I always loved cooking. One of the first lessons in the book we used when I started learning German at school consisted of the recipe for Kartoffelsalat. Potato salads are often abominations of cold potatoes glued together by prodigious amounts of bad mayonnaise, with some chopped chives on top when somebody made an effort to disturb that white monstrosity with traces of color. “Abomination” and “monstrosity” don’t even capture the quality of those potato salads. Now, the Kartoffelsalat from my German book was different. First, it had no mayonnaise at all, relying instead on oil and vinegar. Indeed, the acidity of the vinegar, together with minced cornichons and onion, gave it a level of tang that is often completely lacking in potato salads. As it happened, as a kid I made that salad quite a few times.

In the meantime, my German book has either been recycled or dug into a landfill, and I no longer have the original recipe. I have tried to recreate it a few times, finding some decent alternatives, but none of them lives up to my memory of that Kartoffelsalat. Maybe it’s fitting that, instead of writing about madeleines, I write about Kartoffelsalat.

Besides Kartoffelsalat, I didn’t cook much savory food as a kid. The only memory I have is of peeling roasted peppers, but there I was just being used by my mother as manual labor. To be fair, it was manual labor to produce peppers that I would then basically eat by myself. Anyways, while I didn’t cook anything savory, there were a couple of years when I met once a week with a friend to bake cakes—again, German cakes. Nowadays, I almost never make anything sweet, but maybe once a year I bake a Käsekuchen, which doesn’t give the decadent satisfaction one gets from a New York cheesecake, but is enormously lighter and fluffier.

While I basically stopped cooking sweet things when I moved away from home, I have been cooking a lot since then. Not well, but a lot. My sister, that rancorous and ungrateful human being, would be happy to confirm the “not well” part, relishing in telling the story of the time I tried to feed her and a friend some roasted chicken that was still frozen on the inside. Yes, that happened. My sister might be rancorous, but she does not lie. What she forgets to mention is that we had been partying all night, that we hadn’t slept at all, that by mid-morning we were hungry, and that the only thing to cook was some frozen chicken legs—and that they were screaming for food. By the way, they could have gone to the corner bakery themselves instead of sending me to the kitchen. I am still sulking.

That chicken was a disgrace, and in general, I do better. But compared to other people, I don’t cook well. I just don’t have the perfectionism needed to make it better. But I love cooking. I guess I partly like that I make very varied things, with my obsessions moving from one cuisine to the next. Besides trying new things to eat, or wanting to replicate things I’ve just eaten somewhere else, I like the scientific aspect of it all. At the same time, I’m all but a purist, and while I kind of believe that the combination of this or that technique might make a difference for a really accomplished cook, at my level, one can fudge things a lot, and the difference won’t really be visible.

However, sometimes I really like learning something basic. And this year, I learned how to boil and fry eggs. For years, being able to make a decent omelette was the source of all my pride. But the omelettes will have to share the podium from now on. If you don’t cook, or if you’re even less perfectionistic than I am, you might be wondering where the mystery is in doing these things. Well, first, there’s nothing more satisfactory than a good soft-boiled egg—an egg where the white is firm and the yolk is runny. This is evidently a question of timing, but there the difficulties begin because there are so many ways of cooking eggs that eggs cooked for the same time might differ enormously. I could describe all the failed techniques I used before, but here’s the perfect soft-boiled egg:

Put water to boil, enough to cover the eggs by 2-3 cm. When it is boiling hard, lower the eggs carefully into the boiling water, cover with the lid, and set a timer: 6 minutes and 30 seconds if you like the yolk really runny, and 7 minutes if you want it a bit more set. When time is up, drain the water and pour cold water in to stop the cooking. Peel the eggs when you can touch them without getting burned.

Yes, you need a timer. If you do as my mother surely would—maybe just look at the microwave clock, which evidently doesn’t show seconds—then there’s no way. And, as she probably also would do, when the time comes, think to yourself that that was too short and wait for another while… well, then it won’t work. A timer is a must. Mamá, there’s a timer on your phone!

Okay, you might have chuckled when I said I learned to boil eggs, but I’m sure you know there have been times when your eggs came out too dry. You might have made fun of me, but something in you might have been saying that I had a point. A ridiculous point, because it was about boiling eggs, but a point. But now, when it comes to frying eggs, what could possibly be the point?

Evidently, the problem when frying eggs is that the white part has to set. In Spain, this is solved by frying them in a bathtub’s worth of oil, using a spoon or some other utensil to baste the egg with the boiling oil so that the white sets. In the civilized world, to which I now belong—at least in some form and shape—one does not do that. You just put enough oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Now, you still sometimes baste the egg with the oil—if you want sunny-side-up eggs—but then you have to go incredibly slow, meaning the eggs are more cooked than fried, and the bottom might burn. If you want fried eggs that taste a bit fried, the usual approach is to make eggs over-easy, where you flip the egg. But this risks breaking the yolk. And in any case, it breaks the incredibly pleasant aesthetics of a fried egg. Here’s the obvious solution, which just took me 50 years to learn:

Heat just enough oil to cover the bottom of a small non-stick pan. When hot, pour the egg in, and then cover the pan with a tight lid! The lid should preferably be glass so you can see when the egg is ready.

Yes, some water might condense on the lid so that when you take it off, the oil might splatter. At the same time, there isn’t much oil in the pan anyway. Also, when you do all the basting, the oil might splatter too. A further advantage of this method is that you can also use it to fry eggs in, for example, chili oil. If you make Asian noodles, a chili oil-fried egg often fits very well. Also on things like bibimbap, I assume. It’s been a long time since I’ve made bibimbap. I’m hungry for bibimbap right now.