Speaking of butter—my butter here, not the golden trickling waterfall that pools in the hollows of a waffle in Agano, Niigata Prefecture, Japan in the story I just read—I’ve taken to jazzing up the browned slurry I habitually drizzle over green beans.

I don’t just brown the butter. I enrich it, then, with nonfat dry milk solids I’ve spread on parchment in a pan and toasted in the oven. It’s a trick I saw online. The mixture—I keep it in a jar in the fridge—is what I puddle on the green beans after they’ve cooked.

Having some, you might think you’ve died and gone to heaven.

My mother used a particular glass dish, blue, transparent, to brown her butter, which confuses me now because my ovenproof glassware says no stovetop cooking. Also, cooking her green beans, like her mother before her she boiled them to a pulp, almost. And at the end the kettle had to go dry. No liquid. Just rich, unevaporated flavor.

I continue the tradition, but over and over and over, I burn the beans. I’m not right at the stove watching for the kettle’s warning sounds, its spattering and popping—my head is in some other cloud, not the bean steam—and suddenly I smell the scorch. I miss the precipitous moment, the instant they’ve parched perfectly. It’s always horrifying. You’d think I’d learn.

So when I say I douse green beans with butter habitually, I mean when they’ve not gone black. There’s no point in finessing seared green beans.

The other thing, here—the real trouble—is the sugar.

Butter at least has nutritional merit, but the fondness for sugar transcends all reason.

It’s not that nobody’s been warned.

When the AARP Bulletin, some months ago, ran a piece on sugar’s sins, black as any bean char, it had me staring. I had to figure out that I was looking at a sugar cube. But I couldn’t make sense of the math. For each extra gram of sugar some people in a study ate daily, adding it to their ordinary healthy, low-sugar diet, their bodies aged seven days. Calculated accordingly, that made me about 500 years old. Um, what? I should convert?

What about homemade? If the goodies are homemade, does that help?

This summer when the Brooklyn cousins came to Virginia—we’d not seen them since March—we agreed we’d all get together Sunday afternoon in our carport for desserts, potluck but not really. The necessary texting ensued. (Not to confuse you: Alyson is the New Yorker, Kathie is her mother-in-law, and Jennifer and Christopher are the two persons I birthed before the third in 1983, both of whom live around here.)

Friday evening—

Jennifer: I’m bringing smoothies (at least).

Shirley: Prob fruit soup and a blueberry lemon cake.

Alyson: Ok! Kathie is making a blackberry crumble and I think we’ll make chocolate chip cookies.

Saturday morning—

Shirley: And bring a few lawn chairs please.

Alyson gives a thumbs up.

Sunday morning—

Christopher: To round out the nutritional value of this lineup, we will bring chocolate cake.

Jennifer makes a heart emoji.

Christopher: It was either that or Mini Size Creme Caramel, Easy Australian Lamingtons, Opera Cake, Chocolate Terrine with Chocolate Covered Strawberries, Vanilla Souffle, Kvaefjordkake, Karpatka, Kremsnita, Raspberry Mille Feuille, Berry Pavlova, or Pasteis de Nata.

Shirley makes a heart emoji.

Jennifer: I was excited about that cake but now I have a niggling feeling you’re selling us short.

Christopher: Don’t worry, this one still has sugar in it.

I think we pulled out ice cream, the usual Turkey Hill. Jennifer brought her backyard-cow versions with euphoric titles. There may have been pumpkin bars, what-all else. I never even thought of browning butter, yet, and slathering it over a potful of nice flabby green beans to get everybody swooning.