It’s a Key Lime kinda world

For a while I worked in a professional pastry kitchen. My overall experience was, in a word, traumatizing. I was brand new and learning everything from scratch, all the while pretending I knew exactly what I was doing. I made a lot of mistakes. A LOT. I dropped whole batches of batter, flung biscuit dough all over the kitchen, burned things, broke things, undercooked things and melted non-heat proof spoons into sauces. It was a constant effort for me not to fuck up and therefore have to report to my boss/the pastry chef/owner of the restaurant about what I’d failed to do correctly, at which point I would get the extra stern face with eye-slit, a laundry list of questions and a mountain of guilt + stress + self-doubt. Maybe I’m making it sound worse than it was. I also learned so so very much about creating pastry and bread and desserts of all kinds. I have to do it justice and say it was an incredible experience in so many ways, BUT it also sent me to the verge of tears on a regular basis. Everything was supposed to be just right, everything NEEDED to be just right, and it was pure stress and panic trying to get it there. I often thought about how impossible life as a doctor must be if something as easy as assembling dessert could create this much room for error and stress. How could a surgeon cope with the responsibility of conducting heart surgery on another human being??

Finally, it dawned on me, something so simple and true about my line of work: it’s just dessert. It’s not life, it’s not death, it’s just food. No matter how serious a restaurant is about its cuisine, or how highly regarded and editorialized a chef is in the end they’re simply making us something to eat. How amazing a realization is that? It really took the weight off of the experience for me.

Food, dessert especially, is a lovely addition to the lives we constantly find full of stresses and struggles. It’s a way to warm up that broken heart or celebrate a milestone. Even simpler, it’s a sweet addition to a complex string of daily experiences. It’s one of the good things, not one of the scary.

Last week I made a co-worker a key lime pie. She had never had one before so I excitedly set to work giving her that new culinary experience. What I learned in researching recipes is that key lime is a pretty simple pie. Three ingredients for the filling, that’s it. Lime juice (+ zest), sweetended condensed milk and egg yolks. Pour that into a partially baked graham cracker crust, bake it for a frighteningly short amount of time (10 minutes!), let it cool and add fresh whipped cream. It’s so easy, yet so satisfying. In preparing it and sending it off to its new home I was reminded about the beautiful simplicity of pie and dessert in general. It’s meant to create something sweet and joyful, not overly complex and daunting. Let’s revel in that today, and let Key Lime pie be our spirit guide.