But people, as Alan had once reflected to Greene, were not at all like recipes. You could have all the right ingredients, in all the right amounts, and still there were no guarantees. Or perhaps they were like recipes, he pondered now, and the key to success was in finding the ingredients you had to remove, the components that turned all the others bitter, excessively salty, difficult to swallow; even too jarringly sweet. He had seen Greene clarify butter, wash rice, Devlin shrimp, and meticulously snip the talons from artichoke leaves.

The Whole World Over