How You’ll Know When the Water Is Boiling
Gradually, suddenly, eventually, or never
At 16, my youngest brother could not tell a slight simmer from a decent boil.
I had asked him to cook some pasta. A straightforward task:
Fill a large-ish pot, around one quart capacity, with water, a sliver more than halfway. Set it on the stove. Switch on the heat. All the way. Put a lid on the pot. Make sure you have a nice, good container of salt at the ready.
Open your packet of pasta to spare yourself the stress of trying and trying to open it with your bare hands and giving up and looking for scissors when the water is already boiling and screaming for its appointed contents, and set it near the pot, just so it won’t tip over and you won’t have to pick up stray pieces of dried semolina while you could be ingesting the (well-meaning?) virtual utterings of middle-aged platin-haired women lounging in chalk-and-gold domiciles in a picturesque valley in the Pyrenees.
Then: Wait. Wait. Wait. Listen to the sound of vapor building inside the liquid, to bubbles of heat rising and popping. Hear it growing to an oceanic roar. Finally, sigh as the metallic din slows and tips, floating away into an effortlessly gurgling pool of activity, the pot nonchalantly blowing off steam, an unceasing beam of heat emerging as the lid threatens a violent escape maneuver.
Open it. Plunge your other hand into the salt, add a fair tablespoon’s worth to the water, then dump in the pasta. Stir once with a utensil of your choosing; a finger or your nose may be ill-advised. A fork, a pair of giant tweezers or the wooden spoon you made on your first day at Waldorf school will do.
Set the lid back on, wait for the boil to return — the sound will, again, be freeing, like bursting through the exosphere into the thermosphere, leaving the pull and tension of gravity behind. It’s in that moment your brain always leaves the concept of “there’s a boiling pot of pasta in the kitchen with the lid on it” on the living room floor, not a tinge of care about the fate of your stove or your kitchen floor or the pasta you were looking forward to eating with your hands right from the pot — precisely because the pressure of the heating water’s deafening resolve has just anti-climaxed into the background of everything decidedly more dramatic in your life.
Wake into the reality of starch-infused water manifesting its escape. Groan and squeal and rush and snap off the lid, wipe the stove and the floor and surrender to standing near the stove now, vigilant, until you have eyed your pasta’s perfect consistency, sample one and burn your tongue to be on the safe side, nope, give it a few more seconds, now turn off the stove, take two potholders, pour off the life-to-sauce-giving-elixir, saving some in a bowl in the sink, place the pot back and stand back in delight. Time to feast.
When I returned to the kitchen, I found cold pasta soaking in tepid water.
Stunned, my brain leaving no RAM for dismay, words fluttered out of the gaping abyss in my face.
“No, wait, what? You can’t… it doesn’t — the water has to…”
“Huh? I always do it like this!”
“You — what? How does the pasta even…? Okay. Look. The water has to boil. We’re going to take it out again, put the pot back on and wait for the water to boil first.”
“Okay.”
I fled. Minutes passed. A yell from the kitchen signaled me to come back — apparently, something had gone wrong.
“What’s the matter?”
“Is this boiling?”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“… No. This is a light simmer.”
“What? How’s this different from boiling?”
“…”
There’s that saying about the frog and the cold water and the boiling water and the jumping and the dying:
If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.
— Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
Let’s explore. We’re assuming here that a frog would be able to distinguish boiling from tepid water before it enters the pot, thus readying itself to jump out in a matter of milliseconds. In the other instance, it would remain hapless and undisturbed right up until its untimely demise.
This metaphor has its merits in illustrating human ignorance to the realities surrounding it. But figures of speech like this bother me when they don’t hold up to closer scrutiny.
For one, the part where the frog dies even before the water is close to a boil is overlooked. Proteins begin denaturing at close to 122°F, or 50°C — if we’re assuming a starting temperature of 70°F (21°C), that’s less than half the journey up the thermometer the water has to complete to come to that fizzling endpoint. Of course, this isn’t sufficient to debunk the myth, one must consider the amount of water the frog is being held in, and thus, the size of the vessel to determine the rate at which the temperature is raised.
But even for this, science has accounted for, despite experiments in the 19th century claiming to have found a slow enough rate to achieve the frog’s certain death by gradual amphibian dissipation:
A critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it.
Of course, with a caveat:
Naturally, if the frog were not allowed to escape it would eventually begin to show signs of heat stress, muscular spasms, heat rigor, and then death.
As for the first part of the illustration, it is clear that a frog cannot, in fact, make use of its alleged boiling-from-tepid-distinguishing abilities and simply spring out of the offending container; once it’s in, it’s in:
If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die.
All this is just to say: the opposite of what is supposed in the saying is true. But it doesn’t mean the analogy isn’t useful — just not in the way you may think.
How do you know when the water is boiling?
It is boiling when it is boiling. You know it when you see it. If you’re unsure, it’s not boiling. If you’re questioning your perception, excruciating as it may be, you’ll have to wait and see.
But there’s another, perhaps better question to pose:
Are you a frog?
If you are metaphorically floating in warming water, you can, theoretically, tell when its temperature is climbing to a degree higher than what you know is good for you. You can see that something is not right, and you will trust your instincts: given any chance at all — in most cases, the adage rings true, “Where there’s a will, there’s a way!” — you will exit the pot.
Few people have the self-worth, never mind the courage to do this. And of these, let’s face it, many are not born into circumstances that allow it. To act on their inner knowing before it may be too late. To trust their inner frog and take the leap.
But thankfully, you are, if you’re reading this, not actually a frog, and there are still two other roads your journey may send you on.
If you mistakenly enter a metaphoric pot of already boiling water — well, if the situation takes you as unprepared as the frog in the experiments, you may actually die. Figuratively or literally. This is a possibility. I don’t think I need to give you an example, there are plenty in the media.
In most cases though, humans will do what the frog in the myth does: they fight and fly for their lives. They will jump out of the pot and run to far off places, as fast as their legs will carry them. Because they know. When the water boils, you know — and you act. It’s in your biology.
Last and most common, there’s the middle ground:
You enter tepid water. You swim. You grow accustomed to the ever-increasing temperature of your immediate environment. You begin to languish. But the rate at which the water warms still bears no immediate consequences for your existence. You paddle about feebly, unknowing.
However, once the water heats to a degree where steam begins to grow in bubbles at the bottom of the pot, floating past you to the water’s surface above, you begin to have doubts.
You’re unsure — there are now obvious, detectable differences to before, yet still, because you have spent so much time acclimating to these surroundings — and change of any kind requires so much energy — you stay put. Like my brother, you may not even think twice about the difference the objective temperature makes, you don’t feel the need to because you have never experienced a real, rolling boil.
So you’re good — at least that’s what you tell yourself. You stay in the water, though you kind of actually, totally, know the water is getting too hot. But you can’t bring yourself to get out just yet: Maybe someone will come, take the pot off the heat and save you. Perhaps the water will begin to cool all by itself.
Panic sets in. Realizations and dread metastasize.
But there’s a tipping point. The previous roaring, that deafening cacophony of ever-growing discomfort evens out, in the space of three seconds, into glorious, rolling, unchanging clarity.
That place where you unwittingly know — this is different from before. Completely. This is so hot, it’s intolerable. There’s no denying it anymore: the water is boiling.
When you’ve arrived, there’s no way but out. The temperature doesn’t get any higher.
And again: good thing you’re not a frog.
Because when the water is boiling, you know — and you act. Then, there’s nothing else. When the water is boiling, you jump out of the pot, lest you be cooked on the spot. You just do it.
The Big But
The original ending to this article went as follows:
Every which way you turn it, it’s clear. When the water is boiling, you will know. You will act, because you’ll need to. And you’ll be okay.
But something still irritated me. I hadn’t taken into account all the instances in which we can’t act because we haven’t — in contrast to the scenarios outlined above — experienced life from beneath the boiling point.
The most glaring flaw in the classic frog-in-pot analogy is that it assumes the “frog” in question starts out in cold water. But for so unbelievably many, this isn’t the case. Swaths of people born into poverty, neglect, into abusive homes and severe intergenerational trauma, for the most part, wouldn’t recognize cold water when they saw it. On the contrary, they might, as they dip a toe in it, recoil in pain — and suffer frostbite.
The question — when is the water boiling? — doesn’t apply. Because they’ve spent their entire lives in it.
What’s the answer?
I don’t have one.
I count myself lucky that I’ll always know when the water is boiling.
