It Broke!

My dear husband and I had miscommunication of nuclear proportion last evening.  He was busily preparing his world's greatest white chocolate mousse for a luncheon I'm hosting today.  As I was drying the crystal bowls to receive this delicacy, I heard him frantically screaming, "It Broke!".  Assessing the situation from my non-chef view, I automatically assumed that he was referring to the KitchenAid Mix Master.  As he was leaving the room in an enormous huff,  he spotted me pulling out our trusty electric hand mixer to try to salvage his creation in progress.  He was screaming, " What the heck are you doing?!!!... IT BROKE!!! this stuff happens... You can't fix it..."!

As he stormed out of the house, I tried quite unsuccessfully to resurrect the concoction.  Only then did I realize that we had completely different meanings for "broke".  He was referring to the mixture of eggs, cream, sugar and chocolate that "broke" in the 100% humidity.  My unfamiliarity with this cooking term led me to believe that we'd had a mechanical malfunction with a "broken" mixer.  Because we both had our own understanding of "broke", we each thought the other was crazy.   Only when he reappeared from our 24x7 Kroger, with new ingredients, could we reconcile our foreign language interchange - chef language versus mortal speak. When we compared notes in English, we laughed heartily about our miscommunication and made up immediately.