When I was 24 I learned the truth about Pyrex. Nick and I were making flan in our Bonita Street apartment when the pan and the misconception came apart.

I’d always enjoyed pudding and I’d recently tasted flan. Or creme caramel I should perhaps specify, because I appreciated the golden topping you got if you melted sugar in the pan before pouring in the milk and eggs, so the inverted result carried soft caramel. Nick liked it too. We were just a couple of years married then, and our culinary adventures were about nachos and pancakes and Irish coffee and flan.

So one day in 1974 we decided to make a big batch. We pulled out the 9 x 13 glass lasagne pan for the job. I mixed the pudding ingredients together while Nick caramelized. He spooned granulated sugar into the heavy glass pan, and he began heating it over the gas stove. I suppose he could have placed it on the two front burners, but my memory has him seesawing the glass bottom over one flame as the sugar began to liquify.

Suddenly he went into adrenaline mode. “Mar!” he shouted. “It’s going to burn. Quick! We have to cool this!”

I think I was rather prompt, coming up with the broiler pan for the job. It was the only container bigger than the Pyrex. I ran an inch of tap water into it and plopped it on the counter. Nick was there with the bubbling sugar; he set the lasagne pan in the water.

There may have been a little hiss but what I remember is silence. Complete silence while the two of us stood there like refugees. It was three to five seconds later, as our eyes were meeting in relief, when the Pyrex pan exploded.

I’ll say this: the shards appeared tempered. I didn’t perceive sharp edges. But I couldn’t really tell. Because the way I remember it, every shard was coated in sticky caramel. And there were thousands of them, all over the kitchen.