Snack Chat: Hot Pockets

On changing your temperatures

I write a lot about my own appetites here, but my memories are also filled with other people’s, favorite snacks of old friends and exes. While boiling some eggs today, I thought of the ones served at breakfast in my college cafeteria, known as the Ratty.

Replenished straight from the pot, they were still scalding to touch, drying their shells with their own heat. I remember them irking me; too hot to peel, they called for patience I didn’t have. But as New England cold arrived, a friend — who’d grown up in California, and wore a Californian’s coat — would wait for just this moment, slipping a large white egg apiece into his pockets. He crossed campus like that, gloves on, hands warmed by the eggs, and by the time he arrived the eggs had cooled enough to peel and eat.