The Ingredients of You and Me

by Nina Bocci

  “What did you call it?” Mancini asked, walking in from the other room. I heard Nick’s truck rumbling off down the road. He really did manage to turn down her offer for cookies and cocoa. In my eyes, and perhaps Mancini’s, that made his relationship with Jillian even that much more serious.

  “The Golden Girls Society of Hope Lake. Sorry, I don’t know what the actual name is.”

  “I love it,” Clara said. “Viola?”

  “Me too,” she responded. “Suzanne?”

  “Love!”

  “Girls, we have a new official name. Let me text Emma and let her know to update the town website. Maybe people will join now, if it’s not called the Senior Citizens’ Club. Those fifty-five-year-olds scoff at joining anything that sounds stuffy.”

  “Happy to help,” I said, laughing when Mancini pulled out her iPhone and Siri dictated the message to Emma. She ended with “Clearly, I’m the Blanche in this bunch,” to which the other ladies heartily agreed.

  Gigi joined us, rolling in on her motorized chair, a bottle of beer in one hand as she steered with the other. “Oh, good. You’re here. We can get the meeting started,” she said, pointing toward the wall.

  Along it, there were two long card tables set up end to end and both were piled high with cookbooks, stacks of old, faded papers, and recipe boxes with dog-eared index cards sticking out.

  “What’s all this?” I asked, gently touching one of the cookbooks. It was held together by a satin ribbon because both the front and back covers were hanging on by a thread. The front read:

  The Hope Lake Housewife

  First Edition

  1920

  “You can tell this is old. A title like this would never, ever fly today,” I mumbled, wishing I had a moment to look through the book. I was certain there would be “helpful hints” on how a housewife could make life special for her husband. I quickly realized I was right.

  Have dinner ready when he arrives home from a tough day at work.

  Take fifteen minutes to make yourself presentable.

  Let him talk first—remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

  Hashtag eye roll.

  “This, my dear, is what we need help with,” Clara said, picking up one of the boxes and holding it out for me. I set the antiquated (in more ways than one) cookbook down and carefully took the box from her. Clara peered over her reading glasses at me and smiled.

  “I’m not sure I follow?” I said, examining it. It was surprisingly heavy for its size. Smaller than a tissue box, it had a small lid that sat crookedly on top. The lettering on the top of the box was faded, but you could still see that it said Schultz Family Recipes. The area around the name was ornately carved, and there were a set of initials carved into the bottom: J.S.

  “These were my grandmother Josephine’s recipes. My mother knew them by heart because she learned from her, but my grandmother died before I was born. Needless to say, they’re so old that even Mancini can’t decipher the measurements on the cards.”

  Mancini, not missing a beat, flipped her the middle finger. “I’ll get you back for that one, Schultz.”

  “Calm down, ladies, don’t make me separate you two,” I teased. I set the box down and opened it, gently pulling out the first recipe. The paper it was on was incredibly thin, almost see-through, and it had an odd waxy coating on it. The recipe was for something called Oma’s Apfelkuchen, and the instructions were handwritten in a classic cursive. “What does this mean?”

  “The literal translation is Grandma’s apple cake. I remember loving it as a kid, but I never paid attention to my mother making it,” Clara said sadly. “In hindsight, I wish that twelve-year-old me learned it when I had the chance. Now we’re playing catch-up.”

  “This is written in German?”

  She nodded. “But that’s not the problem,” she explained, pointing to the numbers beside the words. “I can translate the ingredients—it’s the measurements that don’t make any sense. At least not to us. A jelly jar, fistful of flour? What kind of scale is that? Not to mention that the measurements would be in the metric system, which only makes things that much harder.”

  A memory popped up from my time in culinary school. “The instructors used to tell us that back in the day, people used what they had to create a recipe. So, a fistful may be a cup, or more if your gram had big hands,” I said with a laugh. “I’m not too sure about the jelly jar, because if she was in Germany when she made this recipe up, the sizing would be different from here. We can play with it and see?” I suggested, but then I thought back to the table filled with books, recipe boxes, and the handwritten treasures from long ago. One recipe I could probably do, but hundreds?

  I turned to the rest of the ladies, who were now chatting among themselves. “Does everyone have similar problems?”

  Many nodded, while a few raised their hands as if this was a class I was holding. “Ladies, I love you, but you don’t have to raise your hand. I’m not your teacher.”

  Mancini frowned. “But you sort of are. If you can figure these recipes out, you’ll help us in a way that no one else has been able to. Believe me, we’ve tried.”

  “How? Just so I’m clear what’s already been done.”

  Pauline stood shakily, holding an index card–sized recipe in her hand. “My granddaughter tried helping with this. She’s far better at the Google than me. We watched a few YouTube videos to touch on some of what we need help with—conversions, older recipes, etc.—but we haven’t had success with re-creating the old traditional favorites from the turn of the last century.”

  My stomach flipped. This was looking more and more difficult by the second. “So, you’ve already tried Google and YouTube. Short of flying to the homelands of all of these recipes, I’m not sure what else I can do.”

  Mancini smiled. “You’re perfect for this. You’re classically trained. You know the fundamentals. We’re home cooks, not formally educated in the culinary arts like you.”

  “Hey, don’t discount home cooks. I’ve learned a hell of a lot from people who never stepped foot in a culinary school,” I insisted.

  “Oh, we’re not putting home cooks down,” Viola said, coming forward. “We’re proud of what we can do in the kitchen. But there’s definitely a lack of finesse where things like this are concerned. We don’t even know where to start.”

  She and the rest of the Golden Girls looked at me the way I imagined a deer in headlights would: terrified. Realizing the median age of the group was seventy-five, I wagered that none, save for Gigi, was Internet savvy enough to do a deep dive into YouTube or Wikipedia for an answer without the guiding hands of their grandchildren.

  “I’m just saying—I mean, Google is probably going to be a lot more accurate than me, and you guys have a lot of these to go through.”

  But what else do I have going on that I can’t help?

  “We know how busy you are, Parker. We just thought maybe it would help you get some inspiration,” said Mancini. “Since you don’t have recipes of your own anymore, these are family heirlooms for all of us. It’s win-win, you know? You help us get them in order, and you’ll get your mojo back by testing all of these dishes out.” Man, she was good.

  “How did you know that I don’t have my own recipes anymore?”

  They each looked guilty in their own way. Clara looked up at the ceiling. Gigi slowly turned her wheelchair around so she was facing the corner like a scolded toddler. Pauline started filing her nails, and Viola coughed and excused herself to get water.

  “Ladies,” I admonished playfully. I wasn’t mad, of course. More curious how they gathered their information so quickly. This place was truly in love with gossip.

  Mancini cleared her throat. “Well, Emma and Charlotte were talking, and Enrico—that’s Emma’s dad—overheard them. He told Sophia—that’s Emma’s mom—who told Clara at the store, who saw Viola at canasta at the senior center, who then told Gigi, who told everyone else.”

 
I shook my head. “I barely followed that, but thank you for the explanation. You’re right. Since I don’t have any recipes of my own, maybe this will help give my creativity a much-needed kick in the pants.”

  “Plus, if I do say so myself,” Mancini continued, “we can use a little sugar around Hope Lake. Besides the restaurants, the grocery store is the only place to get any goodies unless you drive all the way to Barreton to the bakery there. And in this snow, it’s so dangerous.” She placed her hand delicately over her forehead. “It would be nice to have some homemade, authentic, and classic desserts to bring to meetings or social events.”

  “You’re just laying it on thick, aren’t you? Full of compliments.”

  She shrugged. “Is it working? If not, I have a lot more to say,” she said, not an iota of shame in her statement.

  The longer she talked and the thicker she laid it on, the more I just wanted to laugh. The woman was adorably relentless and admittedly, I found it endearing.

  “You’re one of a kind, Mancini,” I said finally. “I may not know the difference between an old German jelly jar and an American measurement, but I’ll figure it out.”

  She preened like a peacock, and the ladies cheered. “Where do we start?” one asked from the back of the room.

  That was a great question.

  I scratched my temple. “Give me a couple of recipes and I’ll take pictures. I’d like to look online to see if I can find any sort of help for translating old measurements into current ones, and I need to find the conversions because math and I are no bueno. Otherwise, we’ll have to just play with them until we find something that works. While that will lead to a lot of desserts for people to try, I’m not sure it’s the best use of our time.”

  “Are you going to put us on the line?” Clara asked, taking one of her curls and twisting it in her fingers. “I’ve never been on the computer before.”

  “What do you mean? Looking things up or actually being on the Internet?”

  “Lingo, I don’t get it,” she said, laughing. “I just mean if we find out that we’re good at this, maybe we can have a YouTube channel. My grandkids watch these videos all the time to learn about things.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I said honestly. “Let’s get through the recipes first. YouTube is a lot. I mean, maybe? Never say never, how about that?”

  “We’ll follow your lead, dear,” Viola said, handing me one of her note cards. On it was a recipe for some sort of cake called a ciambellone that had about eight ingredients but no measurements at all except for pinch, fist, and scoop. Squinting my eyes at the recipe, I couldn’t make out much other than bourbon. Lots of bourbon, apparently, as it was mentioned three times.

  “This is going to be difficult.”

  When I got back to the lake house via the Uber driver that afternoon, to my surprise someone had shoveled a path from my driveway up to the front door. It wasn’t necessarily newly fallen snow, but the gusts of wind blowing snow off of the piles I’d made the other day had blown it back onto the path. I hadn’t yet had a chance to clear it, and now it looked like I wouldn’t have to.

  “Looks like you got lucky and have a shoveling angel,” the driver said, pointing up to the house. Leaning against the side of the bright red door was a shovel with a bow attached to the handle.

  “I guess you’re right. I’ll have to thank them with some cookies,” I said, but then realized the likelihood was slim. Unless there was a note on the shovel, I had no idea who had done the good deed. I had a feeling it could have been Nick, but just because he shoveled a lot of other places didn’t mean that he was here.

  When I got into the house, I set the folder of photocopied recipes I brought with me on the table in the foyer to keep it safe. Thank God Mancini had a copy machine. The Golden Girls wanted me to take the originals, but something so old and precious wasn’t safe in this house. Not in its current state of disarray.

  Since I spent most of my time with the Golden Girls, in the kitchen, or with my laptop in bed trying to come up with inspiration, I still hadn’t unpacked my suitcase. Instead, I just chose to rummage around in it for what I needed.

  Maybe it was self-preservation. I could make a quick escape by just closing it up instead of taking the time to repack. Granted, I didn’t have much with me anyway. Most of what I was wearing now were the new items I bought with Mancini so I didn’t “catch pneumonia.”

  The other rooms were as spotless as the day I’d arrived. I hadn’t ventured into the living room, and I hadn’t had guests over yet to give me a reason to tidy the other rooms. A housecleaner would be stopping by on Friday, so there wasn’t much for me to do there either.

  Still, afraid of giving the person a heart attack when they saw the kitchen, I decided to have a good, long look at the state of it and to do a pre-tidy before they got there. At this rate, I wouldn’t be getting my deposit back because everything was a mess. Dishes were piled in the sink, my refrigerator had the most pathetic stack of bowls filled with mediocre frosting, and I didn’t yet have the gumption to look in the oven, where I knew my once famous chocolate chip cookies lay sad and flat and stuck to the Silpat.

  They were a test. Since I hadn’t been successful at making anything new, I figured I’d try something I was old hat at: a recipe that I created back at the Culinary Institute of America a decade ago and had made at least a thousand times from memory.

  It should have been a guaranteed success. Instead, the cookies didn’t rise and were dry.

  Walking into the kitchen, I felt a sudden urge of panic seeing the mess I had left behind that morning.

  “What to do, where to start?” I asked the quiet, empty kitchen. My phone buzzed in what felt like strangely perfect timing.

  I had texted Mancini earlier asking for some advice. Nothing specific, just some of her wise words to carry me through the day.

  Two words from her decided the course of action for the next bit of my afternoon.

  Keep trying

  Easier said than done. I was distracted, and it showed in my lazy baking. Knowing that I needed to focus, I racked my brain for another approach. I was never any good at meditation, but I tried anyway. Sitting on the counter in the kitchen, I took a couple deep breaths and thought about the joy that I used to get from baking. How fun it was for me. Engaging with clients, creating the recipes, and just overall getting my hands dirty. I missed that.

  Instead of focusing on where I erred during my last attempt, I took Mancini’s advice to carry on and realigned all the ingredients on the counter as I tucked in. I started with room temperature butter, sliding it into the mixing bowl, then oil and a thick block of brown sugar followed by a delightful sprinkle of white. Once the rest of the ingredients made it into the bowl, and a couple of chocolate chips made their way into my mouth, I let the mixer do its work with the gentle whirring sound that I always found calming.

  While it was mixing, I set up the cookie sheets, lining them with the new Silpat pan liners that I had bought at the store, and turned the oven on to preheat. The dough in the bowl looked perfect, and a sense of pride washed over me. Granted it was mixed with a heaping spoonful of trepidation, but I ignored that.

  Traditionally, I would have used a dough scooper for the cookies, but I didn’t have one handy. Using my hands actually felt like I was back in culinary school. The dough was nice and sticky as I shaped it into quarter-sized balls. I placed each one on the Silpat in even rows until the sheet was filled.

  Once both cookie sheets were covered, I slid them into the oven with a silent prayer on my lips. The timer was set, so I made coffee and sat at the island watching the light snow fall as I waited.

  There was a constant peace out here—one that I hoped would reinvigorate me—unlike anything I’d experienced while living in the city. Sure, I missed the constant stream of sounds that floated up to my Brooklyn apartment, but I loved that here everything was still.

  Looking out the window over the sink, I marveled at the mountains
of sparkling snow that covered the entirety of my backyard. To the right was a wide-slab stone path, which was currently blanketed in snow, that led to the boat tie area. I knew that there was a small boat in the garage, not that I had a clue how to take it out. Even if the weather was good, with my luck I’d get stuck in the center of the lake with no way of getting back.

  The property extended back into a wooded area on both sides of the house. Having had years of crazy work hours with little sleep, being here, surrounded by blissfully quiet woods, I was sleeping better than I had with every sleeping pill on the market I’d tried. With the nearest neighbor down the block, this home really was a bit of an oasis to escape to.

  The timer dinged while I was lost in thought. I slid off the stool, eager to see how the cookies turned out, but when I got to the oven door, I immediately knew that something was wrong. Pulling them out of the oven, I transferred one pan quickly to a cooling rack and waited. I was relieved to see that they weren’t burned, but the coloring wasn’t right either. They were supposed to have a sugary coating on the outside from the brown sugar baking up and out of the cookie, but that was missing. After a few minutes, when I took a bite out of one, the natural moisture it usually had was absent.

  Not typical Parker quality, but still edible. Progress, I guess.

  Today’s attempt was both a success and a failure. A success because this was new and I tried. But a failure because it wasn’t up to par with what I was used to making. Feeling dejected, I spent a few hours scouring the kitchen, putting everything back the way I found it when I arrived. Making another list for the grocery store, I put it on the fridge using an adorable Hope Lake magnet. The groceries would be delivered as soon as I called: a surprisingly modern touch for the town. Apparently the boom of Airbnb visitors created a need, and the store rose to the occasion.

  Still, I thought, I should go to the store soon. The reason was motivation. I was sorely lacking exercise, and after living in the city, where I walked constantly, I was feeling the laziness creep in. Plus, as an added bonus of getting out of the house, I’d be able to see more of the town that I had previously only wandered around at night.