It was our first visit to the U.S. in September 1955, and Lars and Gretl very kindly gave us shelter until we found a basement fiat on Bradley Street, New Haven. It was not a smart flat and Gretl was rueful about our move: "You can live in my basement for free" she said. But we cleaned it up a bit, stuck a few posters to the walls, and eventually felt confident enough to invite our benefactors for an evening meal. Dessert was to be ice cream with fudge sauce, a novel idea to me. The Joy of Cooking was my new-found Bible and I gleaned the recipe from its pages. Apparently a hot fudge sauce, which would harden on contact with the ice cream "to form a malleable consistency," needed to be boiled "fairly fast" for exactly eight minutes. Eight minutes seemed a long time to me, and I was innocently unaware of the dangerous ambiguity hidden in those two words "fairly fast." Gretl cheerfully sustained the conversation whilst my sauce bubbled on the flame for exactly eight minutes, from whence it was poured, with totally misplaced bravado, onto four servings of Best Ice Cream. It hardened. Maybe for the first fifteen seconds it hardened to a "malleable consistency," but after that it rapidly acquired the texture of newly tapped gum. It actually looked delicious, but it continued to harden. Gallantly we wielded our spoons, as though our dessert was edible. Conversation ebbed and gradually died as we endeavored to keep our teeth from sticking together for all time. The depths of my embarrassment were profound, as we wrestled politely with the inside of our mouths.