The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

Chapter 18 COOKING LESSONS

MY TIME WITH GRANDDADDY slipped away as the domestic mill wheel gathered momentum, grinding its principal raw material—namely, me—into smaller and smaller scraps.

“Calpurnia,” Mother called up the stairs in that particular tone of voice I’d come to dread, “we’re waiting for you in the kitchen.”

I was in my room reading Granddaddy’s copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I put it down and didn’t answer.

“I know you’re up there,” said Mother, “and I know you can hear me. Come down here.” I sighed, slipped an old hair ribbon into the book to mark my place, and trudged downstairs. I was the condemned young aristocrat holding my head high in the tumbrel. It was a far, far better thing—

“There’s no need to look like that,” said Mother as I walked into the kitchen, where she and Viola sat waiting for me at the scrubbed pine table. “It’s only a cooking lesson.”

On the table was the marble slab, the sugar tin, a rolling pin, a large bowl of green apples, and one bright yellow lemon. And a book. I perked up until I got a closer look at it.

“Look here,” said Mother. “It’s my Fannie Farmer cookbook. You can borrow it until you get your own copy. It has everything in it that you need.”

I doubted that. She presented it to me in the same way that my grandfather had handed me his book—the other book—a few short months before. Mother smiled; Viola looked determinedly blank.

“We’re going to start with apple pie,” Mother said. “The secret is to add a splash of lemon juice and a handful of lemon zest to give it that nice tart flavor.” She smiled and nodded and spoke in that coaxing voice mothers use on reluctant children.

I tried my best to smile back. Lord knows what I looked like because Mother looked alarmed, and Viola cut her eyes to the corner.

“Won’t that be fun?” said Mother, wavering.

“I guess so.”

“Viola’s going to show you how to make the crust. It’s her specialty.”

“Get two scoops of flour out of that bin, Miz Callie,” Viola said. I blinked. She had never called me Miss before. “Dump ’em in this bowl. Okay.”

Mother thumbed through her cookbook and planned our Sunday dinner while Viola tried to lead me down the tricky path of pastry-dough making. I must have seen her make a million pies as I wandered through the kitchen, and it had always looked so easy. She never measured anything, instead cooking by eye, by instinct, and by touch, throwing in handfuls of flour and thumb-sized chunks of lard and drizzling in more or less cold water, depending. There was nothing to it. Any idiot could learn it in two minutes flat.

An hour later, I stood panting and thrashing around with my third bowl of dough, with Mother and Viola growing more incredulous by the minute. The first batch had been watery and lumpy; the second so dense I couldn’t roll it out with the pin; the last had turned out as sticky as wallpaper paste and with the same unappealing consistency. It was all over my hands and pinafore, smeared across the counter and the pump handle, and there were streaks of it stuck in my hair. I think there was even a glob on the fly paper hanging from the ceiling several feet above my head, but how it got there, I had no idea.

“Next time a kerchief, I think, Viola,” Mother said.

“Mm-hmm.”

“I tell you what,” said Mother. “Maybe we’ll let Viola finish the dough. You go ahead and peel and core the apples. Hold the apple like this, and draw the knife toward you. Be careful. It’s sharp.”

I held the knife and apple in imitation and, with the first paring motion, sliced my thumb open. Fortunately, I only bled on a couple of the apples. Viola plunged them in water, but they were still tinged pink. We all pretended not to notice. Mother went off to get me a sticking plaster. Viola and I sat at the table and looked at each other. We didn’t speak a word. I sighed and put my chin in my hand. I wanted to put my head down on the table, but that would have meant more dough in my hair. Idabelle, as if sensing my despair, climbed from her basket and came over to butt her wide forehead against my shins. I couldn’t even stroke her, I was so covered in goo. Viola got up and threw flour and water and lard together with seeming thoughtlessness and rolled out a nonsticky, nonrunny, perfect crust in no time. Then she skinned the lemon for me, whether to spare my wound its acid or to stop me from bleeding on any more fruit, I wasn’t sure.

After Mother returned and patched my cut, Viola said, “Miz Callie, you got to check the temperature of the stove.”

“How do I do that?”

“You stick your hand in there. If it’s too hot to hold it in there for more than a blink, you got a medium oven.”

“You’re joshing me.” I looked at her. “That’s what you do?”

“That’s what you do.”

“How do you tell when it’s a hot oven?” I said.

“Why, you can’t get your hand in that far. It’s too hot.”

“Isn’t there a thermometer or something?” I asked. They both laughed like this was the funniest thing they’d heard all week. Oh, funny, all right. I opened the stove and was met by a blast of hot air as if from a dragon’s cave.

“Go on, girl,” said Viola. “Go on.”

It hadn’t killed her yet, so I guessed it was safe. I took a deep breath and plunged my arm deep into the heat and pulled it out a split second later.

“Yep,” I said, fanning my hand in the air, “medium oven for sure. Maybe even hot.”

“Put those pieces of apple in the dishes. Get some sugar, like this much here,” she said, showing me sugar cupped in her palm, “and put it over the apple, you don’t need to stir it up. That’s right. Now we got to put the top crust on.”

She handed me a spatula to lift the tops from the rolling board onto the pies, which was easier said than done. The uncooperative dough flopped in all directions. When I touched it, it stuck to me; when I manhandled it, it turned leathery. It took me a good ten minutes to finish putting three pies together. I looked at them. They were a sorry-looking exhibit.

“They don’t look so good,” I said.

“You got to crimp the edges with your thumb, like this. That makes ’em look nice. You go ahead and do it.”

I pinched my way around the pies with my good thumb, and they did look better, although no one would be fooled into thinking they were Viola’s handiwork.

“Okay,” said Viola, “you only got to do one more thing.”

“What?” I croaked, exhausted.

“You got to put the letter C, for Callie, on top. Make a letter C out of dough and put it right there on top. Put it in the middle, show everybody you made it. Then you brush it with the egg yolk. Makes it all shiny.”

I rolled out three worms of dough and curled one on top of each pie as instructed. I brushed the yolk on top, and we all stood back and looked.

“There you go,” said Viola.

“Well,” said Mother. “Very nice.”

“Whew,” I said.

That night, when SanJuanna had cleared the main course and brought dessert in, my mother called for quiet and said, “Boys, I have an announcement to make. Your sister made the apple pies tonight. I’m sure we will all enjoy them very much.”

“Can I learn how, ma’am?” said Jim Bowie.

“No, J.B. Boys don’t bake pies,” Mother said.

“Why not?” he said.

“They have wives who make pies for them.”

“But I don’t have a wife.”

“Darling, I’m sure you will have a very nice one someday when you’re older, and she’ll make you many pies. Calpurnia, would you care to serve?”

Was there any way I could have a wife, too? I wondered as I cut through the browned C and promptly shattered the entire crust. I tried to cut slices but mangled the job and ended up spooning out pie that looked more like cobbler. Father smiled at his dessert, smiled at Mother, smiled at me. My brothers made exclamations of appreciation and fell on their portions like hungry dogs. My cooking lesson had taken all afternoon; the results were downed in four minutes flat. None of them could flatter me enough to make up for the fact that I had lost hours with my Notebook, my river, my specimens, and my grandfather. Granddaddy chewed his pie, deep in thought.