The Glass Key

The bus dropped me at the bottom of the hill and I walked the last stretch with my knife roll over one shoulder and a crate of squash in my arms. Twenty-eight years old and I still carry things like I was a pack mule. The studio sat at the top, all glass and iron, glowing orange from the furnaces inside. You could see the light from half a mile off.

The door was propped open with a brick. I went in and the heat hit me right away, that dry furnace heat that dries your mouth before you get two steps in. Somebody had cleared the worktables and pushed them against the walls. Down the middle ran one long communal table, scrubbed clean, big enough for twelve people to eat at once. Beyond it the furnaces still ran. They keep those lit year round, apparently. It made the whole place feel like a kitchen that had wandered off from a restaurant.

There were maybe a dozen contestants milling around, most of them farmers or hobby cooks from the surrounding glens. I knew a couple of faces from the market in town. And then I saw Renee.

Renee Callahan, twenty-nine, tea buyer by trade, cook by stubbornness. We met two years ago at the Lochcarron food fair where she took second place and complained about it to the judges for a full twenty minutes. I took first. She has not let me forget it since. She was standing at the far foraging table, sorting through a basket of wild herbs with her sleeves rolled to the elbow, and my first thought was that she had very good forearms and my second thought was that I needed to stop thinking about her forearms.

Too late, though. The jolt was already there, sitting low in my stomach like a swallowed coal. I set down my crate and took a breath.

"Sharon," she said, spotting me. "They let you off the bus, then."

"They let me off the bus. How was the drive up?"

"Long. Scenic. I had tea at a service station that I'd rather not discuss." She brushed hair out of her face with the back of her wrist. "You're still doing the soft thing, I see. Squash, braised things, all that tenderness. It won't save you tonight."

"What are we tonight, at war?"

"We were always at war. Tonight we just have witnesses." She said it with a small smile and I felt that coal shift again.

A man clapped his hands near the furnace end of the hall. He was older, maybe sixty, with a leather apron on over ordinary clothes, so I guessed he was the glassblower whose studio this was. He introduced himself as Duncan and said we'd all been given his studio for the night because his wife ran the harvest supper committee and because, quote, it was the only roof in the glen with both heat and tables.

"Now," he said, and he held up a fist, "the prize."

He opened his hand. In it was a key. Iron, old, long as a finger and heavy looking, with a curvy ornate handle. It caught the furnace light and looked like something out of a storybook.

"This key opens the pantry at the manor house. The locked one. It's been sealed for eleven years and it's full of rare things. Dried goods, preserves, vinegars, some of it nobody's tasted in a decade. Whoever wins tonight's supper wins the key and the pantry."

There was a low murmur around the hall. Renee, ten feet from me, made a small sound as if she had just been handed a very good hand of cards. I understood why. A pantry like that could stock a small restaurant for a year. It could stock a tea buyer's tasting room forever.

"Your rules are simple," Duncan went on. "One dish per cook. Everything must come from within five miles of this studio. Local, foraged, grown, or raised. Anything else is out. My wife's committee will walk the tables and score you on flavor, on use of the season, and on story. The harvest supper has always been about eating what the land gives, so tell us what it gave you." He set the key down on the long table where everyone could stare at it. "You have until eight. Foraging table's along the west wall. Take a basket and go."

People moved. I moved with them, mostly running the plan through my head already. Five miles of Highlands in October. Mushrooms, certainly, if I could find good ones. Late berries. Rosehips. Game if anyone was selling. Roots, wild herbs, maybe someone's lamb. I could do a braised dish, something slow and tender, my usual territory, and let the story be the story.

I took a basket and started at the west end of the foraging table. It was laid out like a market stall, wooden trays of things the committee had gathered and traded from neighbors. Chanterelles in one tray, the color of egg yolk. Hedgehog mushrooms. A tray of rowan berries so red they looked painted. Hazelnuts still in their husks. Jars of heather honey with the comb still in them.

"Chanterelles," Renee said, appearing at my elbow. "Bold choice."

"They're not bold. They're chanterelles."

"From you they're bold. You'll bury them in cream and butter until they apologize for having a flavor of their own."

"I use butter because butter is good, Renee."

"Butter is a crutch." She picked a mushroom off the tray and turned it in her fingers. "Look at this thing. It grew out of a pine stump two days ago. It tastes like the forest floor and apricots. It doesn't need a bath in cream to be worth eating. It needs heat, salt, and nerve."

"Nerve," I repeated. "You're giving cooking lessons now? You make tea for a living."

"Tea is the strictest cooking there is. One degree off and it's ruined. That's precision, and precision is what wins tonight." She put the mushroom back in the tray and looked at me straight on. She has gray eyes, which I had somehow never noticed before, and I was annoyed at myself for noticing them now. "What are you actually making?"

"Why should I tell you?"

"Because I'll find out anyway at judging, and if you tell me now I'll owe you a favor." She leaned one hip against the table. "I keep my debts. Ask anyone."

"That's a terrible business model."

"It's a terrible business model and I'm still solvent. What's the dish?"

I looked at her. Here was the thing, and I'll just say it plainly. I liked arguing with her. I've known plenty of people who push and it makes you want to leave the room. Renee pushed and it made me want to push back, harder, longer, ideally all night. That is a dangerous thing to realize during a competition, so I did what any sensible person does and told her a half truth.

"Braised. Something slow. That's all you get."

"Slow and tender. Of course." She smiled like she'd been given the answer anyway. "You know what your problem is, Sharon? You cook like you're apologizing. Everything on your plate is comfortable. Comfortable doesn't win pantries."

"And your problem is you cook like you're arguing. Arguing doesn't win suppers either."

"Doesn't it?" She took a basket off the pile, dropped three chanterelles in it, and started down the table. "We'll see tonight."

I stood there a second longer than I meant to, watching her walk away, and then shook it off and got back to work. Eight o'clock. A key. A pantry. I picked up a jar of the heather honey and held it to the light. There were more important things to think about than forearms and gray eyes. There were. I thought about them anyway, off and on, for the next hour while I planned a menu around mushrooms and honey and nerve.

I got a worktable near the middle of the studio, close enough to the furnaces that the heat sat on my shoulders like a heavy coat. Duncan had set up a row of propane burners down one side and cleared the glassblowing benches for prep space. It was a strange kitchen, all iron and grit and orange light, but it was dry and it was warm and it had a sink, which is more than some kitchens I've cooked in.

I quartered squash and salted it. I cleaned a double handful of chanterelles with a damp cloth, no water, because water is the enemy of a good sear. I set the honey aside for later. Braised lamb, if I could get it, with squash, mushrooms, honey and rosehips in the finish. The story was simple. Everything on the plate grew within sight of this hill. Sometimes simple is the story.

Renee had the station next to mine. Of course she did. There were a dozen worktables in this studio and she picked the one four feet from mine, which I choose to believe was a coincidence and did not choose to believe very hard.

"Nice squash," she said, not looking up.

"Thank you."

"I meant the way you cut it. Very safe."

"Is there an unsafe way to cut a squash?"

"There is, actually. You're just not brave enough to find it."

I let that go, because I had a deadline and she had a deadline and talking to her was, I had already established, a dangerous activity. I got the squash roasting and went hunting for lamb. One of the farmers, a woman named Elspeth with a van full of coolers, sold me two pounds of shoulder off the bone and threw in a marrow bone for nothing because she liked my hat. Good day so far.

* * *

By half past six the studio had turned into the kind of kitchen I love and fear. Furnaces roaring. A dozen burners going. Duncan walking around with a clipboard saying things like "mind the annealing shelves" to nobody in particular. My lamb was seared and buried in its pot with onions and heather and a splash of dark ale from the carton somebody had left at the foraging table, marked FREE, which felt like cheating and wasn't, because the brewery was a mile down the road.

That was when I burned my hand.

Here's how. The squash came out of the oven. The tray had been sitting in there longer than I thought, and when I grabbed the far edge with my bare hand instead of the cloth, because I was an idiot for exactly one second, my palm met the metal and everything in my body said one word at once.

I dropped the tray and swore. Not a polite swear. The kind of swear you learn from line cooks.

"Sit," Renee said. She was beside me already, actually beside me, how fast had she moved, and she had my wrist in her hand. "Don't put it in your mouth, everybody does that and it doesn't work. Sink. Cold water. Now."

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine, your hand is the color of the furnace. Sink."

I went to the sink. She went with me, which I did not need and did not object to. She ran the water cold and put my hand under it and held it there, her fingers over mine, firm, no argument in her at all. That was the surprise. She argued about everything all day, and now her hands were completely sure and quiet.

"Ten minutes under here," she said. "You'll hate every one of them."

"I have lamb on the heat."

"Your lamb has an hour and a half and a lid. Ten minutes. I'll watch your pot myself if you sulk about it."

"You'll touch my lamb?"

"I'll adjust your flame and touch nothing else. Go."

So I stood there with my hand in the sink like a scolded child, and Renee crossed over, lifted my lid, looked at the lamb, and lowered the flame one notch. Then she came back and stood next to me and we both watched the water run.

"Hurt?"

"Like hell."

"Good. Means it's superficial. Blisters mean deeper. Do you have blisters?"

"No!"

"Then you got lucky and you'll keep all your fingers. Which matters, since apparently you cook for a living."

"How do you know that?"

"Everyone at the fair two years ago knew that. You won the fair, Sharon. People talk."

She had a small first aid tin, because of course she did, a tea buyer who travels to estates and farms and judges things for a committee wife. When the ten minutes were up she dried my hand herself, gentle, and spread a burn gel from the tin across my palm, and wrapped it in gauze with two neat turns. Her fingers were cool. My hand was hot. The contrast was doing something to my concentration that I did not have spare concentration for.

"Hold still," she said.

"I'm holding still."

"You're vibrating. Cooks vibrate. It's a known thing." She smoothed the