Back then, when cooking hadn’t accelerated into annual cassoulet parties and a hundred pissy, redundant blog entries on how to make ricotta, you could still stun a human with simple things, real mozzarella or an honest tomato or a good butter crust, fresh sardines at 25 cents a pound from Queens, $1 one-clawed lobsters from Chinatown. The next day, Polly chopped green olives with a not quite Swedish version of cured salmon—cured the way Dee had cured it for Papa, not too sweet—with good olive oil and chives; she made chickpea fritters with red onion and drizzled them with an aioli made with the syrup from preserved lemons. She’d stuffed squid and stewed it in a fresh red sauce, à la Dee; she would slice it and serve it over a pile of orecchiette, topped with chopped basil. For the following day, she planned a duck thigh—soft inside, crackling outside, topped with bread crumbs and a sauce with sharp cider and mustard—and Jane’s anchovy-dosed meatloaf (anchovies had been Dee’s secret ingredient; the past was never quite past), caramelized on the outside and served with ribbons of conserva. Maybe a jarring note of scallops with a lime and red chiles—none of these things necessarily went together. The surviving lemon curd folded with meringue, studded with fresh berries for today, a macaroon with palm sugar tomorrow.

On this second night, Polly again noticed Barry’s discomfort when he first entered, when he first looked at her, and she did not know if she should try to surmount it. She brought the dishes out one at a time, wanting to see his expression. The seduction might have seemed feminine, but the whole approach was essentially macho, a boy dare, less a tease (anything placed in a mouth is beyond a tease) than a challenge: Try this, little boy. Try to keep a straight face when you put this in your mouth. Try to say it’s nothing. Try to resist.

“Open your mouth and shut your eyes,” she said. She was nervous, because there was no one else in the bar, no buffer to awkwardness. She waited, and she fell into love.

Barry dabbed a finger into the squid and sauce and smiled at her as he put the finger in his mouth. “This is wonderful.”

He looked different today, better. His hair looked darker and thicker, and the bruiser look to his nose now seemed comforting and lived-in.

“It was my great-grandmother’s recipe,” Polly said, and then wondered at the way his face closed down. Did he doubt her, too?

“You were lucky,” he said. The line dangled, but he changed the topic. There was a show at the Met he wanted to see. Would she ever want to meet up on her day off?

She said she would, and that she would show him some things her great-grandfather had found in Scythia before World War I, still on display.