I was eating a corned beef sandwich in an Irish bar in Brooklyn, a quiet shebeen with excellent service and food that was reliably terrible. The corned beef was an outlier, salty and sweet, fat-flecked, spicy, delicious. I told the bartender, an owner of the place, how much I liked it. He flashed a wicked smile, surfer-laconic. “It’s the ginger beer we cure it with,” he said. “Secret ingredient.” He died a couple of years later. I never got the recipe.

I love a clandestine soda in the preparation of food, a flash of carbonation where the French might use wine or brandy. It may be transgressive to say so, but I’m hardly alone, for all those who cringe at the thought or snort in disgust. There’s cola in plenty of barbecue sauces, after all, throughout the South, and in the one used at the restaurant Joe Beef in Montreal. Coke gives barbecue sauce a certain roundness, I think, a kind of caramel hum. There’s 7Up in the butter slathered on the shrimp at FOB, a Filipino restaurant in Brooklyn, and Sprite in the sabayon that the chef Tim Love, of the Lonesome Dove in Fort Worth, sometimes serves with oysters, at least when he’s not marinating skirt steaks in Dr Pepper.