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“Albert, love, you’re not helping,” Purdy said. “Don’t worry, Rose. You don’t have to do it alone. We’re all going to beat Lily together. We’ll be with you every step of the way.”
Leigh called out to Rose from her car seat in the back of the van. “Foolish, simple Rose!” She chuckled. “Daring to duel with the mistress of muffins!”
“You have to win,” Purdy continued, “if only so that we can get our hands on the recipe for Turn-Back Trifle and fix our little Lily-loving monster here. I’m assuming the effects of Lily’s Magic Ingredient wear off shortly if you just eat a little bit of it, but Leigh ate a whole pound cake. She could be stuck like this forever if we don’t get the Booke back.”
Leigh folded her arms across her dirty 101 Dalmatians T-shirt. “Oh, Purdy!” she called. “My bladder is. . . replete. If we don’t get to a bathroom soon, we’re going to have a situation on our hands!”
Purdy rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, loading Rose and Ty into the van. “We only have five days before we have to fly to Paris for the competition.”
“Good,” said Sage. “I forgot my blue pyjama trousers at home. I have to get them.”
“Sorry, Sage, but we’re not going back to Calamity Falls,” said Purdy. “We are going to Mexico. We need to pick up your great-great-great-grandfather Balthazar Bliss.”
Albert settled in the driver’s seat and turned the key while the van sputtered into gear.
“We have a great-great-great-grandfather?” Sage asked, brandishing his tape recorder. “Is he a mummy?”
“No, not yet,” Purdy replied. “He’s very spry. We need to see him because he has a second copy of the Booke. Unfortunately, Balthazar’s copy is written in another language, and he’s the only one left in the world who speaks it. He’s been working on a translation, but he’s slow. When last we checked, he’d only managed to translate six of the seven hundred and thirty-two recipes.”
“We need him to hurry it up,” said Ty.
“No time for that. We’re going to need his help.” Purdy grimaced. “Unfortunately.”
“Why ‘unfortunately’?” Rose asked.
Purdy sighed. “You’ll see.”
(#ulink_2dca2d8e-921c-5c9c-b448-bf92c5c196ae)
THE DUSTY MAIN road of the village of Llano Grande cut through a lush green mountain. As the Bliss van rumbled over the dirt, Ty and Sage dozed in the backseat, while Leigh muttered long sentences to herself that no one but she understood.
They’d driven for two days straight, all to get a copy of the Booke. Suddenly an obvious solution occurred to Rose. “Mum,” she asked, “why didn’t you guys ever make a photocopy of the Booke? Just so you’d have an extra?”
“The Booke can’t be photocopied,” Albert replied, turning the wheel with one hand and fanning his face with the other. “You put it on a copy machine, the pages come out blank. It’s an odd trick of the Booke. Can’t be photographed, either. Remember that picture in the newspaper of your mum baking Love Muffins?”
When the photo was taken, the Booke had been sitting open on the chopping block, where it often sat. But in the picture, there was no Booke – only an empty countertop.
“The Booke knows how to protect itself. The only way to duplicate it is to copy it by hand,” he said. “And your mother and I were always too busy. Plus, that would have meant one more copy of the Booke floating around that we had to protect. Bad enough a copy fell into Lily’s hands.” Albert hushed his voice and turned to Purdy. “Imagine if another copy got to. . . you-know-who?”
“Who?” Rose cried.
“Let’s just say,” said Purdy, “that there are far worse bakers in the world than Lily Le Fay.”
“Anyway,” Albert went on, “you can’t even take the Booke apart. Once you remove a page, the recipe goes haywire. There is magic in the Cookery Booke binding that keeps everything in working order. That’s why there are only two copies in the world.”
A minute later, Albert pulled off the main road and rolled to a stop near a brick hut with an overhanging tin roof. Leather saddles and empty canteens dangled from the sides of the roof, and the front porch was littered with sacks of corn and stacks of firewood. A sign hung from the tin roof: LA PANADERÍA BLISS.
“We’re here!” said Purdy, swallowing hard. “Everybody just be nice to him and we’ll all make it out alive.”
Rose touched her finger to the screen door of La Panadería Bliss, and it creaked open. Albert and Purdy stood behind her, with Sage and Ty and Leigh heading up the rear.
It was dusty and dark inside. An empty hostess stand sat next to the door.
Ty glanced back up at the sign. “What’s a panadería?” he whispered.
“A bakery,” Albert whispered back.
“This doesn’t look like a bakery,” Ty said.
He’s right, thought Rose. There were no tables, no chairs, no glass counter top, and no baked goods. It was a tiny, stuffy, windowless room with a damp floor and a toppled stack of chairs in the corner.
“Oh dear,” Purdy mumbled. “He’s probably gone off to a nursing home. I can’t blame him – I mean, he is one hundred and twenty-seven years old.”
Rose noticed a little silver bell sitting on top of the hostess stand. She reached out and pressed her palm against it.
Leigh balled her tiny hands into fists and crossed her arms. “And I suppose it would have killed you to call ahead? Lily, the empress of empanadas, would have called ahead.”
“Well, Lily isn’t your mother, now is she?” Purdy said.
Just then a tall man with a thick chest and shrivelled, spindly limbs hustled through a doorway in the back of the dingy room. His head was mostly bald except for two patches of grey above his ears. He wore spectacles and a sour frown.
“Hola,” he grumbled, grabbing six menus from the hostess stand. “Follow me.”
“Great-great-grandfather Balthazar?” Purdy ventured. “It’s me, Purdy.”
“Who?” Balthazar asked.
“Purdita Bliss, your great-great-granddaughter. We called about the translation of your copy of the Bliss Cookery Booke. Remember?”
“I wish you all could just drop all the ‘greats’ and call me Grandpa. Makes a fellow feel old.” Balthazar squinted at Purdy for a moment, then half-heartedly took Purdy’s hand and shook it. “Oh, now I remember,” he said. “The people with the son named after a spice.” Balthazar squinted at Ty’s crown of gelled red hair that stood two inches high. “What does he think he is, a hedgehog?”
“That’s Ty!” Albert stepped forward and shook Balthazar’s hand. “And these are the rest of our children, Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary.”
Balthazar nodded, still frowning. “More herbs. Huh.”
“Is this the bakery?” Rose ventured.
“Of course not.” Balthazar grunted. “This is the grand entrance. The bakery is this way.”
Balthazar led the Bliss clan through the back door on to a noisy, sunny patio crowded with picnic tables. Dozens of tanned Mexican farmers and their children were sitting at the tables, laughing as they gobbled slices of moist cake and brilliant red pie from paper plates.
“This is the bakery.”
Rose noticed a young woman and a young man sitting across from each other at a table, both eating some sort of goopy yellow mush from white bowls. Rose stared at it, furrowing her eyebrows in confusion. What is that stuff doing in a bakery? she wondered.
“What?” said Balthazar crankily. “You don’t like the look of my polenta, Marjoram?”
“It’s Rosemary,” Rose mumbled.
“Whatever, Marjoram. Come to my office. All of you.”
Balthazar led the Blisses to a tin shed at the back of the patio. Inside was a shady room with an odd concrete structure in the centre. The structure was shaped like an Olympic podium, with two lower platforms flanking one high column. At the top of the column was a grate, and beneath it roared a wood fire.
“My stove,” the old man grumbled. “I know it’s not one of your high-tech American wall ovens, but it serves my purposes just fine. I don’t do fancy frosting on my cupcakes and all that useless, time-wasting ornamental junk. I bake to feed people.”
Rose looked round the room. Lining one wall were giant sacks of ground corn, and lining another were shelf after shelf of blue mason jars, all labelled in Spanish. Rose burned to know what was in each jar and how to use it.
Balthazar stepped into the room. “For ten years I’ve been inventing new recipes using ground cornmeal. The golden porridge you were thumbing your nose at out there, Marj,” he said, pointing to Rose, “happens to be called Polenta of Plenitude. And it’s very useful. Unlike your American cupcakes. All style and no substance, I think.”
As Balthazar launched into an oration on the various incarnations of ground corn, Sage and Leigh wandered off to investigate a rack of cooling strawberry pies, while Ty stepped back on to the patio to seek amigas. Purdy and Albert asked smart questions and settled into chairs to listen.
And so did Rose. After a while she noticed that some of the lines on her great-great-great-grandfather’s face had softened into something that approximated a smile, or at least a non-frown.
“See, the Polenta of Plenitude gets made,” Balthazar explained, “by stirring ground cornmeal in water and milk over an open flame.” He poured a cup full of golden corn dust into a pot with two cups of milk, then swirled the pot over the iron bars of the stove-top grid. “Then you add honey, a sprig of rosemary, and this.” Balthazar stepped over to the wall of blue jars and removed one labelled EL SAPO INFLADO.
Rose peered inside and saw a huge bullfrog leaning back against the side of the jar, his legs splayed out and both webbed forehands cradling his monstrous, swollen belly.
“The burp of a bloated bullfrog,” he said, lowering the unscrewed jar to the boiling pot. The frog punched his gut with a tiny amphibian fist, then let out a rumbling, rolling belch that smelled, not surprisingly, like garlic.
A bubble grew out of the cornmeal, filling the entire pot, then swelling until it reached the ceiling of the tin shed before bursting in a sigh and dropping back into the pot.
“There,” Balthazar huffed, stuffing the poor bloated bullfrog back on the shelf.
Balthazar dipped a spoon into the pot and handed it to Rose. The Polenta of Plenitude was some of the best stuff she’d ever tried: velvety, fresh, moist – the perfect balance of savoury and sweet.
“Mum and Dad!” Rose said. “You have to try this!”
Each tasted a spoonful of the masterful corn mixture.
“Wow!” said Purdy. “You’ve really made something special here, Balthazar!”
Balthazar swatted Purdy’s compliment away like a fly, grumbling inaudibly. “I don’t eat sweets any more,” he said. “You eat too many sweets, you get too big to run away when people come after you. When this masa works its magic, you can’t eat like most people do, stuffing themselves to the point where they’re bloated like a couch potato. Eat a little of this masa as an appetiser, and you’ll eat just enough of your main course to stay healthy. Unlike my cat over there, if you could call him that.”
“What else would they call me?” came a low voice from a dark corner of the room.
Rose couldn’t believe her eyes: a pudgy grey cat as wide around as a bowling ball lumbered out from behind a box and climbed up a ramp on to a rolling wooden chopping block. He sat upright on his haunches and licked under his front leg, which was quite thin compared to his thick face and rotund body. Most striking of all were his ears, which didn’t stand straight up like a regular cat’s but were pinched and rumpled into two folded lumps atop his wide face. “Balthazar, you should have told me we were having people over. I would have bathed. I’m in a shambles!”
“Whoa!” Sage exclaimed. “You have a talking cat?”
“Unfortunately,” Balthazar replied. “He wandered into my parents’ kitchen when I was fifteen, and he got his grubby claws on a batch of Chattering Cheddar Biscuits I made. He hasn’t shut up since.”
“Allow me to properly introduce myself since the old man can’t bring himself to do it for me,” the cat said. He sounded like a butler in a mansion outside of London. “My name is Asparagus the Green, but you should call me Gus.”
“But you’re not green,” Sage said. “You’re more of a dark grey.”
“Minor details.” The cat blinked. “I am a Scottish Fold, and—”
“Is that some kind of soldier or something?” asked Sage.
“It is the name of my breed. I am pure Scottish Fold, hence my exquisitely folded ears. I am not from Scotland, however. My dearly departed mother and father hailed from London. And who might you be?”
“This is my great-great-granddaughter Purdy Bliss; her husband, Albert; and her herbaceous children, Parsley, Sage, Marjoram, and Thyme.”
“Rosemary,” whispered Rose.
“Sure,” Balthazar continued. “And they are here because—” Balthazar stopped and turned to Purdy. “Why are you here?”
“We’re here for the translation of the Booke,” she replied nervously. “We need it, now.”
“Why?” he asked. “Can’t you just use your own?”
“Our copy is indisposed at the moment.”
“What do you mean, ‘indisposed’?”
Rose and the rest of the family gathered around one of Balthazar’s picnic tables, and Purdy recounted the tale of Aunt Lily. “So you see,” Purdy concluded, “we need a copy of the Booke if we’re to win.”
Balthazar had listened to the story with his arms folded over his cardigan, his face growing steadily redder and redder. As Purdy concluded, his bushy black eyebrows sloped furiously downward to where they met in the centre of his furrowed brow. He stood up, scowled, then disappeared into his kitchen hut.
He reappeared a moment later carrying a dusty tome at least a foot thick, bound in ancient, disintegrating leather. He laid the book gingerly on the table and blew softly on the cover. A puff of black dust flew in Leigh’s face.
“Is it customary in the land of Mexico to blow clumps of dust into the faces of small children?” Leigh coughed.
Gus bolted upright and dropped the shell of the cream puff he’d been licking back into his metal bowl. “I’m sorry; did the toddler just speak like a grown lady?”
“Of course I did!” Leigh answered indignantly. “This, from the talking cat!”
Rose peered at the book, which was thicker than her head. There were symbols printed on the cover, none of which she recognised.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“It means ‘Bliss Cookery Booke’ in Sassanian,” the old man said. “Sassanian’s a dead language that was spoken by a tribe of ancient shamans in the Fertile Crescent. They made their medicines of wheat and honey and other sweet ingredients – those were the first magical bakers.”
Balthazar pulled a short stack of parchment from the back of the Booke and slapped it down on the table. Recipes. They were written in English in perfect calligraphy, not a stroke out of place. “These,” he said, “are the translations I’ve done so far. Nine in all.”
“You’ve only translated nine recipes?” Albert asked, scratching at his beard and fanning out his armpits.
“Do you know how hard Sassanian is to decipher? I’m not about to do a rush job on something so important!”
“He’s a bit. . . fastidious,” Gus added.
“This, from a cat,” Balthazar countered.
“We need access to as many recipes as is humanly possible by the time the Gala begins,” said Purdy.
“And when’s that?” said Albert.
“Day after tomorrow,” said Purdy, pushing her sweaty bangs off her forehead. “We fly to Paris in just a few hours. Looks like we’re toast.”
