Текст книги "Richard C. Morais - The Hundred-Foot Journey"

Автор книги: Richard C. Morais

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In the ensuing years, Chef Verdun and I saw each other periodically. I don’t want to exaggerate our closeness; I don’t suspect anyone, not even his own wife, ever cracked the high-octane energy of that man. He was an enigma, always slipping away from our grasp. But over the following years, Verdun and I definitely established a deep and abiding professional respect for each other, even, I would say, one of real affection. And that friendship comes to life for me when I think about the time, the day after I won my second Michelin star, when Chef Verdun showed up unexpectedly at Le Chien Méchant.

It was late afternoon and unbeknown to me he had arranged with Serge and the rest of the staff—rather impertinently, when I think about it, but that was Paul—to hijack me for the evening, leaving the evening’s fare in Serge’s capable hands.

Spluttering with indignation and insisting I was needed in my own restaurant, Paul merely said, “Oui. Oui,” like he was humoring an unruly child, before forcibly pushing me down into the passenger seat of his Mercedes.

My staff waved good-bye from the restaurant’s doorway, disappearing in a blur when Paul’s foot hit the gas pedal and we shot off at an alarming speed in the direction of Orly Airport. He always drove like a madman.

A private plane was waiting for us on the tarmac, and only once airborne did Paul finally inform me that he had decided a proper celebration of my second star was in order, and that meant, naturally, a dash down to Marseille for a good fish dinner. He had bullied an investment banker friend in London into lending us his Gulfstream.

That night Paul and I dined at Chez Pierre, that Old World restaurant sitting on the cliffs above Marseille’s harbor. Our table was against the large bay window. When we arrived, the sun was setting, like a mango sorbet dripping over the horizon; the platinum rolls of the Mediterranean produced the soothing sound of waves thudding the cliff rocks below us.

Chez Pierre was old-school, dressed simply with sturdy tables under white tablecloths and heavy silver flatware. The aged waiter with pomade in his hair hauled a dented silver wine bucket to the side of our table. Paul and the elderly man bantered like they were friends from long ago, before Paul ordered a bottle of 1928 Krug champagne.

We sat in reverence as the ancient vintage was opened, as the golden-colored foam rushed to the glass rim and revealed its great age. But the real surprise came when we brought the flutes to our lips. The champagne, it was as fresh and sparkly as a blushing bride, and revealed no sign at all it was near retirement age. Quite the opposite. It made me want to sing, dance, fall in love. Rather dangerous, I thought.

We started, of course, with a teacup of Marseille fish soup, before moving on to a delicate dish of tiny clams, no bigger than babies’ fingernails, the translucent shellfish grown in the restaurant’s own grotto under the pounding cliff face. As a main course, loup de mer, grilled on fennel stalks and then bathed in warm Pernod before the waiter, towel over his forearm, dramatically flambéed the sea bass at our table, using a long matchstick, the fennel stalks and lemon wedges around the fish still smoldering as the plate was placed before us.

We laughed and talked deep into the night, until the sea outside seemed pumped full of squid ink. Sardine and mackerel fishing boats, their masts bejeweled with lights, headed out from the city’s harbor for a nighttime haul; far out, an oil tanker flat against the sea, a sugar cube of lights in the inkiest part of the blackening water.

That night I learned Paul’s father used to read him The Fencing Master and The Count of Monte Cristo, the reason why Paul had named his most famous dish after Alexandre Dumas. It was also partly why we were there. Château d’If, the island prison fortress that was the setting for The Count of Monte Cristo, was that magical night sitting outside our window in the Bay of Marseille, gray rock and fortress walls looking oddly elegant under a string of fairy lights.

The champagne loosened our tongues, and in vino veritas I finally glimpsed a few other interior facts behind the famously extroverted Paul Verdun. It was toward the end of our meal, as we ate a light almond tort, alongside sinus-clearing snorts of cognac, that Paul quietly asked me if I had ever eaten at Maison Dada in Aix-en-Provence, the minimalist restaurant of the up-and-coming Chef Mafitte. The insecurity in his voice, even with so much drink sloshing about his insides, was quite distinct.

Charles Mafitte was at the time emerging clearly as the artistic leader of the postmodern movement deconstructing food. He used nitrous oxide cans, an unusual kitchen utensil to say the least, to create his trademark “crystallized foam”—a hard froth he made from sea urchin eggs, kiwi, and fennel—or a bowl of delicious “pasta” made entirely out of Gruyère cheese and reine des reinettes apples. Mafitte’s technique involved the total reduction of ingredients, almost to a molecular level, before reassembling an odd mixture of fused foodstuffs into entirely new creations.

I confessed to Paul I had indeed had a memorable meal at Maison Dada, a few years ago, with my then-girlfriend, the thick-thighed Marie, who smelled of mushrooms. Where should I start? Chef Mafitte pulverized Fisherman’s Friend throat lozenges, and used this bizarre ingredient as the basis for his “lobster lollipops,” a stunning dish served with “truffle ice cream.” Even the classic frogs’ legs, really the archetypal dish of French country fare, had been unrecognizably transformed by Chef Mafitte’s artistry: he deboned and “caramelized” the legs in fig juice and dry vermouth, and then served them alongside a polenta “bomb” studded with foie gras and pomegranates. Not even a hint of the classic frogs’ legs ingredients of garlic, butter, or parsley. When I asked Marie what she thought of the dinner, she replied, “Zinzin”—Parisian street slang for “Crazy”—and I must confess my inarticulate shopgirl had rather accurately summed up our dining experience, even before that notorious womanizer manhandled her under the table.

All this I told Paul, and as I spoke, he became more and more morose, as if he somehow intuited from my animated chatter that this fast-rising chef from the south would one day become his nemesis, relegating Paul’s muscular embrace of classic French cuisine, which he loved with all his being and would defend to his death, as completely and utterly passé.

But he caught himself.

“Enough of this. We are here to celebrate your second star, Hassan. Now drink up. We are off to the discos.”

Paul downed his brandy before saying, “Get up, d’Artagnan. Get up. Time for us to sample the justly famous Marseille tarts.”

I don’t know how much Paul dropped on our celebration that night, but it turned out to be one of the most memorable and enjoyable nights of my life.

A year later, in Normandy to see a supplier, I dropped by Paul’s house in Courgains. His wife, Anna Verdun, greeted me stiffly at the door; she was well known to be rather dismissive of Paul’s common friends, preferring instead to expend her energy on his most famous clients and hangers-on. After her distinctly cool reception, however, Madame Verdun did have a young woman escort me to Paul’s lair in the back of the house.

As I followed the young maid through the halls of their nineteenth-century bourgeois house, the walls all dedicated to framed photos and press clips documenting Paul’s steady rise in the world of haute cuisine, I caught sight of a red-wax scrawl, the slant of the letters instantly striking me as faintly familiar.

The framed property in question was a pamphlet from the late 1970s and the firm handwriting scrawled underneath stated, “For Paul, my dear friend, the great butcher of Courgains, a man who will one day astound the world. Keep up the good fight. Vive La Charcuterie Française!”

It was signed, simply, “Gertrude Mallory.”

And so, finally, we come to the key period in question. I was thirty-five years old when Le Chien Méchant earned its second star, and for several years afterward I hit a creative impasse. I worked hard but made no headway, as the freshness and zeal with which I’d started my work at Le Chien Méchant was institutionalized through constant repetition.

We received a few mediocre reviews during this period, I admit. But the old fires, they still burned deep somewhere, and it was when I turned forty, that a dangerous restlessness set in, an urge to kick things up a notch.

I wished—even willed—for some dramatic change to happen.

They found Papa dead on the kitchen floor, in his bathrobe, surrounded by shards of broken plates and glass bowls. Auntie and his local doctor had stupidly forced Papa, at the age of seventy-two, to go on a strict diet; he was having none of it. Awakened by his loudly rumbling stomach, Papa descended to the kitchen in the middle of the night for a little sustenance. He threw open the refrigerator door and stuck his head inside; according to the medical examiner, he was gobbling the leftovers so fast that a chunk of chicken leg got lodged in his throat.

Frightened by the clump of cold chicken blocking his air passage, he reeled around the kitchen in a panic, until finally felled by a massive heart attack. Mercifully, Papa was dead even before he hit the floor.

We all thought Papa would live forever, and his funeral in Lumière remains to this day bleak and out of focus. The entire family was mad with grief, but I personally was so brokenhearted, my eyes so blurry from the constant flow of tears, that I never noticed how feeble Madame Mallory was looking, as she leaned heavily on Monsieur Leblanc’s arm and stood unsteadily at the back of the cemetery. All I could see was that the cemetery was filled with local residents, thousands of them from as far away as Clairvaux-les-Lacs, their hats off and heads bent in respectful mourning.

He won them over in the end, my Papa.

Two months later, on her way down from the attic, Madame Mallory tripped and tumbled down the stairs, breaking several ribs and both legs on the descent. She died a few weeks later, from pneumonia, confined to a bed in the same hospital that had treated my burns two decades earlier.

It is my great shame and sadness that I never made it back to the Jura to properly say good-bye to my maîtresse, but I couldn’t, for simply too much was happening in Paris. Life always brings unpredictable surprises, and after all my good fortune, it was apparently time again for an Indian-style hullabaloo.

The world we had known for so long, it abruptly ended in some profound way, when the television screens suddenly filled with the shocking news that stock markets around the world were collapsing.

Economists have their own explanation as to what happened during this dark period, but I like to think the universe at large was itself reacting to the news that Abbas Haji and Gertrude Mallory were no more a part of this life, but had finally been summoned to the abattoir.

Depression, on a global scale, it was the only appropriate response.

Chapter Fourteen

It was Saturday, twenty years after I came to Paris, when I was at the Place Maubert farmers’ market acquiring a handsome pair of imported mangoes wrapped in purple tissue and carefully packed like rare orchids in a wooden box, that my sister rang my cell phone and informed me that Paul Verdun had died in a car crash.

Mehtab called just as I was handing over my money to the cashier under the stall’s awning, so I was unable to respond to her typically brutal delivery, but my sister chattered on in a voice pitched with excitement.

“They found him at the bottom of a cliff, just outside Courgains. Dead. Just like that. Car, flat as nan. Nah, Hassan? Are you there?”

The vendeuse behind the fruit stall handed me my change.

“I cannot talk now,” I said, and disconnected the phone.

For quite some time I stood stupid with shock, wondering what should become of us. The world seemed to be coming to an end, and a meaningless and monotonous phrase—an era is over—incessantly went around in my head.

But Paris cannot in fact be stopped and the Place Maubert market continued its brisk trade without pause. It was early May and couples lugging string bags stuffed with leeks and joints of spring lamb banged into me. A Vespa beeped with irritation at my statuary immobility before carefully negotiating around my back.

Odd details still stick in my mind: the policemen on in-line skates eating cheese pastries, flakes of dough falling on their blue shirts; the golden charcuterie chickens turning in the rotisserie with windows yellowed from grease. The very air of the market smelled, I remember, of ripe Comté cheese, and a wicker hamper filled with wine bottles from Argentina’s Mendoza vineyards stood on the sidewalk opposite me. Not even the North Africans hawking cocaine-like vials of Turkish and Iranian saffron, normally a great personal weakness, could budge me from my spot in the center of the street, where I was rooted like thistle to a rock.

But there it was, inescapable: an important branch of classic French cuisine had just died alongside Chef Verdun, one of its last true defenders.

It was at that moment a cantankerous old woman with a fig face knocked into me, deliberately I am sure, and, without warning I was furious. I pushed back, hard, and she scuttled away yelling, “Sale Arabe.”

The woman’s curse—“You dirty Arab”—brought me abruptly back to the Rue des Carmes, and for the first time I really looked around at the Parisian indifference surrounding me in the market, so typically offhand, as if nothing of true significance had actually occurred.

I was deeply offended. Paul was a national treasure and even I, a foreigner, knew the bells of Le Panthéon up the hill should have been ringing out the country’s great sorrow. And yet his departure from this world was greeted by nothing more than a Gallic shrug of the shoulders; but perhaps I should have seen it coming. Just weeks before, Gault Millau had demoted Paul from nineteen to fifteen points out of a possible twenty, a brutal reminder that today’s critics and customers were obsessed with the culinary cubism of Chef Charles Mafitte.

It was logical, with my heritage, that I would be drawn to Chef Mafitte’s “world cuisine,” which seemed to revel in combining the most bizarre ingredients from the most exotic corners of the earth, but if I leaned in any direction, it was toward Paul’s French classicism. Charles Mafitte’s “laboratory” creations were highly original, creative, and even at times breathtaking, but I could not help coming to the conclusion his culinary contrivances were, in the end, a triumph of style over substance. And yet it was undeniably his “chemical” cooking that had struck a chord with the critics and public alike these last several years, and, like it or not, Paul’s classically ornate fare was passé and seemed, in comparison, hopelessly outdated. But Paul was all honest blood and bones and meaty substance, and I, for one, was going to miss him deeply.

But it was all over. And thick-headed as I was, I realized, standing in that Saturday morning market, there was nothing left for me to do but to return home and call Paul’s widow to express my condolences. So, mangoes under arm and full of this admittedly abstract sense of loss, I headed back to Le Chien Méchant, up at the top of Rue Valette.

As I trudged up the hill, past the flat-faced apartment buildings on Rue des Carmes, marking the postwar rise of French socialism, I walked under a string of children’s underpants hung from a clothesline stretched across two balconies. Right then a woman in the ground-floor flat of the working-class building threw open a window in her kitchen, and I was instantly engulfed in a steamy cloud of tripes à la mode de Caen, billowing out from the cast-iron pot on her stove.

It was this earthy smell of tripe and onions that finally pulled up from my depths a stew of memories, and in that moment my friend Paul—not the three-star Chef Verdun—was restored to me.

For I remembered that time when, a few years ago, eager not to take the trip alone, Paul convinced me to join him for a produce tour of the Alsace, on the border with Germany. Paul drove his silver Mercedes at a reckless tempo through the countryside, and it was too much, the manic way he pushed us through our tasks. Until, that is, the afternoon arrived when—after countless trudgings up and down muddy lanes to remote farmhouses, where we sampled yet another Gewürztraminer or thyme-infused honey or smoked sausage—I had a fit.

“Enough,” I yelled. I would not continue to one more farm, I told Paul in an ice-cold voice, unless he first agreed to stop for a quiet and unhurried meal. Paul, shocked by my uncharacteristic show of steel, quickly agreed to my terms, and we pulled into a sleepy village I can no longer remember the name of.

But I do remember the bistro we ate in was smoke-filled and dark-paneled and along the zinc bar there were a couple of locals huddled morosely over ballons of wine. I recall that the place smelled of rotten wood and spilled pastis, and we took the table in the back, under a mottled mirror. A bored young man, a Gitane hanging from his lips, came over and took our order, as an aged woman in a soiled housedress shuffled in and out of the back kitchen.

Paul and I both ordered the day’s special, tripe, which was served in chipped bowls and plonked unceremoniously down in front of us. We ate in silence, dunking crusty cuts of country bread into the stew and washing it all down with a local Pinot Gris, slurped noisily from the glass tumblers standing like squat peasants at our elbows.

Paul pushed back his empty bowl and sighed with contentment. A bit of tripe sauce dotted his chin like a culinary beauty mark, and I noticed immediately the pressures that had been leaving deep creases across his face had miraculously disappeared for the moment.

“Never, in all the three-star restaurants of France, will you taste anything finer,” he said. “We toil and toil, until we are exhausted, and nothing we do, if we are honest, will ever be as good as this, a simple bowl of tripe. Am I right, Hassan?”

“You are right, Paul.”

It was only when I recalled this memory, on the sad day of his car crash, that I finally had the decency to let in the enormity of my friend’s death, to really feel the loss of this incredible tragedy.

Paul was no more.

And so it was, halfway up the Rue Valette, that my palate independently demanded its own homage to Chef Verdun, and I found myself tasting on the broad back of my tongue the rich flavors and textures of his crayfish, a masterpiece of paper-thin slivers of grilled goose liver layered delicately between the pudenda-pink meat of freshwater crustaceans.

Starlings chattering near my window woke me the next morning, but when I swung my legs over to the floor, it felt as if I had been hit with a hammer. All the recent departures, the collapse of the old economic order that we were seeing in the news every day, it was as if all this death and destruction had physically settled in the marrow of my bones. I was profoundly exhausted, dragging my feet, and when I left my flat I found I had to stop off at my local watering hole, La Contrescarpe, on the Rue Lacépède, for a second cup of coffee, before I could continue on to the restaurant.

Marc Bressier, an acquaintance who was the front-room manager at the three-star Arpège, was already at our regular table under the brasserie’s green awning, eating an omelet, and he nodded when I pulled out a chair.

At that time in the morning, Place de la Contrescarpe was free of tourists, and when the waiter came by, I ordered a double and a brioche. A street sweeper was driving his whirring green truck around the square’s fountain, hosing down the cobblestones with pressurized water and sending dog shit and cigarette butts rolling into the gutter. A clochard was asleep on the far pavement under a bush, his grizzled gray head resting on his extended arm, totally oblivious to the spray steadily heading his way.

André Piquot, chef-patron at Montparnasse, pulled up a chair as shutters above the bar on the other side of the square suddenly clattered open, the noise sending a flock of pigeons soaring over the houses.

“Salut, Hassan. Ça va, Marc?”

“Salut, André.”

Paul was all we could talk about, and André expertly jabbed at his cell phone applications with his stubby fingers to read us the latest press accounts. There were unresolved questions about Paul’s accident. The absence of tire tread marks on the road suggested there had been no braking of the car before it sailed over the ledge, and the car itself had just been serviced at a garage, so no technical malfunction could have explained the loss of control on a road that Paul knew like the back of his hand. Furthermore, a witness, a farmer across the road, said the car appeared to be accelerating, not braking, as it headed straight for the cliff and disappeared over its edge. Investigations were continuing.

“I still can’t believe it. He seemed so full of life.”

“What do you think, Hassan? He was your friend.”

I shrugged, the French way. “He was as much a mystery to me as he was to you.”

We moved on to the upcoming demonstration against the restaurant industry’s special value-added tax, a subject then much consuming our world.

“You will be there, Hassan,” Piquot said. “Please. As a director of the Syndicat Commerce de l’épicerie et gastronomie, I must deliver bodies for the protest. Please. Bring your staff.”

“We must stand together,” added Bressier.

“All right. I will be there. Promise.”

It was time to go. I shook their hands, crossed the square, and noticed another two shops, a parfumerie and a sandwich shop, had permanently closed their doors. But as I descended the raked Rue Descartes, I had to negotiate around a delivery of tarp-covered paintings to the Rive Gauche Gallery, all conducted with much yelling and theater, and it made me recall the time when Paul and I had spent an afternoon at the Musée D’Orsay, to hunt, as he said, “pour la source d’inspiration.”

He was in good shape that day, at his charming best, and it was a very agreeable afternoon we spent together, even though we moved through the museum at vastly different tempos. I would regularly turn the corner of a room only to see the back of Paul’s silver head rushing ahead into yet another of the museum’s chambers.

At one point, I sat alone before Gauguin’s The Meal, painted shortly after the great painter arrived in Tahiti. Not one of his best, according to the experts, but I recall the painting’s extreme simplicity—the three locals, the bananas, the bowls on the table. The painting stunned me, for it made me realize only a true master could strip away all obvious artistry and drama, to leave only the simplest and purest ingredients on the plate.

Paul inevitably came back to find me, full of enthusiasm, like a child, to say “you must see” the painting by so-and-so in the next room, and he left again only once I had promised to do so. There was a period, however, when Paul disappeared entirely and there was no sign of him until I finally reached the third floor of the museum.

He was standing stock-still before a painting stuck in the far left-hand corner of the grand parlor. I am not sure how long he had been standing there, but he did not move as I came to stand by his side, but continued to stare blank-faced at the image that seemed to have a fierce hold on his imagination.

The painting wasn’t particularly good, I thought then, but now, looking back, the image does come back to me quite vividly. The painting was of a bearded king, sitting on his throne, his wife clinging to his side. They were both deep in shock, each separately wondering what would become of them. A huge and empty gray wall stretched seemingly forever behind them, a ceremonial church candle bluntly extinguished and abandoned on the floor in front of the distraught couple. The painting, by Jean-Paul Laurens, was titled, simply, The Excommunication of Robert the Pious.

When after several minutes he never acknowledged me in any way, not even when I shifted my weight and cleared my throat, I said, “Paul?”

He blinked twice and turned in my direction.

“Ready? My God, it’s like touring with an old lady, you are so slow. Now, how about we have a drink at a little bar I know not too far from here?”

When I slipped through the front door of Le Chien Méchant, I found my maître d’hôtel, Jacques, at the table in the foyer, busy stacking the silver peaches that had just arrived from Seville. The spotlit table was the first thing guests saw when entering the restaurant’s darkened hall, and every day we seductively set it anew with fresh figs, pineapples, and mangoes, colorful pots filled with berries. Among the heaps of lush fruit, we frequently placed a plate of smoke-blackened sausages, or delicate and flaky pastries of the day stacked under a smooth glass dome, all to create a mouth-watering contrast of hues and textures. The only permanent fixtures were a preserved and mounted pheasant—with two glittering glass eyes and a long tail that majestically swept across the table’s polished pear-wood planks—and two strategically placed antique copper pots with lids of hammered silver.

Jacques, dressed in a tailored blue suit, stacked the last peach and turned his head in my direction as I eased shut the front door.

“Chef! You won’t believe it. I cracked it. I know who they are.”

Again I was visited by that overwhelming sense of weariness.

“It’s a young couple. I am sure of it.”

Jacques made me come over to the podium and his leather-bound volume of research to pore over his reams of hastily snapped photographs.

“See? It’s all here. Look.”

Normally a man of great elegance and reserve, Jacques lost all sense of proportion when it came to restaurant critics. He loathed them. In fact, his great ambition in life was to unmask the anonymous Guide Michelin inspectors who secretly reviewed restaurants and doled out Michelin’s coveted stars. His strategy, these last several years, was to photograph guests he thought could be the Michelin critics, in the foyer, as they left our restaurant. He would then take his rogue’s gallery of photos to Bib Gourmand–designated restaurants, modest-priced brasseries and bistros that were the Michelin inspectors’ personal favorites, according to the guides’ own definition, and where they took their own families on their days off.

For years now, Jacques systematically dined in his free time at the unpretentious Bib Gourmand restaurants, comparing his portfolio of snapshots with the room full of diners. It was complètement fou, of course, like looking for a needle in a haystack, and this was the first time he had ever found a match.

“Look. It’s the same young couple. They dined here on the fourth. And then here they are again, four days later, over at Chez Géraud in the 16th arrondisement. I am sure they are Michelin inspectors. He has a rather sneering look about him. Don’t you think?”

“Yes. Possibly. But—”

“Well, I am sure of it.”

“Actually, that’s the son and daughter-in-law of Chef Dubonet from Toulouse. They were here in Paris that week on a research mission. They’re opening a bistro. I personally sent the young couple to Chez Géraud.”

Jacques looked crestfallen.

I tried to smile sympathetically, but it was halfhearted, and I moved on quickly before he could engage me further in his bizarre obsession.

The center room’s jasmine arrangements, faintly perfuming the salon, were from Chez Antoine over in the 6th arrondissement, and were strategically placed among the sea of tables to create a permanently soft and scented air. Le Chien Méchant’s china was made to my design at Christian Le Page; the heavy silver flatware, it, too, was stamped under my instructions at a family-run factory in Sheffield, England. The stemware, Moser crystal, was handblown in northern Bohemia. The dining room linen, crisp and white, was not machine-made in Normandy, but from Madagascar, hand-stitched by Antananarivo women. And everything the guest came in contact with—from the wineglasses right down to the Caran d’Ache pen to sign the bill—was etched with Le Chien Méchant’s insignia, a tiny barking bulldog. Mallory had taught me that details make the restaurant, and no one could say I didn’t learn my lessons well, for I even twinned each table with a mahogany footstool, on which the women could rest their precious handbags.

My front-room staff was crisply snapping linen, draping it over the tables; the faint piano tinkling of Duke Ellington’s “What Am I Here For?” drifted out from the hidden speakers. An apprentice at the sideboard, wiping down crystal, he saw me surveying the dining room from the darkened wing of the restaurant, and he nodded respectfully in my direction as the cut glass in his hand flashed sharply in the light.

“Bonjour, Chef,” cried several waiters as I passed through the salon.

I waved and pushed through the kitchen doors in the back.

Chef de Cuisine Serge was at the gas rings holding a heavy cast-iron pan handle with two hands, a towel across the grip, pouring hot goose fat into a ceramic bowl. The kitchen smelled sharply of just-cut shallots and simmering fish stock. Jean-Luc, a sixteen-year-old apprentice from a farm in Normandy, was standing by, looking on, until Serge barked, “Go put on a glove and help me!” The apprentice, startled by this unexpected command, turned in a panic, but Lucas, my commis, was ready at his side, helpfully handing him a glove.

No sooner had the earnest boy thrust his hand deep inside the mitten than he screamed and shook his wrist, sending the glove and a bit of sheep’s intestine flying across the kitchen. The entire staff instantly burst out laughing, none more so than the ruddy-faced Serge, who was laughing so hard his entire body jiggled and he had to hold on to the side of the cooking range to steady himself. The apprentice tried to smile and look game, but in fact looked a sickly white, but for his protruding ears, which were a purplish red. Pranks and boxed ears—that was how Serge broke in the young staff.