Chapter 0016: Something That Should Not Be Possible
1757 Words
"Yeast is alive. This is not a metaphor. This is the most important thing you will learn in this kitchen."
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The third month began the way the second had ended — two o'clock, the shutter, the smell of flour and heat rising to meet him before he reached the bottom of the stairs.
He had stopped noticing the hour. Not because it had become easy, but because his body had finally accepted the rhythm the way it accepts any rhythm that is repeated long enough — not with enthusiasm, but with the quiet resignation of something that has decided resistance is no longer worth the energy. Two o'clock was simply when the day began. The rest of the city's schedule had become the strange one.
His hands were different now.
He had noticed it somewhere in the middle of the second month — the way the dough felt less like something foreign and more like something he was having a conversation with. Not fluent yet. But no longer speaking entirely different languages. His palms had developed a kind of memory that his mind hadn't caught up with yet, a knowledge that lived below the level of thought and expressed itself as instinct. Pabriel had noticed it too. She hadn't said anything. She had simply, one morning, moved him from the preparation counter to the main work surface.
That had been enough.
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This morning she was waiting for him with something he hadn't seen before.
A small jar, dark glass, sitting on the corner of the work surface with the deliberate placement of something that was going to require explanation. He looked at it. He looked at her.
"Yeast," she said.
He had used yeast before — the instant kind, the dry granules that came in small sachets and could be added directly to flour without ceremony. He had used it in the pineapple bun recipe once, years ago, when Sifu had walked him through the dough as an exercise in understanding structure. He thought he knew what yeast was.
Pabriel picked up the jar and held it toward him.
"Open it," she said.
He unscrewed the lid.
The smell hit him immediately — not unpleasant, but alive in a way that the flour and the water had not been. Something fermented, something active, something that was in the middle of doing something rather than waiting to be told what to do. Yeasty was the obvious word, but that didn't capture it. It was more specific than that. It had a particular quality of aliveness that made the other ingredients seem, by comparison, inert.
"This," Pabriel said, "is not a raising agent. It is not a chemical. It is a living organism, and you are going to put it into your dough, and it is going to eat the sugars in the flour and breathe out gas, and that gas is what makes bread rise." She looked at him. "Do you understand the difference?"
"Between yeast and baking powder," he said.
"Between something alive and something that merely reacts," she said. "Baking powder does not care about temperature. It does not care about time. It reacts when it is told to react and that is the end of its involvement." She took the jar back. "Yeast cares about everything. It cares about temperature — too cold and it sleeps, too hot and it dies, we have discussed this. It cares about what you feed it. It cares about time. It cares, in a way that is not metaphorical, about how it is treated."
She set the jar back on the counter.
"This is why bread is alive," she said. "Not poetically. Literally."
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He added the yeast the way she showed him — dissolved first in a small amount of the water, the temperature precisely in the range they had been working with, watching it bloom. That was the word she used: bloom. He had thought it was a baker's affectation until he saw it happen — the granules dissolving, and then, after a minute, a kind of expansion, a foam forming at the surface, the yeast waking up and immediately beginning to do what yeast did.
He watched it for longer than was strictly necessary.
"It's actually alive," he said.
"I told you," Pabriel said, from across the kitchen.
"I understood the words," he said. "I didn't understand the thing."
He heard something that might, in a different person, have been a laugh. In Pabriel it was a very small sound, quickly suppressed, but present.
He added the yeast mixture to the flour. He began to incorporate it the way the second month had taught him — the negotiation, not the command, the reading of what the dough was telling him rather than the imposition of what he thought it should be doing.
But it was different now. The dough was different with the yeast in it. There was a quality to it he hadn't encountered before — a faint warmth, not temperature exactly, but something adjacent to it. A sense of potential. Of something beginning.
He worked it slowly.
And then, beneath the warmth, beneath the familiar resistance and give of the gluten developing — something else. Faint. A quality that lived at the edge of his awareness the way the bitter note in the bread had lived there on his first afternoon in Paris, the way the flat note in the rye flour had reached him through the doorway before he had any words for what he was sensing.
He stopped.
He held the dough in his hands and paid attention to what his hands were telling him.
The yeast was — he searched for a description — hungry. That was the closest word. Not aggressive. Not urgent. Simply present and ready and already beginning to work on the sugars in the flour with the quiet efficiency of something that knew exactly what it was supposed to do and was doing it. He could feel it. Not with his fingers — beneath his fingers. In the same place the flour's character had been, in the same register as the water's temperature, in the place where his hands had learned to listen.
"The yeast is very active today," he said.
Pabriel looked up from what she was doing.
"The humidity is lower than yesterday," he said. "And the flour — the T55, the new sack — it has a slightly higher sugar content than the last one. The yeast is responding to it." He paused. "It's going to rise faster than usual. Maybe fifteen minutes faster."
The kitchen was very quiet.
Pabriel set down what she was holding. She walked to the counter and stood across from him, looking at the dough in his hands.
"How do you know that," she said. It was not quite a question.
"I can feel it," he said. "In the dough."
"You can feel the yeast activity."
"Yes."
"Through your hands."
"I don't know how else to describe it."
She looked at him for a long moment. The expression on her face was not the recalibration, not the almost-smile, not the thinking face. It was something he hadn't seen before — something that sat at the edge of all of those and belonged to none of them. The expression of someone who has encountered something that does not fit into any category they currently possess.
"Cover the dough," she said finally. "We'll see if you're right."
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They waited.
This was the part of bread-making he had not been prepared for — the waiting. In a Cantonese kitchen, waiting was the exception. The wok required constant attention, constant adjustment, the cook always in motion, always responding. Here, there were long stretches where the work was done and the bread simply needed time, and the baker's job was to leave it alone and let the yeast do what yeast did.
He had found it uncomfortable at first. He found it less so now.
They sat on the stools at the end of the counter — not a common occurrence, but the first batch was in the oven and the dough was proving and there was a pocket of time that didn't require either of them to be doing anything specific. Pabriel had her tea. He had his — the last of the kumquat, pressed thin now, giving less than it had at the beginning, the pouch of dried fruit almost empty.
Pabriel noticed.
"You're running low," she said.
"Almost out," he said. "I've been stretching it."
She looked at the cloth pouch beside his cup. "Can you get more? In Paris?"
"The 13th arrondissement," he said. "There are Chinese shops there. I haven't been yet — I haven't had a reason to go that far." He paused. "I was going to look for a day when I had time."
Pabriel was quiet for a moment.
"Saturday," she said. "The afternoon. I close at one."
He looked at her.
"I know where the shops are," she said, in the tone she used for things that were simply practical, that did not require commentary. "I've been to the 13th. If you want to find specific ingredients, you need to know which shops carry what. Otherwise you'll walk in circles for two hours and come out with the wrong things."
He considered this.
"You want to come," he said. Not a question.
"I want to understand what I've been drinking for three months," she said. "That seems reasonable."
He thought about a woman who had filed away the word gam with the same precision she filed away flour grades and water temperatures. Who had kept the cloth pouch on the shelf above the kettle and given it a place without being asked. Who had, in her own particular way, been paying attention.
"Saturday," he said. "After one."
She picked up her cup.
Across the kitchen, the covered dough was doing what dough did when yeast was active and the conditions were right — rising quietly, steadily, faster than usual.
Fourteen minutes ahead of schedule, as it turned out.
Pabriel checked it without saying anything.
But he saw her note it. He saw her look at the dough, and then at him, with that expression he didn't have a name for yet — the one that sat at the edge of all the others.
She went back to work.
He went back to work.
Outside, Paris was moving toward morning.
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End of Chapter 0016 — Something That Should Not Be Possible
- Writer
