Patience, or How to Make Caramel

When one hosts a large-ish party with an impressive main dish, one earns the right to erase silently an entire item from the intended menu. I was giddy at the prospect of trying something that goes with the transcendent bread pudding at my restaurant: bourbon-spiked caramel sauce.

Wilting over the heat, I watched as a promising tint of gold formed a lacy edge to cup after cup of bubbling sugar. But just as I would begin to feel hopeful, the entire mess would flare up like seafoam and shrink into a spiteful white clump.

Guests began to arrive, and I pretended to myself that I had never planned on serving dessert and ignored the drawerful of ripe peaches huddling in the fridge.

Monday was a new day, so I prepared myself to waste another box of sugar and possibly the better part of a hot afternoon over a hotter stove because these guests would have caramel and peaches, damnit.

Five cups of sugar and several episodes of Planet Money later, I decided to listen to the advice given by only a few of the recipes I came across (the others provided suspiciously few steps and an "it's-so-easy!" attitude I deemed untrustworthy): You must let the sugar dissolve completely before the mixture comes to a boil. I had been a little loose with terms like "must" and "completely". I mean, can syrup ever be completely clear?

As a child, I never understood why Patience had such a good reputation. Anyone can wait for something, I thought. But to watch a pot of sugar and water is to confront again and again feelings of discomfort (at not being in control) and fear (of things not turning out right) and to quiet those feelings.

At its heart, home cooking is about inviting friends into your home so you can validate a slightly obsessive need to turn something simple that everybody likes into something complicated and stressful. And so it was terribly gratifying to spoon up the thick stuff over soft grilled peaches and hear the most beautiful phrase in the world: "You made that?"