The Soufflé

I married a Frenchman, therefore I like to think that I know more about soufflés than your average American cook. But I could be wrong about that. Don’t tell my spouse that I don’t like soufflés...but I don’t. They’re too eggy. Too airy. Too complicated and aristocratic for my pedestrian taste. Give me a hot chocolate chip cookie (with walnuts!) and a cold glass of full fat-milk every once in a while and I’ll be happy. But that is not my husband, nor anyone in his large extended family, all of whom live in France. They love their soufflés - sweet or savory they enjoy them all. Over the years and after repeated exposure to their complexities, I have not come to like the taste or texture of a soufflé per se - but I’ve come to appreciate a well-made soufflé as something akin to a little piece of edible art.

You can have all sorts of soufflés. Au chocolat, au jambon, au framboises. Citron, epinards, carottes or Grand Marnier. There is even a soufflé au poulet…to be attempted only if you are made of stronger stuff (or firmer egg whites) than I am. The varieties are endless. The one my husband has attempted most often in our house is the classic cheese soufflé. We have had years or trial and error with that cheesy devil, and quite a few successes.

What makes a good soufflé? A clean top that rises high and straight above the rim of the buttered ramekin. A light and airy yet stable interior. A slightly moist but not too jiggly center. And a delicate yet delectable flavor.

And how do you make one of these masterpieces? The room temperature egg whites must be stiffly whipped and then folded so gently (you’d think you were giving a preemie its first bath) into the base of whatever type of soufflé you desire. Then you get on your knees and pray. After about fifteen minutes of that you pop the whole thing into the oven and wait. But you can’t talk or walk or sing or dance or do anything around the house while the damn thing is cooking. You sit around and wait in a state of wishful thinking and reverential anticipation to see just how your oven, and the little wonder inside of it, will behave. God forbid you make a peep, lest the soufflé collapse. And, in the world of French cuisine anyway, there is nothing sadder than a collapsed soufflé. In fact the visual of a collapsed soufflé is soul crushing. The whole eggy mess caved in on itself, like a deflated balloon. Inedible. Useless. Depressing.

The other day I was looking at myself in the mirror of an elevator. I don’t spend much time in front of mirrors, believing them to be overrated, and the older I get the less time I spend in front of them. But for some reason in this elevator, with its horrible overhead morgue lighting, its sharp and hideously bright mirror, I took a good long look myself and realized - much to my horror - that my face, like a poorly made soufflé, is slowly starting to collapse. You may not see it. The strangers in the elevator most likely did not see it. But I did, and my blood ran cold.

I ran out of the elevator horrified and didn’t look at myself again until I got home that night. Once there I went to the bathroom, locked the door behind me, turned on all the lights, and took a ruthless diagnostic look at my visage. I came, frustratingly enough, to the very same conclusion. My face, a face that I have been fine with all these years, is beginning to show its age. I stood in front of the mirror for quite a while. Looking this way and that. Pulling upwards on my face and jaw and neck and eyebrows and hairline to see what I might look like with a facelift. Has it come to that, I wondered? “I’ll never go under the knife for beauty’s sake,” I remind myself. But then didn’t I say the same thing about botox for decades? “Pas moi! Jamais!” Until I realized that when scowling I could hold a penny in the divot between my eyebrows. The angry wrinkle was that deep. Penny-holding deep. So I went to the dermatologist and showed her my penny trick and she said “yeah, I can fix that.” She jabbed a toxic poison between my eyebrows, charged me a small fortune, and in about 48 hours the divot was gone! Simply gone.

I could pump some fillers into my face the way everyone in Hollywood does to their lips. But won't that be as futile as trying to pump hot air into an already doomed soufflé? It won’t work. The soufflé will just require more and more hot air until it’s stretched so taut and tight that it doesn't even look like a soufflé anymore. It will look like a soufflé that swallowed an air hose by mistake.

My parents were remarkable specimens in their youth. Strong and straight and beautiful. Both of them. But as they got older they started to collapse. And in their advanced old age when I would help them dress or bathe or even change their diapers, I saw that their bodies, once so indomitable and impressive were beginning to remind me of candles. The skin, once so firm and elastic, was now yellowed and slack, pooling in folds around their waists, resting there atop their hips, like so much melted wax.

Seeing my parents’ bodies like that shocked me. It’s reality, I remind myself. But no. It’s not reality, it’s gravity. Gravity is having its way with me, with my face in particular, and I’m not happy about it. My cheekbones, as is common with older people, will be my salvation. They were for with both of my parents. Cheekbones, unlike skin, muscle, fat and tendon, are not as affected by gravity. So the whole collapsing melting mess of a face can drape off of those and hopefully, at least, give me the appearance of a soufflé that is not a total wreck.

Everyone, it seems, is obsessed with youth. With looking younger. With turning back the clock. As a species I think we always have been. The first historical mention of the fountain of youth comes from the 5th century BC, when Herodotus described the "fountain of the sun" which supposedly extended the lives of the Macrobian people. But I'm sure that humans were looking for ways to prolong their youth long before Herodotus, or even the Macrobians for that matter. In Sephora the other day I saw two little girls with their mother. I could tell by their sweatshirts that they were students at the same elementary school my daughter had attended so I asked them what grades they were in. “Third and fourth!” they told me proudly and then trotted off to figure out which under-eye anti-aging eye patches they were going to buy. I was quite sure that their mother would laugh and say “don’t be silly” so I followed them to the checkout counter where the mother put her items on the counter along with the quite costly under-eye patches for the girls. She purchased everything.

The children left the store thrilled. “No more tired eyes,” one chirped to the other.

Last year I was shooting a former supermodel. One who has folded herself back into the fashionista fold (like so many egg whites) but has done nothing to her face. Not even botox. She's my age, in her advanced fifties. So advanced in fact that they are almost sixties. “Jesus Christ, she looks like crap,” one of the twenty-something assistant stylists said, sotto voce, as our model sauntered past where we were standing and into the makeup chair. But of course she doesn't look “like crap” at all. What she looks like is an extremely attractive woman in her late fifties who is not a slave to youth. But we want her to be a slave to youth. We don’t want her to age. We want her to look just the way she always looked…at 22. Like a perfectly ripe peach. Like the smell of freshly cut grass or a honeysuckle vine on a warm summer evening. Like the most amazing flower in a heady bloom. She was once so young, so “perfect”, and that's what we want now.

At the end of the shoot she thanked me for the photos and I thanked her for being there. I also applauded her for her stance on aging, which she had told me was “to just relax into it. Trying to wage war against time is just too expensive. Too demoralizing.”

“I’ve lived a life,” she added as she gathered up her things and prepared to leave the studio. “I don’t want to erase all my experiences.” She cupped her lovely face in her hands and batted her eyelashes at me in a childlike and adorable way. “Experiences that are written right here.”

In that moment I saw, quite clearly, her youthful, happy spirit shining through. And, at the end of the day, isn’t that what really matters?