She took the frying pan out

She took the frying pan out of the oven, looked at it, puffed her cheeks, and let out a gust of air. Good, the oil was still usable. Lifting the gunk-coated pan, she put it on the left front burner and banged shut the oven door.

It wouldn’t close. She bent down and disappeared into the oven. A few seconds later, the remaining four pans, a thick oily black like the first, were settled more comfortably in their storage area. The burner flames leapt up in pointed petals of a deep violet blue. High heat was a glorious thing. The oil was thick, murky, yellow.

Evidence of last night’s potatoes floated in it like small black tadpoles drowning in swamp water. She put in her nails and drew each tadpole out. The oil dripped from the acrylic manicure onto the polished wood floor. Gingerly, she turned around and opened a cabinet under the sink. The smell of rotting trash greeted the air. Garbage fell from an overflowing steel trash receptacle into a silent corner of the cabinet.

Casually flecking the tadpoles from her nails, she reached down, scooped up the truants from the corner, and deposited them onto the top of the stinking heap. Then with one swift piston-like action, she compressed the pile with her fist to go down and behave itself as much as it possibly could without spitting up again. One forceful slap and the cabinet door found itself shut, with no escape for the nauseating odors except through the open mouth of the sink nesting above.

She rested her hands on the sink ledge. In the left half of the porcelain double basin, some dishes from the night before were waiting to be washed.

Their shamefaced faces, streaked with the residue of excess, invited the tiniest of ants to undertake the challenging journey up four flights of drainpipes and resist the call of innumerable clogs on the way.

To the right of this melancholic disgrace, a pile of freshly washed dishes was draining on a cheap plastic rack. In the foreground, a large rice platter stood on its handle. The words “Traditions by Wedgwood” were inscribed on its back.

Her right hand reached for a weathered spatula from the rack, and with her left she lifted out a clean plate. On the counter top next to the sink, a disheveled roll of paper napkins perched despondently on a battered wooden holder, staring helplessly at the debris strewn around it.

She tugged at the roll, released a sorry-looking sheet, laid it embossed-side up on the plate, and turned back to the stove. Looking about her for a place to put the plate down, but seeing as every other spot on the counter was already occupied, she put the plate on the unlit burner behind the frying pan, and rested the spatula on the plate.

The oil was beginning to splutter. Bright blue-red sparks flew left and right in their pitch-black foundry. Fireworks released, they rebounded from the greasy tiled back walls and settled in scattergrams on the slice of countertop that acted as a gap fill between the stove and the fridge.

Here lay an abundant testimony to past cooking ordeals, undisturbed layer upon gossamer layer of grease, oblivious to any form of scrubbing, hence almost virginal. She took up the spatula again in her right hand and with her fingernails rotated the burner knob to a medium heat setting. Plunking the spatula in the oil, she released it and let it float. A small brownish glob of oil plopped onto the floor.

She yawned, revealing a gap in her teeth. Thus chided, the wooden stirrer cautiously descended to the bottom of pan, where it meekly settled itself and commenced to reminisce about the early days, when it had been treated reverently, and sometimes, even affectionately. How it yearned for the frequent rinsings and the evenings spent soaking in baking soda and hot water.

To be new again, and whole! A rude gust of allspice dowsed all senses. She had opened the cabinet over the microwave above the exhaust over the stove.

An assortment of large and small plastic containers, many bearing the label “fat free yogurt”, and some recycled from restaurant takeouts, were arrayed helter-skelter in a ridiculous fashion.

She groped around for a few minutes, extracted a lidded plastic candy jar half-filled with black pepper, and another glass pickle bottle brimming with powdered red chili.

Prying open both lids, she poured an insalubrious quantity of each villain into a bowl sitting on the tarnished burner to her right. As this dish had been allowed to laze without being heated, the frying pan, which was hard at work, cast it a black look.

This made not a whit of difference to the bowl, which continued in its smugness. It was stoneware made in Italy and thought of itself as Quality; unlike the fryer which was a third quality faberware made in Taiwan. Both knew, of course, that their owner refused to acknowledge the merits of either whenever a certain hideous Corningware plate made its appearance, which it just had, with the paper napkin for protection.

As the bowl and the pan had suffered the same level of abuse and years of service, the relatively new and hence superior Corningware did not deem it necessary, or even wise, to clarify the sordid purpose of the solitary paper napkin, which was, of course, to preserve the appearance of draining fat-laden delicacies of their vices while not actually doing it. So the Corningware merely smirked, and kept quiet.

While these musings were stirring, she had succeeded in mixing the ingredients in the bowl using two fingers, and wiped said fingers, along with their respective nails, on the rim of the bowl, in this way retaining every last bit of batter. The mildly aromatic mélange thus readied, she set about the business of completion.

Lifting the oil-covered spatula from the pan, she winced and suddenly let go. The spatula’s hot handle had seared her palm like the touch of a solidly frozen icicle. It hit the corner of the stove with a massive clunk and clattered to a final stop, scattering oily raindrops as it met the floor.

She hurriedly turned to the sink, skidding slightly as her slippers stepped on the fallen spatula. Flicking the tap open, she thrust her hand underneath. Cool water splashed on her palm, the burning sensation died down, and in a second she had switched off the tap, picked up the spatula, and returned to the stove.

Dip, dip, water droplets clinging to the bottom of the plate rack dripped into the mouth of the open drain below.

Hiss, the oil in the pan leapt up. The anguish of the first ball of batter had commenced. She took a step back and pushed the spatula into the pan.

Waves of hot oil beat relentlessly on the moist culprit, forcing it to cow down, burning brutally, encasing it on all sides like the fires of Hell. It emerged from the pan in a twinkling, hardened, mature, taken above the flames and the torture by the heroic spatula, a pearl in an oyster.

She held the slotted spoon up to her face to see it more clearly. It was acceptable, a patchy dark brown mottled with red and green. Placing the whole on the plate, she broke the ball into two with her nails, and felt the steam escape, softening her cuticles.

She pressed at the center with her free index finger; it was well cooked. A piece of hair peeked out from within the soft interior. She pulled at it, and it lengthened. Finally, the whole shaft was out. Flecking the hair onto the floor, she quickly molded the two broken pieces together with her palm. That was number one.

She could finish the rest quickly, it would take fifteen minutes at the most, and there was enough batter to make forty. Half were to be shelved for another day, and the rest could be left standing out until they were needed. Then she could go upstairs and get ready in peace. It was a good three hours before chatter and the ritual of tea.