Content warning: food
Elbow deep in sticky overwatered dough, Molly scraped the pastry mixture off her lithe arms and flicked it back into the mixing bowl. The girl’s bones carry more mass than you’d think. The fine mesh net on her head barely contained her curly hair—her frosted tips poked out from behind her ears and crown, wet flour spackled across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, creating a new layer of freckles—it was impossible to keep the human parts out of the food parts. Who would mind if a few arm and head fuzzies got worked in with the cold butter; how else would the judges know the sweet confection was from her, from her toil and time and love?
Hands are the secret ingredient to anything scrumptious, my dear. We’ve been perfecting and iterating deliciousness as long as anyone’s been doing anything else. Mix and mash and turn the pot around and inside out; then something different, deckled, and delicious comes out, perfectly imperfect, like you.
Now this particular currant roll recipe was Molly’s mother’s from a half-remembered Trinidad and Tobago—the people surviving while the island masses themselves were long since swallowed up by the water. The child—no, young woman now—hoped to make her mother’s memory proud. She was nervous having reached the final round of the bicentennial edition of the Sweet Memories: World Bake Competition. She started strong and won full points with a callaloo served with roti. The sound of greens, smooth coconut, and sea crab with the slight grittiness of sand were bright and cheerful. They talked of days at the beach, back when they were cherished for their horizons rather than their encroaching prisons.
Molly faltered in the second round making bake and saltfish. The fry of her bake was too oily and drowned out the booming clear voice of the dry hot sun on a clear sky; the saltfish too salty for cooling sweat running down a forehead. Even so, she made it to the final four—the dessert round.
On the bench to her left, a croquembouche was being hurriedly assembled by a man whose square hard face clashed with his airy choux. One puff at a time sighed as he pinched and placed them each with his thumb and forefinger. The bench to her right was lost in a pink-purple iridescent haze, clouds of evaporating liquid nitrogen and powdered sugar obscured where their groans were coming from. The person dancing at the bench in front of her swirled and twirled ribbons of bright orange jalebi, their sweet singsong serenade engulfing the entire space.
Molly, determined, rolled up her loose linen sleeves to her shoulder, dusting board flour on her clavicle in the process. She sifted more flour into the dough through finer and finer sieves. As she did, she heard the multitude of tiny particulate voices, fighting to pass through, not to be considered too lumpy or clumpy to be discarded and forgotten.
She would be food too, one day—this is what the currants collected in her bowl said. Hundreds of round, monotone, tart voices dusted in cinnamon and brown sugar, love reminding her at this stage in the recipe,
“Like us,” said one currant
“you too,” said another
“will be”
“folded,”
“and rolled”
“away,”
“inside something else,”
“for someone else.”
Molly kissed her teeth at the dried up fruit and got on with it. She took some yeast—oh, this dalliance is not part of her mother’s recipe—feeling that the dough needed something more to lift up these mouthy currants. She thought the billions of yeasts—new and ancient at the same time, all eager to eat, chatter, and degas—might enliven the whole thing. She bloomed the yeast and worked it into the dough, kneading and folding and pleating itself into its self over and over. Then she rolled it out into a rectangle and spread the currants in an even layer on top. With stalwart hands, she raked her fingers through the cinnamon sugar and currant filling sitting on the dough surface and rolled the rectangle into a taut spiral, muffling the despondent noise. After proofing the log, Molly set the convection oven to preheat, hot air blowing, preparing to lick itself around her creation.
When the temperature was set and the time was right, Molly placed her currants roll alone in the centre of the oven. In the silence she knelt in front of her oven waiting for whatever the final judgment would be, knowing she made it her own way.
Savouring the remaining sweet cinnamon from her thumb, her tongue curled and stuck to the roof of her mouth. And as her eyes closed, tasting the sugar melting in her, she heard voices. Not the currants, and not a memory, but from inside herself—present today, present from the past. From the microscopic mitochondria that dwell within her, us engines that turn sugar to energy to life, she hears us say, she hears her grandmother say, she hears all the greats and all of us who hid and folded ourselves away say,
“Rise.”
