Daniel Nayeri is a writer and children's book editor in NYC. He loves pastry chefing and Street Fighter 2, hates the word "foodie," and was once an award-winning stuntman.
Pastry is that second of forgetting. It’s the short counterpoint to the rest of an all-in-all pretty awful day. It’s the unapologetic wasteful misuse of all your resources, a slap in the face of the daily grind.
On Sprezzatura and Chupa Chups
Sprezzatura, as a concept, is impossible to translate fully. It is bravura, a swagger you can back up, a cool beyond cool. It’s the years of laboring on card tricks or juggling, so that you get thirty seconds, somewhere in the undisclosed future in some bar with some stunning person, where you actually pull off the sleight of hand, or the turn of phrase, or just plan catch the tipping glass. It’s charm.
These days, the saddest thing I can think of is caramel. Not honey caramel or crème caramel, just regular caramel.
So vast was my fanboy admiration of Billy Collins when I was in college, so unencumbered by facts my ambition, and so shameless my neophytic insolence, that I wrote the Poet Laureate of United States a poem.
So what are we talking here, like, four months till Valentine’s Day? Worst holiday of the year for pastry chefs.
So you might be thinking to yourself, “didn’t he do caramel last time?” and you’d be right, gentle reader, quite right.
Demonstrably irrefusable. Ontologically delicious . . . caramelizing something is pretty much the phrase for making it taste good.
Pastry is that second of forgetting. It’s the short counterpoint to the rest of an all-in-all pretty awful day. It’s the unapologetic wasteful misuse of all your resources, a slap in the face of the daily grind.
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