Delicious! Read Online Free PDF Page A

much. I grew up here. I travel a lot—buying cheese for the store—but I’m always happiest at home. People will tell you food is better over in Europe, but don’t you believe it. We’ve caught up; these days the place to be is New York.”
    “I wish I could spend all day just following you around. I want to meet everyone!” I looked down, guilty, at my watch; I’d been gone two hours.
    “Don’t worry”—he gave my arm a reassuring pat—“not far now.”
    He kept walking, turning serenely onto Prince Street at a leisurely pace. But then he spotted someone on the next corner and began to trot down Thompson Street. “It’s Kim!” He urged me to keep up. “She makes the best chocolates in the city. You have to meet her!”
    I love chocolate.
    Up ahead, an elegant Asian woman was standing in the door of a shop, waiting. “Sal!” Her voice was as delighted as that of a child who has sighted Santa.
    “Meet Jake’s new assistant. Billie Breslin. Kim Wong.”
    “Welcome.” She opened the door to a quaint shop filled with sparkling glass cases, then reached for my hand and tugged me inside. Theshop was dark and dramatic, the chocolates laid out on velvet and lit like jewels. It was the perfect setting for this delicate, bird-like woman with a face like carved ivory.
    “I know you’re a chocolate lover. I can always tell. I’m about to temper the chocolate. I have my own method; want to watch?”
    “Could I?” Inside my head, a little voice was reminding me that I had to get back to the office, but it was drowned out by the scent of chocolate, which flooded all my senses with a heady froth of cocoa and coffee, passion fruit, cinnamon and clove. I closed my eyes, and for one moment I was back in Aunt Melba’s kitchen with Genie.
    I opened them to find Kim dancing with a molten river of chocolate. I stood hypnotized by the scent and the grace of her motions, which were more beautiful than any ballet. Moving constantly, she caressed the chocolate like a lover, folding it over and over on a slab of white marble, working it to get the texture right. She stopped to feed me a chocolate sprinkled with salt, which had the fierce flavor of the ocean, and another with the resonant intensity of toasted saffron. One chocolate tasted like rain, another of the desert. I tried tracking the flavors, pulling them apart to see how she had done it, but, like a magician, she had hidden her tricks. Each time I followed the trail, it vanished, and after a while I just gave up and allowed the flavors to seduce me.
    Now the scent changed as Kim began to dip fruit into the chocolate: raspberries, blackberries, tiny strawberries that smelled like violets. She put a chocolate-and-caramel-covered slice of peach into my mouth, and the taste of summer was so intense that I felt the room grow warmer. I lost all sense of time.
    Sal was waiting outside, talking on his cell phone, but when he saw me he slipped it into his pocket. “You liked her chocolates!”
    “She’s a sorceress. That rain chocolate—it tasted the way the air smells just before a storm. I want to know how she does it. I identified hyssop and maybe myrtle and a bit of cassia, but then it got away from me. God, she’s amazing!”
    “Cassia, hyssop—you’re really something. I wish my daughter had your talent for flavor. But”—he sighed—“Toni’s a lawyer, and I’d betshe’s never even heard of hyssop.” He gave me a slightly guilty look. “Don’t get me wrong; Toni’s the most wonderful daughter a person could ask for. But she’s never had an interest in our business.”
    Sal sounded so sad that I said impulsively, “I think my father feels the same way about me. He’s a lawyer. My mother was too. Dad’s the nicest man in the world, but I know he’s disappointed. He would have liked me to follow in their footsteps.” Embarrassed at having said so much—too much?—I stared down at my watch again.
    Sal reached out and covered it with his hand.