We’re in the kitchens today. Steamy heat spews from half a dozen enamel pots and pans boiling away around the room, filling the air with a cozy, heavily spiced aroma. Along the walls are a series of white enamel-plated ovens, cast iron stovetops, and sinks deep enough to submerge your elbows in. I’ve already eaten, but the potent aroma of different foods—onions and garlic sweating in the heat; tiny, headless birds marinating in herbs and oil; sweet red berries simmering into a thick, jewel-hued liquid—makes me hungry all over again.
“Today, we’ll be doing something a little more fun—and delicious, if I might say so.” Dean Edina’s a little flustered with the venue change and struggles to keep our attention with the same ease she does in the classroom. “In addition to learning about the economics of our allied friends, it is imperative that we learn about their customs and culture. The most obvious way to do this is through cuisine. Therefore, we’ll be doing a little sampling of some of their more famous dishes. I hope you didn’t fill up on breakfast!”
We stand single file next to a long butcher block counter set apart from the commotion of the working kitchen. Dozens of maids dice and stir and chop, wiping down their cutting boards with tea towels, and then starting over. While none of them look at us, I get the distinct impression they’re listening, some more obviously than others. Three maids in suspiciously clean aprons set the countertop with several dozen forks and spoons, water glasses, and napkins.
“Of course, I know most of the classic Espancian dishes,” Fiona says to Ophelia, a girl with the fairest complexion I’ve ever seen. Her cheeks and forehead are red from even just ten minutes in the bowels of the kitchen.
“Is it very spicy?” Ophelia asks, her long nose pinched.
“It can be, if you’re not used to it,” Fiona says.
“Sudersbergian cuisine is really the one to watch for,” says Greta, a girl with a snub nose and too much confidence.
“Oh, so many different spices,” Fiona says with a knowing nod.
“What kind of spices?” Ophelia asks.
“All of them!” Greta says, with a snobby laugh that Fiona mirrors, leaving Ophelia to be the outsider, looking in at the worldly, sophisticated girls. I flash Ophelia an empathetic smile, and she snorts, edging away from me. Guess she’ll just have to deal with her feelings of inferiority on her own, then.
Dean Edina wasn’t kidding. The rest of the morning is spent eating. We sample a creamy Espancian pasta pudding; eggs and fish pickled in a brine rich with dill and cilantro from Brandeissland; a pastry stuffed with dates, cinnamon, rice, and about a dozen other spices I can’t name from Sudersberg; and a stunning, dense chocolate cake filled with brandy-poached stone fruit from Swendenland. There are about a dozen dishes, all tolled, and by the time luncheon rolls around, nobody is hungry. Dean Edina laughs heartily when a few of the girls groan, hands held tight against their bellies, and claps her hands.
“Don’t worry. There will be no luncheon today. However, as a special surprise, we will be splitting into teams, and preparing some of these dishes ourselves for dinner tonight with the First Family!” I feel pretty good about this assignment. I’m not a talented chef by any means, but I can chop an onion better than most. And, looking around the room, I think I stand a decent chance of being the only one who knows how to tell parsley from cilantro.
“I’ll leave it to you to split into pairs,” Dean Edina says. “Then we will draw recipes and get to work!” Around me, girls pair off into the expected social cliques. I’m pretending to focus on the Sudersbergian fried potato dish still in front of me when Molly approaches.
“You wanna team up?” she asks. To say I’m surprised is an understatement. I abandoned her to sit with Zerah, not to mention I’m now an Independent and have nothing to offer in terms of support.
“You sure?” I ask, nodding at the room in general. She laughs and raises an amused eyebrow.
“Honestly, I’ve had it with most of these girls. Besides, we worked well together.” I hesitate for a moment, considering whether or not she might be working with them to somehow undermine me. But there’s something different about her—she looks more herself somehow. She’s not wearing the ear cuffs or chokers that Fiona favors, or the layered necklaces that Avery has too many of. She looks comfortable in her green dress with the rounded collar and scuffed shoes.
“If you’re sure,” I say.
“I’m sure,” she says, and then leans in. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m kind of hedging my bets that you know how to cook. You seem like maybe you’ve done some real work in your days.” She smiles, tapping the side of her nose. I take a deep, satisfied breath, and nod.
“Why are we doing this?” Molly asks as she struggles with a paring knife along the edge of a potato. We selected the fried potato dish, which is fairly simple in preparation, save for the sauce. The sauce consists of fifteen ingredients, the chief one being smoked peppers. I’m deveining and seeding the long peppers with gloves, so the seeds don’t burn my skin, which leaves Molly to peel the potatoes. I’ve already shown her how to twice, but she’s just not getting it.
“Essential life experience we can’t get anywhere else?” I say, wincing at her technique.
“Essential to who, though?” she asks. It’s a valid question. I check the recipe and dress the peppers in thick, fruity olive oil, coating them in salt, pepper, and smoky paprika, and then put them on a sheet pan and slide them into the cast iron oven. I doubt I will ever make this sauce again if I become an ambassador—an ambassador’s wife, though? They’re probably up to their ears in sauces.
“This is impossible,” she says, dropping a half-peeled potato on the counter, only to nearly lose it as it rolls down the wooden surface.
“Why don’t you measure the other spices?” I say. I take the potato from her and slide my knife along it, shedding the peel in one long curl. She watches, mesmerized, until I bark at her and she refocuses on a bunch of teaspoons. I finish the pile, ten total, which seems like way too many for a side dish, but who knows? When I return to the recipe card, she’s used the wrong spoons for the cumin and bay, and I have to correct it.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were paid to sabotage me,” I say with a wary smile.
“I wish,” she says, shaking her head. “It’d be a lot less stressful if I could get some money out of this.”
We get the ingredients in the right order, and then I send her to assemble an ice bath for the potatoes as I start to slice them. It’s menial work, but relaxing in its simplicity, satisfying in its solvability. I’m not being judged on my technical skills, or the way I look as I’m doing it. She returns with the ice bath, correctly assembled for once, and drops the potato slices in.
“How did you learn to do this?” she asks.
“I had to,” I say simply.
“Were you taught?” I’m hesitant to tell her too much, but this seems superficial enough.
“More or less. I had to be helpful to earn my keep, and they didn’t know what to do with me. Somewhere along the line, one of the cooks started giving me potatoes to peel and onions to chop. ‘Can’t have too many chopped onions,’ she used to say.”
Gaia used to let me hide out in the kitchen, giving me piles of onions to cut on the days I didn’t want to walk my normal route. She’d slip me little sandwiches after I helped in the kitchen, and I’d share them with the other girls. Carla would take hers, thanking me with kisses to my cheeks, while Neve would only ever take them to be polite, claiming she had to watch her figure. I would sometimes catch her eating them in the dark, though. Thinking about it now, those knife skills saved me in more ways than one.
“So, she gave you a knife and told you to figure it out?”
“Sort of,” I say, grabbing the last potato. I tuck my fingernails underneath my fingers and slice away. “I used to watch her. She was so fast, it took a long time to figure it out. But over the years, I picked up most of her tricks. I could hold my own if I had to.”
“Clearly,” she says, brows raised into her bangs.
“Something’s missing,” I say, licking the sauce from the spoon and frowning as she shakes her head.
“I don’t know what . . .” She picks up the recipe and looks at it carefully, then frowns, flipping the paper over and shaking her head.
“What?”
“It almost looks like something was torn . . .”
“Seriously?” I ask. I take the card from her hand. She’s right. There’s a super fine shred to the right side of the paper.
“Dean Edina?” Molly asks, and the dean makes her way from the corner of the kitchen, where she and the head cook—a round little woman called Miss Connie—are enjoying their second glass of cooking sherry.
“Yes, dear?”
“Is it possible this recipe was torn? We’ve followed it to the letter, but it doesn’t taste right,” Molly says. Dean Edina looks at it with a frown and shakes her head.
“This is the recipe card we’ve used for years. I’m certain it’s in the same condition it’s always been.”
“Could we ask Miss Connie to take a look?” Molly asks, and Dean Edina shakes her head.
“Enlisting the cook’s expertise is strictly forbidden. I’m sorry, girls, but if your dish doesn’t taste ‘quite right,’ it has nothing to do with the recipe.” She looks down her long nose at us, her expression one of reproach. I know my technique was good, better than most of the other girls here. The problem’s definitely not with us. But if Dean Edina’s not willing to help, we’ll need to be a little more creative.
“Is the dish we sampled earlier still available? Could we give it a quick taste?” I ask. She looks puzzled, like she’s never been asked this question before. She looks over to the other side of the kitchen, where the long table still holds the sample dishes— as decor more than nourishment, at this point.
“I suppose that wouldn’t be against the rules,” she says. I smile and carry our bowl over to the table. Molly and I taste the sample dish again, and it is much more flavorful: sweeter, spicier. There’s something familiar in it that’s absent from ours. I close my eyes and think of onions sweating, but I know it’s not onions.
“I can taste the difference, but I don’t know what it is.” Molly’s voice is whiny, and she slumps over the table, defeated. I’m reminded of a thick tomato sauce Gaia used to make. She’d let it simmer all day, the smell wafting through the rooms and out into the grounds.
“I know what it is.” I run to the pantry and search for a small, papery bulb. I peel three cloves as I walk back to our place and turn the knife on its side, smashing the garlic against the cutting board to loosen it from its husk. Then I quickly chop and drop it in a pan with hot olive oil. The oil splatters, a tiny drop catching the side of my hand. I hiss and shake my hand, wiping off the oil with my apron.
“Are you sure about this?” Molly asks. I grab a wooden spoon and push the garlic around the pan.
“Ladies, you have thirty minutes left!”
“Yes,” I say, “I’m sure. But I need you to focus on frying those potatoes.”
“How do I do that?” she asks.
“See that frying vat over there?” I hand her a metal basket with a long, wooden handle and nod toward a giant pot of oil boiling in the corner. “Put them in the basket, lower it into the oil for about ten minutes, and then pull them out.” Normally, I wouldn’t send a novice to deal with hot oil, but the key to this dish is the sauce. If it’s not exactly right, it’s not going to work. As soon as the garlic starts to smell, I take it off the heat and mix half of it into the sauce. I stir, let it sit for a minute, and then give it a quick taste. It’s not quite there, but almost.
I close my eyes and think for a moment. What’s missing? I hone in on the missing flavor and its subtle complexity—the slight sweetness, gentle earthiness, the tender prick of a floral note—and suddenly, I’m transported to the rooftop garden, looking at Declan through basil plants, the same floral fragrance thick in the air, stuck to my fingers from pinching the flowers. I open my eyes and look around, find a couple of basil leaves, chop them finely, then add it with a sprinkle of salt. I taste it again, and then carry the spoon to the frying station.
“Try this,” I say, spooning the sauce into Molly’s mouth. Her eyes grow large, and she grins.