The bottle was down to its last third, oil gone slightly thick in the cold kitchen, pouring slower than it would by noon. I tilted it over the cold pan and let it come.
There is a spoon measure people use. A tablespoon, two. I have never poured oil off a spoon in my life. You pour it straight and you watch the pan.
What you are watching for is the shine. Oil goes into a pan and spreads a skin across the metal, and there is a moment where that skin covers everything and catches the light and stops. Enough. If you keep pouring it starts to pool, to gather in the low spot where the pan has warped, a little yellow puddle that means you have gone past.
I tilt the pan to read it. The oil runs to one side and you see the floor of it, whether the metal underneath is wet-shined all over or dry in patches. Dry patches stick. Whatever you lay down there will grab and tear when you turn it. Too much and it is not a sear anymore, it is a shallow fry, the food swimming and going greasy at the edges.
I poured, tilted, watched the gleam chase itself across the steel. A dry spot near the handle. A little more. Now it moved as one sheet.
I set the bottle down. The pan went onto the burner and the oil began to thin as it warmed, the shine loosening, a faint blue moving through it before any smoke.
A drip had run down the bottle’s neck and dried on the label, and my thumb found it there, tacky, when I picked the bottle up to put it away.