And then again, it could just be luck

I used to run a blog called Food Gone Wrong. The idea behind it was to celebrate kitchen failures. I’d noticed that some people didn’t like to cook because they couldn’t make food that was consistently good. A restaurant was different — you showed up, paid your money, and something edible, even delicious, usually arrived. But home cooking, at least for most people, involves a lot of trial and error. It takes a lot of time to find the recipes that work, to learn how to follow them properly, to know how to adjust them for the available ingredients and equipment, and so on. Learning to cook means stomaching a lot of barely edible meals along the way.

Anyway, that blog was part of my lifelong celebration of useful imperfections, rich failures, and charming mistakes. It became a bit tiresome at one point, mainly because people kept sending me pictures of terrible food, so I let it expire. But I thought of it again today when I made a dish that just. kept. failing.

I’d gotten it into my head that it would be a good idea to make Turkish Çılbır, a dish in which poached eggs are gently placed into garlicky yoghurt, drizzled with nutty, spiced butter and finished off with a sprinkling of fresh herbs. Doesn’t it sound amazing? I think we can all agree it sounds amazing! The Facebook reel that showed me the dish made it look amazing and easy. Fantastic. I even had most of the ingredients, I just needed bread and some fresh mint. As though it was meant to be, really.

I should have known things were going poorly when the mint, so crisp and peppy in the market stall, wilted overnight. I’d even put it in water, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. Alright, no matter. I found a recipe on Nigella Lawson’s website, which seemed like it had a good chance of being reliable. It was complicated, maybe a bit more complicated than necessary, but I was on my own this morning and in no rush, so I set about the work.

The recipe asked me to place a bowl over a pot with hot water in it, but not to have the bowl touch the water. In this, I was supposed to gently warm the yoghurt, and whip it into a moussy delight. Amazing, I can do this. Only the steam alone got too hot, and my moussy yoghurt turned watery. I took the pot off the heat and added some more cold yoghurt to balance the hot yoghurt out, which seemed to work for a minute. At least until I tried to remove the metal bowl from the top of the saucepan, which was when I realised that the steam had created a strong vacuum and I could not in fact separate the two. I tried fingernails, I tried various knives. Nada.

Ok, I put this aside and focused on the eggs. I’ve poached eggs before, and they come out more or less ok. You know the deal: egg in ramekin, put a little vinegar in the water, get it swirling mightily, slip in the egg and time its cooking. I’m not making any claims to be a brilliant poacher of eggs, but at this point in my life I can get an edible one done without overcooking it.

This recipe had a different technique, however. It asked me to strain the egg first in a finemesh strainer, so as to let the watery parts come out. I’d seen this online too — it definitely seemed like it would be an improvement. It then wanted me to put a drizzle of lemon juice on the egg white while it was in the ramekin, and then put the egg in the hot water but not move it around at all. In fact, it wanted me to do this with both eggs at once. Hm.

I tried to strain my eggs, but I rapidly realized that the eggs were too watery for my strainer, or too watery for life, I don’t know, the point is, the whole egg was straining through. After a minimal strain for each egg I lovingly squirted a bit of fresh lemon juice onto each egg white, got the hot water going (but not swirling!) and then put in the first egg.

Disaster. Instead of holding together this egg practically exploded. There was egg white everywhere. I tried to encourage it to hold together a bit but the result was not pleasant. At least I hadn’t followed the advice to put both eggs in at once, so I was able to swirl a bit for the second egg, and that turned out better. Not beautiful, but at least coherent.

So I made my spiced brown butter, which thank goodness went uneventfully, picked out a few mint leaves that seemed less droopy than the rest, put the dish together on top of the watery yoghurt, and took a picture. I think, all things considered, it didn’t look too bad. I even remembered to put on salt.

But something about the taste of it was wrong. The yoghurt was too warm, the eggs too cloying, the garlic too strong. I was starting to feel vaguely queasy. That’s when I realised: this dish was never going to turn out. Maybe it was a bad recipe, maybe it was a bad day. Maybe it was just bad luck.

I’ve been thinking about bad luck lately. I find it difficult. This is where the cultural split in my upbringing — and therefore, personality — is most evident. My Canadian brain says: there is no such thing as bad luck, or any kind of luck. Or rather: you make your own luck, by working hard, risking new things, persevering. As you can probably tell, my Canadian brain doesn’t like to think of things being unfair. It likes to think of the world as a rational place in which actions have predictable results. If things don’t work out, there is probably a coherent reason for it. And any kind of situation can probably be improved by more work, better work, self-optimization.

Nice little Protestant brain, that Canadian.

Then there is my Romanian brain. It, too, is rational, but follows different rules. This version of my consciousness spent only its childhood in Romania (so cannot speak for the culture as a whole), but in those five-plus years it learned that the Evil Eye exists and can be drawn by both jealousy and admiration, and that you should not expect success or talk about good things happening, because that will definitely doom you to failure. My Romanian brain doesn’t believe in randomness so much as invisible forces of cursedness that have to be carefully managed, in thought and in speech.

As I write I realise that neither of these worldviews makes space for randomness. For luck. I have been working on a particular project for a very long time, and have had all kinds of failures, both small and spectacular. For a while, I was convinced I wasn’t working hard enough, that I wasn’t disciplined or flexible or talented enough. Then at some point I realised I’d worked as hard as I physically could, for years, so I started to wonder if I was cursed in some way.

It was only when someone said to me, “you’ve had unbelievably bad luck” that I realised it could just be that. It could just be luck. Part of me thinks it should feel bad to be out of control, but it’s a liberation. Sometimes the day is wrong, the vibe is wrong, the ingredients are off. It doesn’t mean the next meal, or project, or undertaking won’t turn out. Sometimes things don’t make sense, and there’s no predictable relationship between effort in and what comes out.

Of course this also suggests that a failure is not something that can always be managed either. The self-improvement ethos holds failures to be useful building blocks to success, but if bad luck is a factor, this may not be true. A bad result is not necessarily something to be learned from or built on, because it might be that what caused the failure was not controllable. The exact same actions might have led to a different result on another day, or in a different context.

And it suggests the same things about success. Success, too, can be a matter of luck. Sometimes that can be an even harder idea to swallow.

Thank you for reading this far. I’d love to hear how you see luck, if you believe in it, or what rationalizations about the world are lurking in the back of your head.

Irina

Updates

• At the London Review of Books, I have a review essay on medieval minstrels, and a new book that shows how bureaucratic their lives really were.

• Also at the LRB is a new podcast on medieval humour, this time on the Middle English poem, Dame Sirith.

• I have two new columns at the Times Literary Supplement, which form a perfect pair. The first is a commemoration of two poets I loved and lost, and the ways we keep memory alive. The second, meant to balance out the gloom, is on light literature and the pleasures of escapism.