The perfect omelete
Ir is Sunday evening. That meanst I smell of onions and garlic, the usual Sunday scents. I have been cooking, and it seems that in Brazil everything but dessert starts with onions and garlic. I am trying to make my daughter eat eggs, so I decided to prepare an omelete. When I was little, and started showing interest in the kitchen arts, my mother taught me how to make the perfect omelete. "It's got to be baveuse", she used to say. Baveuse is the French word for dribbling. The perfect omelete should be well cooked on the outside, soft and almost liquid in the inside. I hated runny eggs, but I learned to do it perfectly, on a high fire (omeletes are one of the few foods that should be done on the hottest flame your stove can provide, I learned that too), carefully folding it without damaging the crust.
My daughter is a child like I once was, with clear child ideas about what is good and what is bad. She has been given more room to state her preferences though. She likes her meat blue, turns down any chicken dish, suffers when there is no rice and beans to eat. I had a hard time feeding her when I took her to Disney World. There were no hamburguers or hot dogs with fries that would compensate her cravings for rice and beans, our staple food. Like me, she hates runny eggs. She would certainly find the perfect baveuse omelete very imperfect indeed. Alas, people doesn't follow strictly the rules of a good cookbook. The dishes come to the table with uncertain amounts of spices.
So I have been preparing my daughter a perfectly imperfect omelete. An egg concotion that will please perfectly her imperfect standards, and that will be perfect to her. For perfection seems to be in allowing our imperfections to coexist perfectly with the will of doing things perfectly. Love understands perfection and imperfection and embraces them both like the sweet smell of onions and garlic embraces the house on a sunday evening.
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