In Japan, they will hand you a raw egg and tell you to eat it. Then it will become the best thing you taste all year. This is sukiyaki. Thin slices of beef, cooked at the table in a dark sweet sauce of soy and sugar, until the edges curl and the fat goes soft. But here is the part no one warns you about. Beside your plate sits a single raw egg, beaten smooth in a small bowl. You take the hot beef, still steaming, and you drop it into the cold raw egg before it reaches your mouth. Everything in you says no. Then you taste it. The egg does not cook. It coats. It cools the heat just enough, wraps the sweetness in something soft and rich, and turns one good bite into something you will think about on the flight home. The thing you were afraid of was the thing that made it perfect.