The Kitchen Front

by Jennifer Ryan

  “But a reward isn’t good enough! You should have a fair chance of winning.”

  “It’s not as if we have much of a chance anyway. We’re far too busy. At least, Sir Strickland’s reward will be something.”

  Audrey stamped a foot crossly, feeling anger welling up for the poor girl. “Why does everything have to revolve around them?”

  “Th-that’s the game, you see.” Nell gave her a weak smile. “You get security, good food on your plate, and a small room in a beautiful house.”

  Audrey went to finish her thought. “And in return—”

  “You give them your soul.”

  Zelda

  Zelda Dupont was not the type of person to leave things to chance. She had been aiming to be the last to leave Ambrose’s house. Any plan worth its salt would include a campaign of befriending the judge—who could tell what might be needed in the later stages of the competition? She had been hoping to flirt with him, a tactic she used often and well, but since he was obviously not a ladies’ man, that idea was jettisoned.

  “What a wonderful opportunity you’re bringing to us chefs, Ambrose.”

  Ambrose fumbled with his notes. “Yes, I’m glad it’s something the community is supporting.”

  She laughed, pretending it was all a bit of a lark. “My job at the factory is a marvelous little role—good to do my bit for the war. Of course, it’s not at all like my previous work at the Dartington Hotel.” She applied emphasis to the last part of this statement. “Perhaps we should meet, and I could give you some proper haute cuisine tips from a top restaurant chef.”

  As if from nowhere, Lady Gwendoline was suddenly beside them, looking accusingly at Zelda. “Ambrose is beyond bribing, you know!” she snapped. Then she turned to smile up at him. “A man of his caliber is fair, evenhanded, and honest. Isn’t that right, Ambrose?”

  “Quite so!” His smile had adopted a frightened wobble.

  Noting it, Zelda decided it was time to politely take her leave, exiting with a dignified swirl of her dress. Once outside the front door, she cautiously looked over her shoulder to make sure no one saw her walking briskly to the bus stop. A woman of her caliber should never stoop to taking a bus.

  Rain was coming down by the time she stepped off the bus in Middleton. It was an ugly town, gray and dismal with struggling businesses and small factories. The acrid smell of gunpowder seeped out of the new munitions factory, smoke hanging in the air. There would be fog in the morning again.

  She passed the concrete pillbox, built to guard the town in case of invasion and painted like it was a petrol station, then took out her key to the little rowhouse on the main street. How she loathed it there. When she’d pressed the Middleton billeting officer again, emphasizing her special need due to her pregnancy, the woman had looked bemused—there was nothing about Zelda that indicated that she was, indeed, pregnant. At five months, her bump was still small and easily concealed beneath the loose corset, especially with flowing clothes or her kitchen apron. But after relentless urging, the officer had written to the Fenley billeting officer.

  “Hopefully she can find somewhere close to the pie factory,” she’d said, desperate to get Zelda off her back. “I’ll get in touch as soon as I have an address for you.”

  That had been last week, and there was still no news.

  Bottling up her frustration, Zelda crept quietly up the stairs. But it was no good. The vile woman who owned the house was already upon her.

  “Oh, you’re still here, then,” she yelled. “You and that unborn bastard inside you!”

  “I explained that my pregnancy was my own matter, not yours.” Zelda snapped pointedly, her guttural cockney coming out. “Your thoughts on the subject are not my business, and vice versa.”

  “But while you’re under my roof, you little trollop—”

  “Call me what you will, but I’ll always make a better coq au vin than you.” With that, she briskly trotted up the stairs to her room, leaving the bitter old nag downstairs letting loose with a stream of names.

  Inside her room, Zelda leaned against the door with a groan. She looked around the desolate space, small and square with a lumpy, cold bed down one wall, a boxy dressing table down another. At the foot of the bed, a great old wardrobe stank as if something had died inside it. Before she switched on the light, she closed the blackout screen—in this case, a sheet the woman had painted black hooked over a few nails.

  “Back in the lap of luxury,” she muttered as she switched on the light, the dusty drabness of her surroundings filling her with a sense of despair.

  The dressing table was cluttered with recipe books mixed with mascara, hairbrushes, and her favorite razor-sharp vegetable knife. Down she sat, sweeping the debris to one side and pulling out her notebook.

  “I need a plan,” she murmured, finding a clean page; and then, carefully, she made a list of her competition.

  Lady Strickland: Probably a half-decent cook but good enough to win? She knows Ambrose well, and he’ll give her an advantage, especially since her husband is a bigwig.

  Audrey Landon: Isn’t this a competition for serious cooks? What’s that scruffy housewife doing here? Probably no need to worry about her, though it is said that her berry pies are quite good. Could be a problem in Round 3.

  Mrs. Quince and Nell: This team will be hard to beat. The woman is a renowned manor-house cook, although the maid is a clumsy mouse of a girl.

  How was she going to stop Mrs. Quince? Even in London, Zelda had come across her name. Her reputation for big banquet British and French cuisine was legendary.

  If only I were in London. Then I could pull in some favors and have someone else get rid of her for me.

  “That’s it!” she shrieked. “That’s precisely it!”

  She would tempt Mrs. Quince away from Fenley.

  With this in mind, she pulled some writing paper out of a drawer and began to write to a former work colleague. He owed her a good turn after she covered for him when he was caught with that parlor maid.

  My dearest Claude,

  If my memory serves me correctly, you owe me a favor. I warned you I never forget, and lucky for you it’s an easy task. As you are now the head butler at Rathdown Palace, I want you to urge Lord Morton to consider a new head cook. Mrs. Quince is considered the finest cook in Kent. Currently working in Fenley Hall, she may well be looking for a different place of employment soon and would be open to a good opportunity.

  Any offers should be addressed directly to her, Mrs. Quince, at Fenley Hall. Don’t mention my name. It’ll be our little secret.

  Yours,

  Zelda Dupont

  “Let’s test her loyalty to the Stricklands, shall we?” Zelda muttered happily as she sealed the letter and two others of a similar nature.

  Next, she turned her attention to the competition itself. She had to show initiative, ingenuity, and skill. The winner would produce the best-tasting food—the dish that played to Ambrose’s favorites.

  “He’s a man who dines in the top London restaurants, so fine dining must be what he expects,” she mused.

  A list of ideas came to mind, but each was dismissed as it was deemed too bland, too simple, too obscure. Some needed ingredients that would be impossible to get with all the shortages and rationing—her job meant that she couldn’t queue at the butcher’s all morning, as seemed to have become necessary if you wanted good meat. It didn’t help that she wasn’t a local. Butchers enjoyed power these days, and building a rapport with one paid off, especially if you had favors or goods to swap. Even then, often all he had were sausages, scraps of offal, or horsemeat. Before the war, the latter had been dog food; now it was deemed good enough for human consumption. The dogs had to do without.

  People were cooking anything it seemed these days. Only yesterday in the paper she’d read about women collecti
ng mussels and seaweed from rocky coastlines, searching for gulls’ eggs to use in place of hens’, and making snail havens in their gardens.

  She shook herself, murmuring, “No, I have to come up with something so good that it can’t possibly lose.”

  It had to stand out.

  It had to be brave.

  It had to be sophisticated, with bold flavors, unlike anything the other contestants would produce.

  “Coquilles St. Jacques,” she murmured under her breath, as if it were an incantation or a magical spell.

  The words echoed through her heart, and her mind reeled back to that evening, only three years ago, when Jim Denton had shown her how to create the famous French dish in the deserted Chelsea hotel kitchen in the dark hours of morning. Perhaps one of the most handsome men she’d ever met, his charm was magnetic, his daring legendary. At once he was a gentleman, a culinary genius, and a Casanova.

  She forced him out of her head.

  “I need to focus on the contest. Now, do I have some scallop shells somewhere in my boxes that I can use? And where on earth am I to get scallops?”

  A frown creased her brow.

  Fish and seafood weren’t rationed, but there wasn’t much of them around. The Royal Navy had commandeered the fishing fleet at the start of the war, along with their crews. Most of the boats were now minesweepers or used for ferrying the military around the coast. Local fishermen and anyone trying to find extra food by scavenging on beaches for shellfish often found barbed wire, land mines, and massive beach defenses lined up to stop or stall a Nazi invasion.

  “I’ll have to find myself a black-market spiv,” she said with relish. It was bound to be against the rules of the contest, but who was to know she hadn’t come by her ingredients in a moment of luck? Many scarce items could be found randomly in shops from time to time. She could have been in the right fishmonger, queuing for hours, to get those perfect scallops.

  A lot of the top chefs were working the black market to source good ingredients. In London, these little men were easy to find. But here, in this backwater? She would have to see what she could do. If necessary, she could replace the scallops with circles of cod—she’d heard of restaurants doing that. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do.

  After asking the factory girls, she located the whereabouts of the local black marketeer in Middleton. Frank Fisk was a scrawny weasel of a man with a thin moustache and oiled hair. She met him in a clothes shop on the high street that had closed down as a result of the clothes rationing.

  “Frank Fisk, I presume?” she asked of the man, who was sitting at a table as if in his own office. The place was dark and smelled of mothballs. Empty clothes racks were set to the side, along with the occasional dismembered mannequin, gruesomely armless in the dim light.

  He put forth a thin hand, which she ignored.

  “I’ve been informed that you can provide foods that are hard to come by. Is that correct?”

  His smile displayed a somewhat lax approach to dental health. “You’ve come to the right place, duchess.”

  Ignoring his familiarity, she continued. “Seafood. I want scallops preferably, and if not, cod. Can you get it?”

  “If you want it, Frank Fisk can get it, sweetheart.” A wink supported this sentiment. “Scallops won’t be cheap, mind you. Two shillings apiece.”

  “That’s extortionate, but since I only need two of them, I’ll take them.” She strode to the door. “Get them for me for the second Saturday in July, fresh. If you can’t for some reason, then find me a thick piece of fresh cod.”

  “Right you are, missus.” He darted about her to open the door in a nauseatingly obsequious fashion. “Pleasure to do business.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure,” she muttered, wondering if she would indeed get her scallops.

  That evening, with her landlady out at her Women’s Institute meeting, Zelda took over the kitchen to try out her recipe. She had pilfered the ingredients from the factory kitchen for the exercise. In place of the scallops, she had a piece of what everyone called “scrod,” which comprised a thin, indeterminate whitefish that may or may not have been cod. These days, it was often the only fresh fish to be found.

  Checking that she had everything, she switched on her wireless for a little music. Jazz poured into the room, a female voice singing “Pennies from Heaven.” Zelda’s mind flitted momentarily to another place, another time, before refocusing on the task at hand.

  Her Coquilles St. Jacques.

  First of all, she had to make the mushroom duxelles, a mushy base of mushrooms and shallots upon which the scallop—or circle of scrod—would sit. Finely shaving a mushroom to wafer-thin papers, she then chopped a small onion—shallots were not a staple in the factory canteen so onion it would have to be. Together she fried them in a little butter, adding garlic, thyme, and a drop of white wine vinegar in place of a nice Chablis. She savored the warm garlicky scent, the mushrooms heady in the background. She hadn’t smelled anything like it since…

  And in that strange way that aromas can, she was transported back to the Chelsea hotel kitchen where they worked and lived three years ago. Jim Denton was the first to show her how to prepare Coquilles St. Jacques. He had stood a little too closely beside her, his breath warm and even on her neck.

  Jim was a real man, a type that she had never previously met: strong, determined, in control. As he went through each step, he taught her how to smell, to taste, to feel the subtleties of texture and viscosity. She watched with adoration as he molded, severed, and separated the fish, as he poured, dabbed, and spread the duxelles, as he closed his eyes when drawing in a deep breath to savor the warm fragrances, as if an almighty presence had lifted him to a higher domain.

  Brushing away her memories, Zelda got back to her contest starter. Taking the parcel of fish, she gently unwrapped the thin, translucent scrod fillets and, careful to not break the taut flesh, she slid her knife into it, deftly cutting out the circles.

  Jim Denton had seduced her that night. She liked to think of it as a seduction, although if she were honest, she had coaxed him, dared him. Every night following, he would steal into her bed, the moonlight searing into the small, dusty space to the tune of their gasps, their mouths licking, tasting, relishing each other as if starved of a crucial life ingredient.

  She had never known what it was to be loved. Her desperate childhood had made her cold and callous. But as Jim’s eyes tore into her soul, she felt her heart come alive. It was as if he could see straight into her, to the real, hurt, and lonely woman inside. It was a feeling she could never have imagined—and now one she could never forget.

  She heated the milk in a small pan to poach the little piles of scrod disks.

  But Jim kept meandering back into her mind, and before a minute had past, she was back in Chelsea. It hadn’t been long after the Coquilles St. Jacques evening that they’d escaped from the Chelsea hotel in the middle of the night. It was three in the morning, and she was almost asleep, warm and naked beside him in her bedroom in the attic, when she sensed him pulling away from her, the warmth of him replaced with a stiff cold air.

  “Where are you going?” she whispered.

  But there was a roughness in his movements as he pulled on his trousers.

  “I have to go,” he said in a harsh whisper. “Go back to sleep.”

  She sat up, alarmed, jerking his arm back. “Why?” Then the panic always at the back of her mind. “Are you leaving me?”

  “No, no. There was trouble today. I didn’t want to tell you. But I have to get out.”

  That made her jolt up, standing beside him. She twisted his face toward hers, ignoring the chill on her naked body. “What trouble? Why didn’t you tell me? I thought we had no secrets from each other.”

  He turned away from her, his chest and shoulders almost incandescent in the moonlight. “You thought wrong.”r />
  She pulled him to her naked body. “You can’t leave me! What did you do that was so bad?”

  He shrugged, a cocked smirk lifting one side of his mouth. “They say I stole some silver.”

  She understood him sufficiently to know that this was probably true. “Were you going to run away without me?”

  He let out a gentle laugh at her naïvety. “You’re too good for me, Zelda.” He leaned down and kissed her softly—oh so softly—and she melted into him like butter in the heat of the fire.

  “No, no!” she gasped, pushing him away, furiously putting on her own clothes. “I’m coming with you.”

  “You can’t. I’ll have to go underground for a while—”

  “You don’t understand, do you?” she said, almost shouting at him. “I have to.”

  Together they let themselves out the back door, and they were free. For a few weeks they lived in sheds, or they broke into houses and hotels, picking pockets, running and laughing. Their lives consisted of dodging and diving, fleeing and hiding, making love under the stars.

  Jim bribed his way into the position of head chef in a fancy London restaurant, Le Mirage, and Zelda got a job at the Dartington Hotel, making a mockery of the restaurant’s top chefs by inventing her own superior recipes and working her way up. She took a small flat off Holloway Road, and night after night, they had escaped back to her flat, desperate to devour and be devoured. Only, as time went on, he’d turn up later, and then sometimes not at all. Gradually his possessions were being removed. Was he slowly leaving her?

  After precisely four minutes, she carefully lifted out the scrod circles. They didn’t hold their shape well, but on the whole, it was as good as it could be.

  Next, she had to prepare the sauce. The rationing and scarcities had brought on a flurry of mock recipes. “Mock cream” was anything from meat fat blended with sugar to a type of cold roux sauce that sounded absolutely revolting. It was nothing like cream.

  How gullible does the Ministry of Food think we are?