Chapter 9 #2
Peeling is just as boring a task as ever, but this time, Mebel knows to expect the ache, so it doesn’t catch her off guard like it did on that first day.
Plus, she has righteous indignation fueling her, and there is no emotion quite as powerful as pettiness.
She finishes peeling them in no time, then she moves on to the chopping.
Her first few attempts come out wonky, but instead of getting frustrated, Mebel takes her phone out and opens up YouTube.
Chef Clarke suggested it in a somewhat patronizing way, and now she is going to take his advice to heart and utilize the app, though perhaps not quite in the way he was thinking.
He wanted her to use social media to find fun little recipes to cook for Henk.
She’s going to use it to find videos on how to correctly cube a fucking potato, damn it.
The next thirty minutes are spent hyperfocusing to get the potatoes into uniformly sized cubes.
At first, Mebel obsesses over each cube, painstakingly pushing it up against the measuring board to make sure all its sides are the appropriate length.
It’s a mind-meltingly boring, arduous task, and several times, Mebel is tempted to throw her knife down in the most dramatic fashion and call it a day.
But somehow, she keeps going, fueled by an inner flame that she hasn’t felt in decades.
In fact, she can’t quite remember the last time she’d applied herself so wholly to a singular task, and she’s surprised to find that part of her is kind of enjoying itself.
It isn’t long before she’s managing consistent cubes.
She goes to a state that’s somewhere between conscious and subconscious, a beautiful flow where she is able to watch herself wield the knife, nowhere near expertly, but somewhere close to comfortably, at least. And before she knows it, there is a small mountain of cubes next to her.
Mebel steps back and marvels at her work.
She picks up one piece and measures it, then another, and another, and they’re all the correct size.
Joy flows throughout her body, effervescent, and she does a quick hop and goes, “Woo!”
There is a gasp from the doorway. Mebel’s heart stops. She swings round, all of her senses screaming—oh my god, she is definitely going to get kicked out now, for sure. But it isn’t Chef Clarke at the door; it’s Gemma.
“Sorry,” Gemma says, and is about to close the door when Mebel calls out to her.
“Wait!”
Gemma hesitates. Why does she look so guilty? Then again, Mebel probably looks guilty as hell too. For a moment, the two of them stare at each other, each woman trying her hardest to not look like she’s up to no good.
Finally, Mebel decides that instead of asking Gemma what she’s doing in the kitchen, she should offer up a piece of information as a show of goodwill. So she says, “I’m practicing my knife skills.” She holds up a cubed potato.
“Oh!” Gemma’s shoulders lower ever so slightly. She looks a little less like a hamster who’s just sensed an eagle overhead and more like a hamster who thinks there might be an eagle overhead but isn’t too sure about it.
“I don’t know if it’s allowed, technically,” Mebel says with a shrug. She gives Gemma a cunning glance. “And why you are here?”
Gemma grimaces. “Um, I was kind of hoping to get in a bit of practice too.”
“I don’t remember you have trouble cubing potatoes,” Mebel says.
“No, I don’t have trouble with that. I just wanted to—uh…”
As Gemma’s voice trails away, Mebel notices the large bag she’s carrying. “What is that?”
Gemma shies away, as though to hide the bag from Mebel, but then she pauses, taking a breath, and says, “Oh god, I feel so stupid, this is the first time I’m doing this, truly, I—”
“As long as not someone’s severed head inside, I think you are fine,” Mebel says.
Gemma’s mouth closes abruptly. Then she laughs out loud.
“Thank you for that. No, it isn’t someone’s severed head, though I feel like it would almost be less mortifying if it was.
” With a sigh, she unzips the bag and shows Mebel the contents.
“It’s ingredients to cook with, plus this.
” She takes out a foldable tripod and camera ring light with an embarrassed smile.
“Ooh. Are you one of them—wait, I hear this from my friend who recently find out her grandson goes to this horrible pornographic website—I think it’s called Only Vans? You know, I always wonder why the name, but then I realize it makes sense, because only shady people own vans. So—”
“No, oh my god, Mebel!” Gemma cries. “No, this isn’t for OnlyFans.” She pauses. “How would this even work with OnlyFans?”
Mebel gives her a cynical sideways glance. “I don’t know what you young people are up to these days. Maybe you are about to cook naked in front of the camera. There are all sorts of fetish and I don’t judge.”
“Oh god. Please stop talking.” Gemma looks so genuinely horrified that Mebel feels sorry for the poor kid.
“No, I only take videos of my hands. Not in a sexual way,” she adds when Mebel is about to say something.
“I do cooking videos. They’re shot top-down and they only show my hands doing the cooking. ”
“Oh! Well, like that is okay. Why are you so acting so sus about it?”
Gemma stares at her. “So ‘sus’? Mebel, I beg you, please stop trying to use Gen Z slang.”
“My granddaughter says it all the time. Is it my fault if I am on fleek?”
“Oh god,” Gemma mutters, but Mebel catches the hint of a smile. “Okay, the reason I am acting ‘sus’ is because I’m pretty sure the school wouldn’t be happy about me using their premises to shoot my own personal videos. Same reason why you’re being sus about chopping potatoes.”
Mebel looks down at her small mountain of cubed potatoes. “You have a point. So you are going to shoot a video now? I watch, okay?”
Gemma chews on her lower lip. “I don’t know, I don’t do well with an audience.”
“Have you ever had audience?”
“No.”
“Then how you can know if you do well with an audience or not?”
In the ensuing silence, Gemma’s teeth grind audibly. “Okay, I suppose you have a point. You can watch. Quietly.”
Mebel makes a zipping motion along her mouth. With another sigh, Gemma heads for her worktable and begins unloading the ingredients onto the kitchen counter.
“What are you making?”
“A Scotch egg, but with a twist.”
Mebel has no idea what an untwisted Scotch egg is to begin with, so she simply smiles and says, “Oh yes, wonderful idea.” She watches as Gemma sets up the tripod and carefully positions her phone.
When she turns the ring light on, a dramatic spotlight appears, aimed straight down at the ingredients on the countertop.
“Oh my,” Mebel says appreciatively. Who knew that there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes of a simple cooking video?
Cooking has never been a thing that Mebel fully appreciated.
For her, food was something to be enjoyed in the consumption of it, not the creation.
Food was something that was prepared behind the scenes and appeared at the table every mealtime.
She can count on one hand the number of cooking shows she has watched in her lifetime, and she’s never once spared a thought for the amount of prep work that has to be done behind the scenes.
And she is thoroughly gobsmacked by how involved Gemma’s “Scotch egg with a twist” turns out to be.
First, there’s the eggs themselves. Gemma boils four of them in water with a splash of vinegar for six minutes exactly before transferring them to an ice bath.
Then there’s the meat mixture. Gemma chops up chives and parsley and garlic with such ease that Mebel is both surprised and humbled.
So this is what proper knife skills look like.
The parsley in particular looks like green dust by the time Gemma is through with it.
She opens up a bunch of fat sausages and squeezes out the meat into a mixing bowl, then pours the chopped up herbs and garlic into it.
Mebel admires the deftness with which Gemma folds the mixture together.
“You are very skilled,” Mebel says. “What you are adding to the meat now?”
“English mustard. It adds a bit of a zing to it.” Now that Gemma is actually cooking, she’s lost all traces of her earlier anxiety.
In fact, after a while, she begins to narrate what she’s doing to Mebel.
“Traditional Scotch eggs are crusted with breadcrumbs and then fried, but I wanted to do something different, so I’m wrapping mine in puff pastry and then baking it.
” She presents her puff pastry with pride to Mebel.
“I made this earlier today. Have you ever made puff pastry?”
Mebel shakes her head. To her, the sheet of pastry looks like any other pastry dough.
“It’s one of the toughest things to master. Layers of dough alternating with butter. You have to make sure the temperature is just right so the butter doesn’t melt into the dough, so you’ve got to work fast. Took me years to get it right.”
“Why anyone would bother making puff pastry?” Mebel says. “I’ve never eat a single puff pastry in my life.”
Gemma stares at her. “So, you’ve never eaten a croissant?”
“What that has to do with puff pastry?”
“Mebel,” Gemma groans. “Good grief, why are you at culinary school?”
“Because my husband decide to leave me for our twenty-four-year-old chef,” Mebel says dryly.
Gemma is now back to gaping at her. “Wait, seriously?”
“Oh yes. It is a bit of shock.”
“Jesus, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry, Mebel.”
“Yes, she make best five-spice roast pork belly. The skin is so crispy and fragrant.”
“I mean, like, it must’ve been horrible to lose your husband like that?” Gemma says.
“Oh, right. Yes, that too. That is why I’m here, you know. To learn how to cook and win him back. They say that the way to man’s heart is—”
“Through his stomach, yeah I know that one.”
“I have always thought the way to man’s heart is through his penis, but where has that one got me? So here I am, I try the route of the stomach.”
“God, I never want to hear you say the P-word ever again,” Gemma mutters.
Mebel waves her off. “Don’t be such prude, Gemma. And also, you are not allowed to call me Mebel. I am at least forty years older. Is so disrespectful. You call me Auntie Mebel.”
“No can do, Mebs,” Gemma says cheerfully. “In here, we’re schoolmates. We’re equals.”
Mebel is torn. Gemma is right, in a way.
At the Saint Honoré School of Culinary Arts, both she and Gemma are first-year students.
But still, a large part of Mebel can’t let go of the fact that she’s Gemma’s elder and should be treated with the deference she deserves.
But then again, she’s no longer in Asia, where elders are treated with reverence.
As her brain clacks away at this convoluted thought, she watches Gemma roll out the puff pastry.
Gemma wraps the soft-boiled egg with a layer of sausage meat, then wraps that up in the puff pastry before sliding it into the oven.
It’s impossible to take her eyes off Gemma’s hands as she works.
They move so deftly it’s almost like watching a ballet.
And it is then that Mebel realizes Gemma is right.
Here in the school, they’re classmates. Equals.
Just because Mebel is older doesn’t necessarily mean she knows better.
In fact, Gemma can cook circles around her.
She needs to accept that youth doesn’t mean a lack of wisdom.
“Okay,” she says finally.
Gemma glances up from the second egg she’s wrapping. “Okay what?”
“Okay, you call me by my first name.”
“Cool.”
That’s it? Mebel wants to say. Here she has come to the choice only after having a mental wrestling showdown with herself, and there’s Gemma just calmly cutting out a puff pastry leaf to use as decoration. Mebel sighs. Try as she might, she will never understand these youngsters.