshy shiitakes, stripped and diced the ginger. I skipped the garlic, though I have always admired how a clove crushes and splits under the flat of a blade. But I knew that garlic gave Adam headaches. I reached for scallions.

“Actually, can you skip those, too?” Adam asked. “I don't like them.”

I wanted to say no—knife work was one of the few things I'd been good at this morning—but it was a petty point. His tongue would be the only judge of this frittata when it was done. After the skillet had been loaded into the oven, I realized there was salt and pepper at our workstation, waiting. I looked at Adam.

“Did we use salt? In anything?”

He shook his head. No difference. After it emerged from the oven and cooled, the whole frittata disappeared from his plate in thirty seconds and five bites.

Spotting my spotless knife and fork, a passing elf asked, “Did you have your frittata yet?”

“Someone stole it,” Adam said, tapping his fork and knife on the counter. “I demand another.”

We'd reached dessert, the mousses having set. The instructor doled out mint leaves for a garnish and suggested that those who had used the hazelnut liqueur add a spoonful of chopped hazelnuts on top as well.

“To warn people there's an unexpected ingredient,” she said. “In case they have a nut allergy.” I smiled. Of all this dish's ingredients, the hazelnuts were the one thing that
wouldn't
kill me.

All that was left to do was top off the mousse with fresh-whipped cream. I gripped the shallow little bowl in one hand and the whisk in the other, trying to pitch the chilled cream at an efficient angle for beating. I began to swish the whisk frantically, careful to keep each slosh of liquid shy of the bowl's lip, until my wrist started to hurt. It wouldn't take shape. I tried again. Nothing. The cream was starting to warm up, at which point it would be too late for it to set properly. So close, and yet so far.

Adam gently took the bowl from me and switched the whisk back and forth with a rapid beat. His hand and arm became spattered in white as the cream first aerated, then foamed. “You have to really get into it and take a risk,” he said. “That doesn't work for someone like you.”

At least, this is what I heard him say. Later I would figure out that what he actually said was “flick your wrist,” not “take a risk.” But my hurt ego heard what it wanted to hear: judgment. I didn't have the right stuff.

I stepped away from our cooking station. Walking over to a bank of windows, I noticed that a birthday party of ten- and
eleven-year-olds had filed into the adjoining room. Cooking parties are now popular among preteens. I'm glad this wasn't the case when I was a kid. I can remember only one party that involved making something—pasta, from scratch. We had all been given the party favors of aprons, and for step one, I had made my little volcano of flour along with everyone else. Then they got the eggs out, and I had to stand back for step two. And step three. And steps four through six.

There was something odd about this CulinAerie birthday party. In addition to the usual moms, there were men stationed every ten feet, their alert postures at odds with their casual button-downs. I overheard one of the other students identify them as Secret Service.
Obama
. Apparently, a daughter of President Obama was among the party guests. Jolted out of my self-pity by this brush with celebrity, I returned to tell Adam.

The cream was now fully whipped. He was so proud. And as I watched him dollop it on our mousse, it occurred to me that I'd had this all wrong. My original plan—to make Adam stand by, passive, while I fixed everything on my own—would have been a victory, technically. But this wasn't really about skewering prosciutto instead of eating it straight from the package or learning how to give eggs an Asian flavor profile.

A gourmet glorifies food as a gesture of love, whether love for the self—eating Lean Cuisine off the good china—or love for the person sitting on the other side of the table. This was the person on the other side of my table. And he really didn't want to stand back and watch me kill myself over a mousse.

“Looks good,” I said as Adam took his first bite. We were trying to build a nest in those years. It didn't matter which one of us broke the eggs.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Kiss of Death

K
iss of death for nut allergy girl,” proclaimed the headline in London's
Daily Telegraph
on November 29, 2005. A fifteen-year-old girl living outside Quebec City had died after being admitted to the hospital for what was thought to be an anaphylactic reaction to peanuts. The reason? A passionate 3 a.m. kiss with her boyfriend—after he had eaten peanut butter. Her friends didn't even know of her allergy until they pulled an EpiPen from her backpack. She had a MedicAlert bracelet, but she did not wear it.

“If peanuts are still in the mouth, or on the tongue or on the lips, they can cause a reaction,” said Dr. Karen Sigman, an allergy expert, in an interview for the
Telegraph
. “Teenagers with allergies have to let their friends know. If they are going to be dating somebody, then they have to tell the people they
are close to that they are allergic to make sure they are not in contact with nuts or peanuts.”

There was a precedent for suspicion that kissing had been the culprit. In 2003, the
Mayo Clinic Proceedings
had published a case report on a twenty-year-old woman who had been admitted to a hospital with lip angioedema (swelling), nausea, wheezing, cramps, and a significant drop in blood pressure, all of which had happened immediately after receiving a good-night kiss from her boyfriend. The girl had a known allergy to crustaceans; the boy had eaten shrimp less than an hour earlier. She had recovered, but only after receiving several treatments including prednisone, nebulized albuterol, and intravenous epinephrine.

“Kissing, an ancient technique for expressing simple affection or erotic desire, has been recognized only recently as a vector for transmitting food allergens,” noted Dr. David P. Steensma, in his report. This was probably the only time Steensma has ever had to create a footnote citing William Cane's
The Art of Kissing
.

As Canadian coroner Michel Miron would announce in the spring of 2006, the case of the fifteen-year-old victim turned out to be a bit more complicated. The girl had a history of severe asthma as well as allergies, and had been spending hours at a party with smokers; there were traces of marijuana in her system. These factors had contributed to an asthma attack, rather than a food reaction, and the subsequent cerebral anoxia (when oxygen cannot reach your brain) that actually led to her death. Her boyfriend's snack of peanut butter and toast had been at 6 p.m., more than nine hours before they had kissed and she had begun complaining of shortness of breath.