Chương 196: The Fifth Possibility of the Potato

Ethan went to Boston to build The Imperfect. Kira went to Shizuoka to find her quiet time. Chris turned down the luxury hotel Dave had arranged and rented an empty apartment in New York. Going from the loud center of the world to being completely alone should have left a hole. It didn't. It left something solid. There was very little in the apartment. Most of his cases were still stacked unopened against the wall. He wasn't in a hurry to arrange anything or to plan anything.

He was a traveler back off a long road who needed a little time to feel the ground under his feet again. That evening he came in from a walk and opened the fridge. It was empty. There was one potato in the corner of the cold shelf, thrown in during a shop several days ago, its skin beginning to wrinkle. Chris stopped where he stood. A potato. The most ordinary and the most dramatic ingredient of his entire career.

He thought about Burning Kitchen, and the confidence with which he'd produced Three Possibilities of the Potato, and the savaging Gareth Vane had given him for showing off, and the humiliation of being eliminated. That potato had been his shame. He thought about the basement at Le Château, peeling potatoes that never ran out, day and night, until his fingers blistered and his mind nearly went. And Philip telling him to respect every potato, because it carried soil and sunlight in it.

That potato had been his training. He thought about Paris, deconstructing and reassembling potatoes into exquisite dishes that won round after round. That potato had been his weapon. Shame, training, weapon. He'd given the potato a great many definitions and somehow forgotten what it actually was. And then he thought about the man on the bench in Central Park a long time ago. That old man had taken a baked potato, put a little salt on it, and eaten it mouthful by mouthful with total, contented pleasure.

Chris had never forgotten the expression on his face. It was the purest expression of this is delicious he had ever seen — and he had never once seen it on a judge, with all his technique and all his invention. If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement. He'd half understood something in that moment, through a layer of fog. Now, standing in front of an unremarkable potato again, the fog was quietly clearing. He took it out of the fridge.

He didn't reach for a peeler and he didn't reach for any specialist equipment. He went to the sink and washed the dirt off it, the simplest way there is. Then he pricked it a few times with a small fork and put it in the very ordinary little oven the apartment came with. He didn't set a precise temperature and he didn't calculate a rigorous time. He turned the dial to roughly the right place and sat down at the small counter outside the kitchen to wait. The dim oven light was on.

He could see the skin slowly going brown and wrinkling in the heat. He wasn't thinking about anything. No data analysis. No flavor model. No anxiety about the future. His head was empty, and there was nothing but the faint hum of the oven and, gradually filling the air, that plain and warm smell of cooking starch. Some length of time later the oven went ding and stopped. He put on a glove and took out a potato too hot to hold. No ornate plate.

He put it straight on the board, split it down the middle with a knife, and a rush of steam came out of it that smelled of the ground. Inside, the flesh was fine and inviting. He took a pinch of sea salt out of the cupboard and scattered it evenly. Nothing else. No butter. No black pepper. No sour cream. No caviar. A baked potato and a little salt. Was this the fourth possibility of the potato? No — this was probably the first, the most original and most essential one.

Chris took a fork, cut off a piece and put it in his mouth. Crisp skin with a light char on it. The flesh inside soft and scalding and melting on contact. And the salt bringing up, at exactly the right level, that plain sweetness the potato had brought out of the earth. The flavor was as simple as flavor gets. And as complete. And in that moment something went hot behind Chris's eyes. He had tasted it. He had finally tasted what was on that old man's face in Central Park.

It didn't need a complicated philosophy of cooking to interpret it, and it didn't need any ornamental language to describe it. It was the force of food itself. Soil, sun, water, fire, salt — the oldest memory human beings have about being fed and being satisfied. He'd believed once that the summit of cooking was turning nothing into something remarkable, creating flavors that made people gasp. Only now did he genuinely understand that the end point of cooking is probably a return to the plain thing.

It is that after you have mastered every complicated technique, you are still willing to bend down over one ordinary potato and give it all the respect and patience you have. He sat in an empty kitchen with the lights of New York in the window and ate the whole potato, one forkful at a time. His stomach was warm. So was everything else. And the question that had been troubling him for weeks — what do I do now — had an entirely clear answer.