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cooked slowly in a buttered pan over hot water. I served the eggs with bacon, grilled flat and crisp under a weight, with a sprig of thyme, accompanied by one of my own blueberry muffins. Since I have been scrambling eggs over low heat for years, I must assume it was a kitchen colleague that summer who taught me tostrain very fresh beaten eggs and scramble them over an improvised bain-marie rather than an open flame.
    SCRAMBLED EGGS AND OMELETTES
    Now I use a Teflon sauté pan over a pot of simmering water and stir the amazing eggs from Iacono’s farm on Long Lane in East Hampton with the back of a fork until the small curds mound up bright yellow and just firm. Usually I serve them simply scrambled, but with two or three shoves of the fork I sometimes roll them up as omelettes, holding the rolled omelette in the tilted pan over a high flame just long enough to brown the surface slightly, but leaving the inside slightly undercooked, before rolling it onto a warm plate and glazing it with butter from the pan. When I’m in the mood, I fill the omelettes with salmon roe or bits of smoked salmon or a few poached oysters. I no longer make and cannot recommend Devon Frederick’s buttery, sugary, irresistible blueberry muffins, each one a day’s worth of calories, but intrepid muffin fans will find a good approximation in the
Gold and Fizdale Cookbook,
now out of print but available secondhand.
    My first restaurant assignment was the hot-dog-and-hamburger grill. The owner advertised that these were broiled in “creamery butter.” They were not: they were fried in rendered beef fat, dyed yellow and packed in cardboard tubs marked “Stearin,” probably the same lethal stuff that the big hamburger chains were using until recently for their fries. I was told to keep a brick of “butter” beside the grill, where the customers could seeit. I did not feel good about this deception, but butter was scarce in that postwar summer, the owner wanted his “butter” on display, and I liked my job.
    Restaurant cooks in those days were nothing like today’s celebrities. Most of them, especially those who worked in seasonal resort towns, were drifters, who may have learned their trade at sea or in the service or prison. I liked to watch them dice vegetables fast and with precision, scoop them into a sauté pan, then, without looking, flip them and let them fall flawlessly back into the pan. These itinerant cooks tended to be childishly touchy and thought nothing of walking out on a busy weekend if their feelings were hurt or if they heard of a better job or got drunk. That first postwar summer, the kitchen was run by a rawboned, red-faced father-and-son team wearing identical red baseball caps. The son, who spoke Spanish, resented my status as a Columbia College freshman and called me the
perro-caliente
professor. The loquacious father told me about a one-legged hotel chef from Newark, New Jersey, who proved that oil floats on water by soaking his hands in ice water and then plunging them into hot oil without hurting himself, an improbable story but a useful demonstration that wet ingredients won’t caramelize in hot oil because oil floats on water, so that the oil doesn’t touch the food, which steams rather than browns. He and his taciturn son made their own potato chips, which they called Saratogas: russet potatoes sliced almost paper-thin on a mandoline, soaked briefly in water to get rid of the starch so that they wouldn’t sticktogether as they fried, then drained and thoroughly dried in the cooler before they were plunged into hot oil. When I make these at home, I sometimes think of George’s hands and wonder, against all reason, if that story could possibly have been true. Nevertheless, the fact that oil floats on water is an important lesson for deep-frying and caramelizing generally, and especially for salads. Unless you are using an oily emulsion or the greens are bone dry, add oil to the greens first, vinegar second, or