Now truly stuffed to the gills, Jane bade Bella goodbye and wobbled her way home. She stood for a time in what amounted to her backyard, looking out over the water and reflecting on the surprisingly eventful day.
Eventually, some calamity would overcome the town. Jane knew that. Rockslides and fires were common. Attacks by strong beasts weren’t unheard of, since a few still roamed the places yet unfilled by civilization. But until one of these disasters came, she was safe to go on being plain old Jane.
The feeling was almost overwhelmingly delicious. Jane stood there for a long time, letting it sink in.
Anyone who knew her back at the academy wouldn’t understand at all. Jane doubted they would have the first clue why she had given up a life of riches, adventure, and fame for a normal town far, far away from the center of excitement in their country.
Jane didn’t need them to understand. She had just enjoyed her third full meal of the day, and each meal had occurred with people who were as friendly and good as she could imagine. She had done something worthwhile with her own two hands and normal tools. And she was now going to take a long, hot bath before sleeping a full night in a quiet, comfortable bed.
If her former colleagues couldn’t understand why such a day was worth giving things up for, that was their problem.
—
Bella wasn’t able to set aside another evening for Jane before the next Lee-day. As nice as she was, she had a business to take care of, and had spent far more of her free time with Jane over the past few days than she had any right to.
That left Jane to her own devices. Though she still got her breakfasts from Bella, she was otherwise alone and free to explore her new work.
The morning after Bella took her to the interpreter, Jane sat down with her notebook and made a plan. Not only did she have a bakery to get up and running, but there was the dinner party to prepare for. However busy the day before had been, it was far from enough to make her forget that a boy would be visiting her house in a few short days.
An incredibly handsome boy.
Jane’s Work:
1. Master at least one more complex loaf of bread.
2. Figure out at least one type of sweet baked good. Preferably two.
3. What do people do when they have fun? Ask around.
Each item developed in complexity as she filled in the page after her list, but the overall sequence of events was still easy to understand. She was going to buy a reasonable amount of ingredients every day, practice with them, and try to get ready to feed her friends.
Bella had promised to bring meat, cheese, and wine. Sadie, who turned out to be Bella’s cousin, had been conscripted to bring ‘some kind of vegetables’, according to Bella. Nobody else was expected to bring anything, but Bella explained that often people would anyway, just to be polite guests.
That left bread and cakes-and-cookies types of food for Jane. She was not going to embarrass herself. Not in front of new friends, and certainly not in front of new… whatever-Allen-might-be-to-her.
First on her list was a more complex form of bread. Thankfully, Felicity Cast’s book had plenty to say about that.
Bread is an interestingly diverse food. It can be loaded with meats and cheeses as easily as chocolate or vegetables. The inclusion of any of these additional ingredients changes the bread, sometimes subtly and sometimes drastically.
As your first step towards mastering the near-infinite variations available to you, we will be attempting two simple tasks. The first will be a bread with seeds and herbs, and the second will be a sweet bread of some kind. These two experiments will open up worlds of possibility, just so long as you pay attention to the process as you go.
Jane made a note of all the ingredients she would need. After stopping at Bella’s stand for breakfast, she set out to tackle her list. It didn’t take her long to secure the more conventional ingredients for her day’s learning. When she went looking for the specialty items, however, she hit a snag.
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Bella had recommended a particular shop. Furthermore, Bella and two unrelated merchants had sworn that shop would be right where Jane was currently standing. Even with these assurances, it didn’t seem possible that these three sources were right.
There were no signs in the alley Jane had walked down, let alone anything that resembled a storefront. The only hint of a shop was a small, nondescript wooden door that could have led anywhere.
Jane stared at the door. Perhaps Bella and the two merchants were, in fact, right. What seemed incredibly odd to an outsider could be so normal for them that they’d forgotten to mention it.
Deciding to take her chances, Jane gathered her courage and knocked firmly on the door.
She didn’t have to wait very long. The door creaked open at the hands of a slim older man wearing spectacles.
“Gurther?” Jane asked. “I was sent here to talk about herbs and spices.”
“Then you were sent to the right place,” Gurther replied with a smile. “Sorry about how it looks. My wife keeps telling me to get a sign.”
He turned back into his dark shop, and Jane stepped in after him.
“Why don’t you? If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Oh, you know. Most people know who I am. And not having the sign gives my wife a thing to gripe about without having to work very hard at it. She likes to gripe, you see. And I’ve come to like being griped at, if you believe that.”
Jane did believe it. Furthermore, entering the man’s store immediately made her believe that people would take the trouble to find it, sign or no sign. The whole building had a strong, delicious aroma: a storm of herb smells, spice smells, and wood-and-leather smells she was helpless to untangle. It was so heady, she felt she might even get dizzy if she took it in long enough.
“Wow.” Her eyes panned over hundreds of bottles, jars, and wooden boxes lining the walls. “How will I ever find what I need?”
“Don’t worry about that, miss.” Gurther firmly thumped his own fragile-looking chest. “That’s old Gurther’s work, you see. Just tell me what you are looking for, and I’ll be glad to help.”
Jane did her best to explain her situation. Today’s needs would be easy to fill, she felt, since almost any tasty mix of herbs and salt would satisfy the experiment. Even so, she wanted to buy enough herbs to experiment with for at least the whole week, and perhaps even more than that. She had lived enough life and read enough of two cookbooks to know there were all sorts of delicious possibilities for her bread, just waiting for her to find them. She also knew she was far, far behind the game when it came to knowing what ingredients were available to her.
Gurther listened to her problems seriously, nodding as she worked through the narrative behind her needs. When she finally finished, he smiled.
“All that’s easy enough, miss. I know how the shop looks, but a lot of these things are blends, you see. I keep them pre-made for various customers. Really, there’s only so many spices and herbs we can keep in stock, and only a few different ways of roasting or storing each. If you learn those bases, you can understand the blends, or even make your own.”
He took her on a tour of the shop, introducing her to a few spices she knew and several she didn’t. Holding up container after container to her nose, he acquainted her with different herbs she had never known by name.
After some time had passed, it became clear to Jane that there was no way this was going to be a quick visit. She didn’t mind one bit. Gurther knew more about his work than any dozen laymen ever could, and was happy to talk about any aspect of it for as long as Jane needed.
Two hours later, Jane emerged from Gurther’s shop with a small fortune in spices, a few blends he thought she’d like for her day’s cooking, and a stack of notebook pages full of Gurther’s thoughts on the world of flavor. She made her heavily-laden way back to her bakery, hoping nobody minded the fragrant cloud of food-smells that emerged every time her bag jostled.
Putting together the new loaf was an easy thing. The dough itself was very similar to the basic bread she’d made the day before, with only minor adjustments to account for the saltiness of the blend she was using. On top of that, she took a page out of a later recipe and sprinkled the top with whole seeds of grain.
One of the difficulties with baking is that bread bakes at its own pace, only slightly modified by other ingredients you might add. Some ingredients are hardy, sitting inside or on top of the dough and surviving the baking process almost unchanged. Others are delicate, and can be significantly changed or even harmed by the baking process. Still others would benefit from even more heat, a searing kind of cooking that approaches or exceeds your bread’s required temperature range.
Balancing each of these takes a significant amount of effort and a great deal of thought…
While that was true, Jane knew she couldn’t rely on the book forever. Sooner or later, she’d have to start taking chances and allowing herself moments for her own cooking to shine through. Today, she wanted to make something like she had eaten before in the capital, something so good that she had even talked to the baker about it the next time she had stopped in his shop.
“Burned-top bread, my mother called it,” the baker had explained. “She held a hot coal close to the top to sear the loaf, just enough to make things nice and crispy. She said a tiny bit of burn made the seeds crunch and drew out the taste of the salt. I agree. Not an easy thing to do, though, which is why I make it so seldom.”
Jane had enjoyed that bread for days, and now she wanted to attempt her own version. She mixed her dough, let it rise, and kneaded it until it was ready to be put into three pans. Then she sprinkled each pan of dough with seeds and herbs, just on the top where they’d provide a burst of flavor that also spread through the loaf a bit.
Normally, the recipe book called for what it named ‘a non-optimal increase in temperature’ to get the top crispy, but Jane had other plans. She set the loaves to cook at the normal, optimal level of heat and moved on to her next project.
While the bread was in process in one oven, she prepared to make a completely different treat in another. Given that this was a new type of process entirely, she planned to give it her all. If it took her the rest of the day to get right, she was ready to spend that entire day. If it took her a week, she’d spend that week.
Cookies, after all, are just that important.
Jane had assumed that sugar cookies would be the simplest kind of cookie. They were delicious, and she loved them, but since there weren’t any chunks of anything in them, it seemed they should be pretty easy to make. But Felicity Cast said otherwise. Her book organized the sugar cookie recipe with several others Jane thought of as probably harder than what she was ready for.
Instead, Jane chose the next closest thing at the easy level of recipes.
Shortbread. It’s time to make shortbread.