The Baker

‘It was called Kifli not Kiffler. You’re thinking of some kind of potato’ his mum said.

’Sorry, I do not have the recipe. She never shared it. And anyway, it was hardly a recipe worth sharing.’

She was right. The recipe was not worth sharing. She did not mean it was bad. A kifli is a buttery, sugar coated biscuit. They were delicious. But the recipe was too vague to be of much use. 

He had once seen the handwritten recipe on a sheet of paper. He was a child watching his grandmother bake. She took out at every Christmas the faded piece of lined yellow legal pad with blue writing. It was creased and had two adjacent circles of spilled fat where the paper had become transparent. When he looked at a certain angle to the paper it was like he had foggy binoculars to look at his grandmother’s face. The recipe was probably now in the hands of some undeserving creature who bought the recipe book it was stored in at a charity shop after a poorly coordinated clean up. His grandmother was no longer lucid and now lived in a place of care.

He had only seen the handwritten recipe once. He was young enough to be impressed that he could read it himself. In retrospect he realised what a useless document it must be. He remembered that the recipe only said ‘make the biscuits’ after listing the ingredients. That was like giving a fireman a truck and hose and writing on the back of a business card ‘drive this and put the fire out.’

His mum said her mum always preached a particular ratio of ingredients. She could not remember the ratio. She balanced her uncertainty by being pretty certain that the biscuits were made from butter, ground almonds, caster sugar and flour. ‘There was also the sugar used to coat the biscuits. She had a plastic container with vanilla pods and sugar. She always mixed it with regular sugar to balance the flavour.’

He had an oven and baking trays at home. He also had baking paper and a largish bowl to mix things in. He should just need to buy ingredients. 

He always felt sorry for children of Indigenous heritage who had elders and who passed on traditions. Here he was trying to remember a recipe and they had the responsibility to memorise by word of mouth their cultural DNA.

He drove to the supermarket. He parked around the corner from the main entrance. He was happy that he found a spot that he did not have to reverse out of later. He took his grocery bag with his handwritten list. He went through the automatic doors on one side of the entrance. An old man came through the other side of the entrance at the same time. They created a crosswind which sucked the handwritten list out of the grocery bag. They both made a dive for it. It was eventually saved. Both knew that they were not going to make it onto the Quidditch team that season. 

He went to the dairy section first to buy butter. Unsalted it had to be, he knew that much. He would buy double the ingredients he thought he needed. He would decide if he wanted to double the recipe or make it twice to attempt two slightly different ratios of ingredients. 

He was not conducting nuclear physics. There would be no Chernobyl if he got the ratios wrong once or twice. Or three times. And if he did not like the results he could throw them out or instead of being wasteful he could give the botched results to someone he did not like. He would not cause a nuclear meltdown if he made a mistake. But to not remember what was written on that piece of paper, it felt like he was betraying his village elders. For the shared wisdom would be stifled. Knowledge can be preserved in the written word, but it is so easy to ignore the lessons of the past when it is tucked away in a box. He would have liked to record his grandma cooking on his phone, that wisdom of the elders contained in a more lively footage. And then he would not leave it on the phone but copy the stories of the elders onto hardware storage devices, labelled by hand on peeling white labels like so many old VHS tapes. Memory is small when its hardware is small.

He took the butter off the shelf. Four five hundred gram bricks of home brand he thought would do the trick. At least twenty cents cheaper to other branded products. If he got the results right he would support independent business next time and pay the twenty cents. 

The same logic applied to the flour and sugar aisle. You can tell a lot about what someone puts in their grocery cart. What would archaeologists think now if a volcano or a comet exploded over him? He would be buried in a layer of searing hot ash preserving him for centuries. The professionals would eventually see his corpse, preserved in time. The mouth would be open in reaction to that last sensation of pain but not enough life left to get to the yelling stage. His hands would be held stiff on the shopping trolley. In the area surrounding the trolley would be the disintegrated packaging of his trolley’s contents. They would feed samples of the charred rubble through the mass spectrometer. They would conclude that Exhibit 242 located in the stratigraphy of the produce layer must have had a very unbalanced diet. Evidence showed that he was only gathering sugar, flour and butter from his local source of food. 

He could have gone to the self check-out section to scan his own groceries. But he felt he had enough goods and was participating in an important enough cause to go to one of the human scanners. He parked his trolley half a metre away from an old lady getting ready to push her own cargo away. The young girl with a pony tail behind the counter took the belt divider off the belt from where it had fallen. He placed two items at a time on the belt. First the cold bricks of butter, followed by bags of flour and almond meal and then sugar. He would have a food pyramid in his grocery bag with the sugar on top. 

‘Hi, how are you?’

‘Good thanks.’

‘Flybuys?’

‘Yep.’

‘Here you go.’

‘Thank you have a great day.’

He threw his single tote bag with all his groceries on his passenger seat. The bundle would have looked more at home on the front basket of a push bike than on the fresh leather seat of his large SUV. He pushed the start button. The engine started. He knew he would have to wait for the butter to soften a bit when he got home. It was still too stiff from the coldness of the fridge. He did not feel like baking straight away anyway. Even the shortest bursts of shopping made him feel inclined to take a coffee break. Humanity was at its most exhausting to deal with in the supermarket, even in the smallest doses.

He arrived home. He emptied the contents of his shopping bag onto the empty island bench. He used the last of his energy to take himself back to the car to place the grocery bag back in his boot to be sure that he had it with him next time. He made black coffee and reclined on an arm chair and played chess on his phone. He played against the same computer identity on the App twice. He won the first game and lost the second. He finished his drink and watched a segment of a favourite comedian’s stand up performance on YouTube. He had seen that clip too many times to laugh but he still enjoyed it. 

He motivated himself to get up and check the butter. It was still cold and stiff in the middle. It would melt all to liquid if he put it in the microwave for too long. The weather was mild. It would not melt too far if he left the butter on its own for a while. It was eleven in the morning. He left the butter to continue melting. He drove to the pool and swam forty laps in thirty minutes. He took a long drink of water back in the house and then went out to wash his car. The sun crept strong through the clouds as he finished rinsing off the soap. The water on the car paint steamed away in the flash of heat. He left his bucket and sponge to dry in the backyard and returned the coiled hose to its holder on the wall next to the garden tap. He went inside and made a salami sandwich with crusty sourdough and three thin slices of maasdam cheese which he toasted in his large sandwich press. He ate the sandwich. He got up, placed the crumbs in the rubbish bin and put the plate in the dishwasher. He felt the butter. It was close enough to being soft enough to make into dough. 

He had to follow a ratio of ingredients. That is what his mum had said. A ratio he guessed would mean that some ingredients would be placed in double the quantity that some other ingredients would be used. But what would be used more? The flour, the sugar, the almonds or the butter? Probably not the sugar. The sugar presumably would fall apart if you put too much in as well as making it too sweet. There would also be sugar coating on the outside placed afterwards which would presumably counteract any non-sweetness of the biscuit. It was very buttery so in all likelihood butter would be the key ingredient. Almond meal is made from almonds and almonds do not generally hold together no matter how hard you squeeze. He assumed almond meal would be on the smaller ratio, filler rather principle ingredient. So that was it, twice the flour and butter to half the sugar and almonds.

He turned the oven on to low. He mixed the dry ingredients with a sieve. It was the first time he had used the sieve. He gave the mountain of mixed powders a thorough stir to blend. He presumed he would mix in butter to produce crumbs which he would knead into a dough. He cut the butter into small chunks with a table knife and began blending the pale yellow cubes into the blended flour and sugar. Large balls of dough clung between his fingers. It was like snow balling up on the paws of a long haired dog. He did not form crumbs. That was unnerving. He stopped handling the dough when he could feel the butter was getting too liquid like from the heat of his hands. He would go straight to kneading and hope for the best. If he was smart he would have prearranged a board with flour dusted evenly on its surface. As it was he had to wash his hands from the dough and get the board ready. 

He carefully rolled the dough into the flour and made it into something that was not too sticky. He pulled two rectangles of baking paper from a box with his flowered hands. He used the jagged row of teeth built into the paper’s box to make a swift cut. He placed the paper on two baking trays. He took tablespoonfuls of dough and shaped them into moons that he placed about an inch apart. He made them nimbler than he thought they needed to be to allow for the dough to expand or distort in the oven. He put the two trays in the oven. He looked through the oven door’s glass every five minutes to check. On the third check they seemed almost the right pale brown. He filled a shallow bowl with sugar. He would have to wait until next year to age a container of sugar with vanilla seeds.

He took the biscuits out of the oven. They were very soft but needed to be rolled in sugar quickly otherwise the sugar coating would fall off. He got the thinnest spatula he could find and began lifting biscuits into the sugar. Most had at least some crumbs come off and a few broke. But their sugar coating was consistent and true. He placed them on a cooling rack. He cleaned the kitchen. He came back and tried one biscuit cool. They were more buttery than he remembered. And the sugar coating was plainer without the infusion of vanilla scent. But at least they had mostly stayed in one piece.