Going By the Lady

“And that’s it,” says the lady. “That—right there—is mascarpone. Ten minutes, two ingredients. I told you it was easy.”

You watch over and over. The spoon coats. The bubbles bubble. The whole big puddle pours down into the sieve lined with cheesecloth.

HELP, you text the lady next day, because you cooked some but your sieve full seems too limp. You dripped it all last night in the fridge. How’s it cheese?

“You put in the lemon juice?” she asks. Yes, you did. “Maybe too many cheesecloth layers?” you say. “Stir it around,” she says. “Then let it drip some more in the fridge.”

It drips, drips. It makes another middling pond in the bowl, like before. But it doesn’t much stiffen. And the lady doesn’t have any you can borrow, when you ask. Your sad lump is your only hope.

You take it over to her house—the whole thing—the bowl, the sieve, the draggy cloth, your so-called mascarpone. The lady pushes it around with her spoon, smacks her lips smartly. “Yep, that’s good,” she says. “Keep draining it. Stir it sometimes.”

Clutching it to yourself, you carry it back to your car.

At home, the sieve lifted from the bowl for a moment, your hand accidentally flails, knocking the bowl sideways, off the counter, down onto your thick rug by the sink. Drooling milky runoff, the bowl skitters some distance before you can grab it. A soggy rug, now, but that you can handle. The thing is still the cheese. The cheese, the cheese.

You hang it out again in the fridge.

When the people come on Saturday night, the rug isn’t outside on the deck table anymore, drying in the sun. It’s back indoors on the floor. On the deck table instead is a tablecloth. The weird thing about your cake when you carry it out is its two straws sticking up from the mascarpone like flagpoles. You should’ve just cut one straw in half and poked each half down through the layers, hid it. The point was to keep the upper layer from sliding around but you didn’t have to get so flagrant about it, did you. The people and your husband and you sit yumming and forking, and everybody except you takes more. Too much pileup.

No magazine cake, this one. Still, carried in from the dark, wrecked as it is, it’s enough of a sight. You managed all this yum, going by the lady.

 

 Just a sponge cake, with mascarpone mixed into the whipped cream. Not her tiramisu, my word, no.