“It sounds like you guys were a good team.”
“Yeah. We were.” She closed her eyes, squeezing them, and Henry hoped he hadn’t said the wrong thing. “He actually—he only ever cooked one thing.”
“What was it?”
“Burgers. On the grill. Every Fourth of July. Practically the whole block would come over to get one, that’s how good they were. I was thinking . . . about maybe doing a burger. For my final meal.”
“I think you should.”
“I know it’s not very chef-y, or that the idea of a chef-y burger is overdone, I guess, but I just . . . I just want to cook something that feels like me. Like home. Like family. Like . . . love.”
“Like potatoes?”
“Potatoes,” Rosie repeated.
“Potatoes are nature’s most romantic starch.” From his perch on the counter, Henry leaned over to the other station and picked up the nearest plate—it had a stack of thick steak fries on it. “Wasn’t that the whole point of all this?”
“The whole point of all this is that I like you. And you like potatoes.” Rosie grabbed a fry.
“I like you more than potatoes.” Henry grabbed one, too.
“Now that would make a great Valentine’s Day card.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Henry said. Valentine’s Day. With Rosie. It was only a couple months away. Maybe Dad could get them back into Les Oies. At this moment, Henry felt like anything was possible.
“Can you reach the mashed potatoes?” Rosie asked.
“Think so.” Henry reached over and slid the bowl closer. “This really is an overwhelming amount of potatoes. It might be too much even for me to finish them.”
“Should we get everybody to help us eat them?” Rosie asked. “Honestly, I’m sure they’re right outside. Yumi’s probably hiding on the staircase, eavesdropping.”
“We’ll get them in a minute,” Henry said. “They can wait.”
Henry pushed aside the mashed potatoes and kissed her again.
He’d waited long enough.
“Open up.”
Henry’s lips closed around the spoon Rosie held up to his mouth. Oh God. He’d been wrong about everything. Maybe chocolate was better than potatoes. He mmmed involuntarily as his eyes closed.
“Is it good?” she asked anxiously.
“Better than good. It’s delicious.”
But delicious was inadequate. The only way Henry could think of to tell her how good it was, was to lean down and kiss her, slowly. The kiss felt like tempering chocolate, something solid melting to form something new.
“Henry!” Rosie chided him as she pulled away. “Focus. Does it need anything? More salt?”
“Give me more. I’m not sure.”
It didn’t need more salt. But he needed more chocolate whatever-it-was. Rosie fed him another bite, and Henry mmmed in response.
“Can you please stop being gross?” Yumi complained, interrupting Henry’s chocolate reverie.
“I’m not being gross!” Henry protested. “I’m tasting the food.”
“I don’t think you’re gross.” Rosie put down the tasting spoon to squeeze his hand. “You’re very decidedly un-gross,” she whispered as she rose up to kiss him again.
“Stop it! The both of you! No more kissing! No more mmming! It’s repulsive and you know it.” Yumi looked around the kitchen, where she, Marquis, Hampus, Priya, Rosie, and Henry were clustered around Priya and Rosie’s table. “I hope everyone is noticing how hashtag-Mumi over here has never tortured you with PDA. Or mmming sounds. This is why we’re the École’s best couple.”
“The École’s best couple is Hampus and that sandwich,” Marquis said, pointing to the stool where Hampus sat, busily demolishing his snack.
“I am sorry!” Hampus said between bites. “I was hungry!”
“Must be nice to be relaxed enough to take a snack break,” Priya said wryly. “The advantages of already knowing you’ve been guaranteed a spot here in the spring.”
“Everyone is coming back and I will tolerate zero negativity in my kitchen!” Yumi barked. Henry wasn’t sure when it had become Yumi’s kitchen, but she was running it like a boss. “Priya, if you serve Chef Laurent that same rack of lamb you just served me, he’ll be begging you to stay!”
Henry watched Priya stand up a bit straighter. The lamb had been cooked perfectly. So had everything they’d tried. He was really glad Yumi and Marquis had made them all practice their dishes together. Henry was excited to cook for Chef Laurent, obviously, but there was still that low thrum of anxiety that he hadn’t earned his spot here next semester yet. Never mind the fact that all he’d heard all semester long was that he couldn’t put himself on the plate, which was exactly what he was supposed to do now. Henry was happy with the dishes he’d come up with, and his friends seemed to like them, but was that enough? Was he enough?
And what if he did pull it off, but Mom made him leave the École anyway? Henry had no idea how he’d done on his finals. It was entirely possible he’d sink into the B range.
Henry needed more chocolate.
“You guys have to try this dessert Rosie made,” Henry said. “It is ridiculous.”
“Really? It’s good?” Rosie whispered to him as everyone crowded toward the small glass dish, tasting spoons at the ready.
“It’s better than good, Rosie.” Henry squeezed her hand, and suddenly things didn’t seem so bad. “It’s perfect.”
“Mmmmmm.”
Yumi was mmming loudly, her eyes closed. Henry burst out laughing.
“What?” Yumi said defensively. “Some things are just that good, okay?”
Henry looked down at Rosie smiling up at him.
Some things were just that good.
He was here.
Chef Laurent was here, physically here, in the building. Rosie wiped her hands on her chef’s pants for what felt like the millionth time. She was sweating out of places she didn’t even know she could sweat. What would happen when she actually saw Chef Laurent? Her body couldn’t produce any more sweat than this. Or at least she hoped it couldn’t.
Rosie kept an eye on the clock at the front of the classroom as she plated her biscuit. The time limit wasn’t insanely tight—they’d even been able to do some prep work yesterday—but she still had to be ready to go when Madame Besson called her name. They were going in alphabetical order, which meant Rosie was near the end. But poor Henry—Yi—was absolutely last. Which would have made Rosie feel more nervous, but Henry, working alone at his station at the front of the room, seemed completely relaxed. Hampus—last name Andersson—had gone first, and most of the kitchen had cleared out as they’d worked their way through the alphabet. Priya was gone, and Yumi, and Marquis. Bodie was still working a couple rows behind her, but Rosie wasn’t looking at him. She couldn’t. She couldn’t afford any kind of distraction.
Which was unfair, because this had basically been the most distracting week of her life.
“Parker-Green and Radeke.” Madame Besson stuck her head into the kitchen. “Please bring whatever you need to finish plating up to the prep kitchen. You will be next.”
Next. Rosie looked from her incomplete appetizer plate to the total chaos of dishes and bowls surrounding her.
“Here.” Henry was at her side, already picking up everything she needed. “Let me help,” he said. “I’ve got time.”
“Henry,” Rosie chided him. “You should be finishing your meal. I can do this—”
“I know you can,” he said firmly. “But let me help.”
Rosie smiled, grabbed her dessert from out of the fridge, and followed him up the stairs to the kitchen that led out to the cafeteria. Clara was already up there, arranging her plates on a counter along one wall. Rosie and Henry set her stuff up on another counter, away from Clara. Rosie scanned her plates with her eyes—yup, it was all here. Everything she needed. She wiped her hands on her pants. Why couldn’t she stop sweating?
“I’ve gotta go downstairs before
my sauce reduces too much,” Henry said, “but I just want to say good luck. Not that you need it, because you don’t.” He smiled at her, and she was tempted to grab on to his hand and refuse to let him leave the kitchen. “This meal is fantastic. It’s you, Rosie.”
And he said it like being Rosie was the best possible thing something could be.
Henry leaned down and brushed his lips against hers. Rosie answered his kiss with one of her own, and if she hadn’t known Henry had to go check on his sauce, she might have just kissed him forever and forgotten about the whole Chef Laurent thing. But she didn’t forget the sauce, so she stopped kissing Henry, and he disappeared back down the stairs, and Rosie found that she missed him already.
“That’s a new development.”
Clara. Rosie had forgotten she was in the kitchen, too. In fact, Rosie was having a hard time remembering the last time she’d even thought about Clara.
“Um . . . Yes. Yes, it is,” Rosie said awkwardly. “A new development. It was a long time coming, though.”
“Oh. I thought you and Bodie had, like, a thing.”
“Nope.” Rosie shook her head. “We’re just friends.”
“Well.” Clara fiddled with her earring. “He talks about you a lot. And he’s always over at your station. I see him there all the time.”
“Like I said. We’re friends.”
Clara had been jealous of Rosie and Bodie? Perfect Clara, with her gorgeous hair and her flawless skin and her effortless ease in the kitchen, had been jealous of Rosie? The whole idea of it was so absurd Rosie almost burst out laughing, but it explained a lot. As Clara stood there, still fiddling with her earring, Rosie felt nothing but empathy for her. Rosie certainly understood how hard it was to find the words to tell someone you liked them.
“Parker-Green.” Madame Besson appeared in the doorway. “You are next.”
Clara drew in a shaky breath before she rolled her shoulders back, picked up her dishes—how she managed to balance all three effortlessly, Rosie didn’t know—and glided into the cafeteria, as serene and flawless as she’d always been.
Now Rosie was alone in the prep kitchen. She finished plating her dishes, spooning sauces, and adjusting her food, and in what felt like no time at all, Madame Besson was back in the kitchen.
Clara never came back. She must have gone out the front.
“Radeke!” Madame Besson called from the front of the room. “You are next!”
Rosie went to pick up her dishes, but found, much to her dismay, that her hands were shaking uncontrollably. She tried to pick up her appetizer, but the plate rattled noisily against the stainless steel countertop.
“Please.” Madame Besson was now next to Rosie, and stilled her shaking hand by placing one of her own perfectly manicured hands on top of it. “Please. Let me. I will carry your plates. Take only your dessert.”
This small gesture of kindness almost undid Rosie, but as Madame Besson whisked her appetizer and entrée out of the room, Rosie didn’t have the luxury of coming undone at the moment. She had to follow. And gripping the glasses that contained her dessert like her life depended on it, she did.
The cafeteria was empty except for one table, where Chef Laurent and Chef Martinet sat, across from each other. Chef Laurent. There he was, chatting with Chef Martinet—her face was pinched as ever, but his! The corners of his eyes crinkled exactly the way they did on the cover of his cookbooks, and then he ran his hands through his hair—graying, but still thick—just like Rosie had seen him do so many times on his Food Network show. Except this wasn’t TV. This was real life, and Chef Laurent was here, in front of her, and he was about to taste her food.
“Rosie Radeke,” Chef Martinet announced as Rosie stood at the head of the table, in between them.
“Rosie? This is Rosie?” Chef Laurent said, and he turned and looked at her. Rosie was hyperventilating. This was the end. She was going to keel over right here and die, her face planted in one of her carefully plated dishes.
“Yes,” Chef Martinet said, almost suspicious. “This is Rosie.”
“I have heard so many wonderful things about you,” Chef Laurent said warmly, and he reached out his hand. Oh no, not her hand, her sweaty, sweaty hand. As Rosie shook the hand of one of the world’s most famous chefs—the hand that had invented new dishes and revolutionized classics and created things that Rosie could only begin to dream of—Chef Martinet just looked . . . confused.
Of course she was confused. Why on earth would Chef Laurent have heard of Rosie? Chef Martinet didn’t know about the whole Bodie Tal situation. Well, she probably knew that Chef Laurent was Bodie’s godson, but she didn’t know that Rosie was . . . whatever she was . . . to Bodie Tal.
But now was not the time to worry about Bodie, or what he may or may not have said about her to Chef Laurent. Because Chef Laurent was about to take his first bite of her food. His first bite of a meal that meant everything to Rosie and to her future at the École.
It was good. It had to be good.
Rosie couldn’t bear to contemplate the alternative.
“Tell us about your meal, Rosie,” Chef Laurent said, casually, like he was inviting her to tell a story at a backyard barbecue he was hosting. Like this wasn’t about to be the most important ten minutes of her entire life.
“Well. Um . . . Okay.” Why did her voice sound so high? Did her voice always sound like that? If so, it was annoying. “For this meal, I was really inspired by my family. And the idea of home.”
“Where is home, Rosie?” Chef Laurent asked.
Where is home? Good question. Home was where Mom and Cole and Ricky and Reed and Owen were. Home was here, at the École, in her room with Priya and at the lunch table with her friends and hand-in-hand with Henry. Home was in the kitchen, no matter where that kitchen was. Home was all of these things, and these places, and these people, and these feelings. But all she said was “East Liberty, Ohio.”
“Ah!” Much to Rosie’s surprise, his eyes lit up with delight. “I had a very nice sausage in Ohio once, with Tony. For his show.”
Tony. His show. Rosie was pretty sure he was talking about Anthony Bourdain. Which was not helping her sweating.
“Sausage. Well. Um . . . Funny you should mention it. Ha.”
What was wrong with her?! Rosie needed to calm down. Now. And she needed to stop looking at Chef Martinet’s confused frown. Rosie took a deep breath.
“It’s funny, I mean, because there’s sausage in my first course.” Chef Laurent nodded at Rosie like that had been a totally normal segue and not an insane sequence of words. If he hadn’t been her favorite chef before this very moment, he certainly was now. “For our first course, we have a play on biscuits and gravy, a classic Southern dish that’s also popular in the Midwest.” Chef Laurent picked up his fork and cut into the biscuit. “Here, we have a miniature biscuit topped with a boudin blanc sawmill gravy and a poached quail egg.”
Chef Martinet poked at the quail egg until the yolk burst. Probably looking for egg flaws. Rosie decided to just keep talking. If she kept talking, she wouldn’t be thinking about what they were eating.
“I first had biscuits and gravy at the restaurant where my mom works.”
“Your mother, she is a chef ?” Chef Laurent asked. He was going back in for another bite. That had to be a good sign.
“No. She, um, manages the store . . . at the restaurant . . . where she works.” No matter how much time Chef Laurent may have spent in Ohio, Rosie was pretty sure he hadn’t experienced a Cracker Barrel. But he nodded like a combined restaurant and gift store was nothing out of the ordinary. “I put my own spin on sawmill gravy by using boudin blanc instead of breakfast sausage to incorporate some of the flavors I’ve discovered living here, and I kept the biscuit small and used a quail egg to keep the portion appropriate for a first course.”
“The biscuit is excellent,” Chef Laurent said. “Fluffy, light, buttery—it is everything a biscuit should be. I should tell Marcus that this is exactly th
e kind of appetizer he should serve.”
He must have meant Marcus Samuelsson. Rosie felt her hopes start to rise.
“For our next course, we have a burger topped with Gruyère and caramelized onions on a brioche bun.” Chef Martinet was making a face at the burger. It was too simple. Rosie knew it. She should have done something more complex. But it was too late now, and she just had to keep talking. “The burger is inspired by my dad, who grilled burgers for our whole neighborhood every Fourth of July. It was the only thing he ever cooked.”
Dad. She couldn’t believe how much she’d talked about him, with Henry. It was the most she’d talked about him since she could remember. Since he’d passed. She tried not to think about Dad too much, and talked about him never, because she was afraid of missing him. Afraid that talking about him would open up something inside her that she wouldn’t know how to close again. But talking about him with Henry, and even more than that, making this burger . . . it had made her miss him, yes, but not in a way that hurt. Or not in a way that hurt like it used to.
She hoped Dad would have liked this burger.
No, she knew he would have.
Even if he would have raised an eyebrow at her choice of cheese.
American cheese was specifically engineered to melt, Ro, he used to say. Rosie grinned at the memory, remembering how it felt to stand barefoot in the grass in their backyard, hands on her hips, asking her father to use some other kind of cheese as he manned the grill. And maybe American cheese did melt really well. But she’d never been a Kraft Singles kind of girl. And she knew that Dad had loved that about her, too. Just like he’d loved everything about her.
“And then I wanted to use Gruyère for the cheese,” Rosie continued, “because that was the first French word I recognized on a menu here in France. When I went out for crêpes, with my friends.”
Love À La Mode Page 24