Читать книгу Simple Pleasures - Robert Taylor - Страница 21

When my second daughter was due to be born, the Jamaican doctor I was seeing said to me, “Be sure and take time for the first child—the child who will feel displaced. In our country mothers make this time a ritual—an eating ritual. They spoonfeed a softboiled egg to the elder child every day. It's a small moment to make the child feel the center of attention again, it gives eye-to-eye contact, it provides a warm and soothing taste, and it guarantees time—one on one—for the older child.”

I thought it was a great idea and when I did it, I found it was as wonderful for me as it was for my daughter. “Don't forget the comfort egg,” I used to say to myself—and it was a comfort to me to have at least one moment ritualized in the chaos of those days.

Years later, when my youngest daughter—who was then 16—was crying inconsolably for her father, who had been killed some months before in a car accident, I could think of nothing to say in the presence of her pain. So I brought her milky tea and a soft-boiled egg which I fed to her myself with the buttered “toast soldiers” her father had always made, and stayed with her until the pain had somewhat—at least on this occasion—passed again.

“What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick!”

—Nora Ephron

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