She perused the book’s first few pages with high hopes. If she had written these hopes down, they would have read something like this: ‘The author of the book approaches baking in a well-organized way, starting with basic concepts and working up systematically until the reader emerges triumphant from the last page, mastery of baking secured.’
Jane had no such luck. The introduction alone was enough to shatter her dreams.
Gramma Isaks here! My bebbes are all grown now, and they asked me to take up pen to put down my rememberings of my recipes. I never much was a writer, but here is my best shot at it. I hope you like the cookies and pies and such!
The book was a nightmare. Gramma Isaks was a kind, simple woman, it seemed. Given the sheer breadth of her recipe repertoire, Jane guessed she had been quite good at baking.
What she was not, however, was an organized writer.
Spelling errors and near-nonsense sentences abounded. Her ingredient lists ranged the whole page, sprinkled among paragraphs like afterthoughts or hiding like children playing a game. Gramma appeared to have just added a mention of ingredients into whatever line she was working on at the moment she remembered them.
Even worse, Gramma did not seem to have used standardized measurements in her cooking. She had also, apparently, expected that everyone else knew what her shorthand meant.
A half-handful of flour on top of it all will seal it up, ’specially if you add a mite of salt. Bake it in a not-too-hot oven, now, for about twice what a cookie would want. Then you have it! A perfect bread.
With no way to know what a ‘half-handful’ or a ‘not-too-hot oven’ really was, Jane made her best guesses. Noting down her experimental amounts and oven temperatures, she kneaded everything together, let it rise, and finally put her first-ever bread attempt into the oven. While it baked, she perused the rest of Gramma Isaks’ thoughts on cooking, lighting a few candles since the sun was going down. Not too long before she finished skimming the entire book, the bread had been in the oven as long as she meant to leave it.
With an excited, trembling hand, she opened the oven door and took out the fruits of an evening’s labors.
“A rock.” Jane looked down at the ruin of all her hopes and laughed. “I made a burned rock.”
The lump of cooked almost-dough on her counter was so hard that she had to put effort into scratching it with a knife, and so scorched that it didn’t stop smoking for several minutes after it left the oven. She was confident she could have dented the table with it, if she had really wanted to. It had many fine qualities, durability chief among them, but it was not bread. It probably wasn’t even food.
The next several hours were spent chasing the dream of producing what Gramma Isaks had called ‘the perfect loaf.’ Jane kept making adjustments, trying to identify and fix what had failed in the first batch.
The second batch of bread never took to a particular shape. It came out of the oven as a cooked puddle of dough which, when tasted, was so salty that it might as well have been the sea. The third batch burned, literally catching on fire in Jane’s oven like a candle. She had to put out the flames with a quiet, stealthy summoning of the mystic forces of ice.
Finally, she went for broke. With every ingredient left to her in play, she fired up all her ovens, systematically tweaking as many parameters as she could while still keeping track of her own adjustments. With each oven burning a different amount of fuel, she managed to get sixteen experiments going at once.
Fifteen of them failed outright. It was now fully dark, so she took the fifteen disasters outside and threw them into the lake as a gift for very brave fish.
The last, however, was different.
It still wasn’t bread, exactly, or at least not bread of any texture Jane had ever seen before. Yet it cut with a knife, and a cautious taste showed it to be technically chewable. The flavor wasn’t anything to write home about, but it wasn’t offensive, at least.
It’s not bread, but it’s almost bread. Nearly. Someone might even think it was bread, if they were drunk enough.
She took a risk and made a light dinner of it, eating a quarter of the almost-loaf and washing it down with the cold, good water from her kitchen’s pump.
The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.
The night was halfway over by now. She was covered in flour, and exhausted. She had confirmed one thing absolutely: she was not a baker. At least, not at the moment. No god of kitchen-work had tapped her on the shoulder and given her the gift of free excellence in that field. She would even guess, offhand, that she might be the very worst baker in the entire town.
If that’s true, though, then why am I so happy?
After hours of nearly total failure, she would have thought she’d be depressed or despairing. That she’d be looking for another profession, one at which she wasn’t so hopelessly inept.
Instead, she was elated. She hadn’t succeeded at making bread, true. But she had gotten to spend an entire evening with her hands busy at the task of creating real, physical things. She had kneaded, pounded, measured, stoked, and poured.
Despite having created many more abominations of nature than qualified successes, Jane was as happy as she had ever been.
She bounced upstairs and heated a quick bath, soaking in it just long enough to shake loose all the food from her skin and hair. Shrugging into some sleeping-clothes, she hopped into bed. Her head was swimming with thoughts of friends, flour, tinkers, and tinkering with recipes.
For all of two minutes, before she fell asleep, she tried to plot her next steps. Her aunt’s money wouldn’t last forever. She needed to be efficient.
That should be doable. Jane was a mage, after all. And she had long ago learned the secret that a mage’s power didn’t come solely from magic. Real power didn’t come from the use of any kind of force, whether physical or mystical.
It came from books.
—
The next morning, as promised, she stopped at Bella’s restaurant. After waiting a few minutes for Bella to feed her other customers, Jane plopped down on a stool and took in the good smells.
Bella greeted her with a smile. “There you are. I wondered if you’d make it. How did things go?”
Jane accepted a glass of juice as her friend got to work on the griddle. The juice was good and freezing cold, waking her up with a sharp tang of some fruit she wasn’t familiar with. She could have made a breakfast just of that, but the sizzling of other, heavier fare made her glad she wouldn’t have to.
“With the boy, or with the baking?” Jane asked, sipping the juice. “I have news about both.”
“Start with the boy.”
“He’s still very nice. He said he hoped he’d bump into me again, around town.”
Bella’s eyebrows popped up just a single surprised half-inch.
“Did he now? That’s a lot, for him. You must have made quite the impression.”
“I don’t know how.” Jane pulled a bit of her own hair forward and looked at it. As always, it was just a bit too curly. “Looking like this.”
The action at the griddle stopped as Bella turned and leveled a scolding spatula of judgement at Jane.
“Stop saying that,” Bella commanded. “Forever. It’s not true, and even if it was, that wouldn’t be the way to talk about it. Got it?”
“I’m not that pretty, though.”
“You may not think so, but I thought you were pretty enough to send you towards Allen, who thought you were at least something enough to distract him from the things he makes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.” Bella scraped up a whole breakfast from the grill, put it on a plate, and shoved it Jane’s way. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We are friends now, and I’m using that privilege to demand that from now on, you trust my opinions on how nice-looking you are. Mine are just better than yours. ”
“Fine, fine!” Jane waved her hands defensively in front of her. “You are also very beautiful. And you make a very good breakfast. I see you used normal bread today, not that good flat stuff. What was that?”
“It’s called keln. It’s a local thing, and I love it, but only one baker in town makes it anymore, and only on Lee-days.”
“Lee-days?”
“Oh, yes, right. You wouldn’t know. We have a rest day here, just like everyone, day before yesterday. We also have Lee-day, a second rest day. That’s yesterday.”
“But I saw you working yesterday,” Jane pointed out. “I saw a bunch of people working.”
“People still work, just… less. It’s more like a day to catch up on the work you want to do, to accomplish something while letting yourself lollygag. I’ll be making food all day today, you see, whether I like it or not. Yesterday, I worked a few hours to see my friends, and then I went to find you. But the point is that yesterday, I could get good, fresh keln. Today, I can’t. That’s how it goes.”
Jane devoured her breakfast. It was not quite as good as it would have been if wrapped in warm, soft bread, but it was still excellent in every other possible way. Bella seemed to know in advance how much food Jane needed, and had given her just enough to feel good and full without feeling overloaded.
As Jane finished, the sun had thoroughly warmed her back from the outside, and her insides were well warmed up from the meal. She stood, stretched, and looked both ways down the road.
“What do you need? A store that sells flour?” Bella asked.
“No, not that.” Jane held up the gift from Allen, which she hadn’t quite been able to leave at home that day. “The only book on cooking I have is this, and it’s not… well, just take a look at it.”
Bella thumbed through the pages for just five seconds before she burst out laughing.
“Oh, yes, I know this type. I bet you she made very good food, in her day. But she learned from a person, who had learned from another person, and so on. They showed each other what the measurements were, and over time, she would have adjusted them to fit her own style.”
“Then the book is really useless? I feel almost bad for her. And the book, for that matter.”
“Oh, no. Not useless. There are probably a lot of great ideas in there, and you could even use the recipes once you have an idea of how to cook things. But not the best book for you right now. I’d say find something better for learning with, and then come back to it later.” Bella looked down at the casual nonsense of the book and laughed again. “Much later.”
Jane picked up the poor tome from the counter and wrapped her arms around it. “Well, at any rate, I still need something to work with. Is there a library around here? Or a bookstore?”
“For what you need? Normally, I’d send you to a few places, but you are going to want a selection so you can find something that suits you. You’ll need our big library.” Bella turned Jane around and pointed across the lake. “You see that big building there? The one that looks like it’s the child of a castle and a very large brick?”
Jane did. It was impressively square.
“That’s our big library. If anyone has what you need, they will.”
“How will I ever find what I need in there? It’s huge!”
Bella gave Jane a little shove, moving her in the right direction and simultaneously clearing the counter for her next few customers. “Just tell them you need help. The librarians, I mean. They won’t just help. They’ll love you for it.”