Last night’s Greek fish recipe ended in tears, or rather ended in a murk of fumes from scorched oil, scorched fish, and melted spoon.

It started with the highest of hopes, as cooking so often does in our kitchen. It also started with the Julia Child trick of testing whether the oil is hot enough by dropping a piece* of bread into it to see if it turns golden and bubbles. The oil is ready when the bubbles spread out immediately.

The flaw was the bread choice. Dark wheat. Although it burned to a blackened crisp immediately, the color difference was not noticeable.

Potential life lessons abound. We could easily take away messages such as “order a pizza next time” or “cod is overfished and this is what you deserve for buying it anyway, Environmental Destroyer.”

But I think the real lesson is concerned with the melting point of plastic cooking utensils and I conclude that, for safety’s sake, we should get a deep fryer which coincidentally I have wanted to do now for almost a year.

*really more of a morsel of bread, the merest fragment