The realm of the Buddhas is inconceivable.
They universally cause their trees to make music.
Hearing the sound, the multitudes are able to see
The Buddhas’ past practices on the bodhi path.—Avatamsaka Sutra
I have been making a lot of cacio e pepe for my daughter lately. Inflation is high and gas prices are up, but it’s important we eat together. I make my own noodles now when I have time.
The cheese and the pepper are a given but a great cacio e pepe is mostly a textural experience. The pasta needs to be right, sure, but the bite itself needs to be silky. It can’t stick together or clump, or get soupy and slosh around in the pan. The only way I’ve found to achieve that texture is egg. And that’s where people tend to mess it up.
My understanding of God when I was a child was like my understanding of Santa Claus. Omniscient, subjectively judging the intent of your actions, lenient on swearing, etc. Despite its relatively loosening dogma, the Western Christian tradition is quite clear about this: the path to paradise is exclusively through Jesus Christ. Forgive the cliche (but cliches exist for a reason in religion), but it put me in a predicament when learning of and admiring figures like Gandhi or Malcolm X. Those types of logic loops are common for faithful Christians, and it doesn’t make them lesser to live with them but it does introduce some level of self-deception or metaphysical world building. An inevitable “othering” that seems baked into our thinking. There’s got to be a right way to do stuff.
And there is when it comes to cacio e pepe. You have to use an egg to get the texture right, otherwise you end up with too much pasta water or too much cheese. A 1:1 ratio is going to work best, meaning that the silkiness has to come from a third party. Two forces at odds with each other can’t provide balance, only reluctant stasis and undying tension. Riding the edge of that is no way to cook.
But if you add the egg too fast, it fucks everything up. This is where most people really lose their grip on the dish. The egg is added last, and the dish is just about ready to serve. Toss the egg in as is without paying attention to the temperature and you’ve got scrambled egg pasta. No good. Nobody wants to eat it.
I think that when kids first hear about God it’s mostly just to calm them down. It really sucks to find out you’re going to die. And then you have to just live with that for a really long time. My son asks me about it a lot lately, just because he’s at the age where he learns stuff dies. It fucks with me pretty bad. He’ll tell me that he knows I’m going to die, or ask me if I will, and then he’ll say that it’s okay because it won’t be until I am an old man. I hope so, buddy. It’s hard to feel real confident about stuff these days.
I lost God for a long time and sometimes I still can’t find where it goes. That’s okay. I find it again when I read about something new that reminds me of something else. I find it again when I am a tick on a hound hurtling through a field I can’t comprehend, suckling at the life I’m allowed to steal. To glimpse all of the divine is incomprehensible, so it has to show up a little bit at a time.
It’s called tempering an egg, when you’re making the cacio e pepe. If you add the egg right away, you’re fucked. Right away, your whole dish is trashed. Even if you keep the temperature consistent and really stir that thing, you’re going to be lucky to end up with something edible, yet curdled. What you need to avoid is the immediate change in temperature. It’s chemistry stuff. So you temper the egg by beating it in a bowl and then adding little teaspoons of the hot liquid from the pan (at this point you should have a butter, pasta water, and freshly cracked pepper simmer running, if you don’t mind) and really mix it into the cold beaten egg. Gradually, that egg is going to be room-ish temperature, if not on the warmer side. It takes a little longer, but now you’ve got liquid silk to add after you’ve blended your parmesan.
You don’t have to add the egg. I’ve eaten lots of cacio e pepe without egg that has been fine. You could invite people over and make a wonderful cacio e pepe without egg and your guests wouldn’t suspect a thing. But you would be stuck knowing that your dish isn’t as good as it could be, all because you were too impatient to let the right way happen for you; too harried to allow coalescence rather than manufacture facade.