The Business of Bewildered by Bitter

Dear Tamar:

What can I do with do with the liquid leftover from braising endives? Contains butter, sugar and salt and is lovely, but has the distinctive bitterness of chicory.

-Bewildered by Bitter

Dear Bewildered by Bitter,

I recently went to a spa for Vogue. I won’t say which, because our 2026 Spa Guide is about to come out and I don’t want to ruin the surprise. (I’ll allow that the overlap in readership between the Vogue Spa Guide’s readership and this newsletter’s is likely limited. But you never know.)

At the spa, I learned all sorts of interesting things about the inner workings of my body. My cognition—which I envision as an old, coal-smoke-belching boiler—is somewhat better than average and somewhat worse than the best. I’m unusually good at using oxygen during exercise. I breathe well at high altitude. A particularly interesting bit of information (to me, obviously) is that my parasympathetic nervous system is incredibly active—scoring something like 96 out of 100 on a scale whose units and purpose I now forget—and my sympathetic one is…almost dormant.

I don’t recall what was measured to reach that conclusion. Or really what they mean other than what the nurse administering the test said, which amounted to: It seems that you adapt well to stress, but by being constantly on alert, rather than just processing it well. I told my husband this. He was unsurprised. He pointed out that I might be the most vigilant laid-back person in the world. You would never call me Type A—trust me, my socks rarely match and I’m always sure “it’ll be fine”—but I tend to know the exact location of any object I’ve been in contact with in the preceding week. I am ON ALERT.

What this has to do with your endive liquid is the following. Surrender may be the quality I most admire in friends. More than achievement, more than expertise, more than virtuosity. Maybe more than generosity, because I possess generosity (qualified generosity, like most of ours), but I struggle—and that’s a flattering characterization—to let go.

Surrender is subtle. It’s humble and unselfconscious. Surrender looks like so many other things that it can be difficult to identify: It may look like perseveration on a topic, out loud. It may look like despair. It may look like solipsism. It may look like clinginess. Surrender may look like laziness or an absence of backbone or a lack of creativity. It may look like those, because to let go is to trust that you’ll be caught, which means softening into the kind of borderlessness that is uncomfortable to witness. My friends who are most practiced at surrender cry more than I do, spend much more time on the phone, and preserve, within them more space for the needs of their communities, and a higher attentiveness to what those need might be, than I can ever hope to.

Dear cook, as the possessor of a totally unbalanced nervous system, I attest that I have tried to use bitter leftover buttery braising liquids in as many constellations as have occurred to me. A little pour into a mushroom sauce for pasta—bitter. As part of the liquid for an artichoke or endive risotto—bitter. In minestrone—bitter. In potatoes—bitter. In beans, etc. and so on. Might it add a dimension to…? No. The answer is no. I have tried. I have battled. I have raged and strategized and insisted. But the truth remains, and in it a hard-won lesson of the kind of surrender for which I aim and usually miss by a mile. The only thing endive-braising liquid is good for is braising more endive.