Remember That Steak?

My parents often claimed, after eating a certain steak, that it was good, yes--but not as good as that one steak. Remember that steak?

Ridiculous, I thought.

So, since we all become our parents, I do the same things now:

"I miss pizza with sauce. What do they have against sauce out here?"

"We don't have bagels. We have steamed dinner rolls with a hole in the center."

"Don't get me started about egg rolls." (To which a friend recently replied, "Yes, but we have potstickers." Which is a bit like saying, "Yes, Bobby started seeing Susie/moved to Outer Mongolia/became a Moonie. But look, there's always Sammy. What's wrong with him?")

I still remember the egg rolls at Aisin Goro in Boulder in 19-never mind. The restaurant served just two things: Enormous, wonderful egg rolls and jasmine tea. True, they went out of business--maybe people wanted oolong or lapsang souchong.

Your example here.

But really, life is as much about variation as theme, no? The magic is in the things you discover precisely because you can't create the exact replica of something you tasted.

Maybe. If you don't count Mrs. Craig's brownies.

Mary Craig hailed from Glasgow and, in addition to making Scotch Broth and teaching us the people were Scots and the whisky was Scotch, she made the greatest rum brownies on the face of the earth. I remember my mother asking her to use the flavoring instead of the real stuff, but that's about it. The recipe and everything else but the memory of how delicious they were is gone. I have tried a few times, but haven't found the flavor of hers among my little squares.

Once I told my friend Simone I'd had a great encounter with a guy, the kind where you talk about everything under the sun and leave feeling elated. But we never connected like that again, however much I tried.

"Ah," she said, "The search for the lost conversation."

So was it Mrs. Craig's stories that made the brownies better than anything since?

And what exactly was it about that steak?

©2010, 2012 Laynie Tzena.