“Who?” Balthazar asked.
“Purdita Bliss, your great-great-granddaughter. We called about the translation of your copy of the Bliss Cookery Booke. Remember?”
“I wish you all could just drop all the ‘greats’ and call me Grandpa. Makes a fellow feel old.” Balthazar squinted at Purdy for a moment, then half-heartedly took Purdy’s hand and shook it. “Oh, now I remember,” he said. “The people with the son named after a spice.” Balthazar squinted at Ty’s crown of gelled red hair that stood two inches high. “What does he think he is, a hedgehog?”
“That’s Ty!” Albert stepped forward and shook Balthazar’s hand. “And these are the rest of our children, Parsley, Sage, and Rosemary.”
Balthazar nodded, still frowning. “More herbs. Huh.”
“Is this the bakery?” Rose ventured.
“Of course not.” Balthazar grunted. “This is the grand entrance. The bakery is this way.”
Balthazar led the Bliss clan through the back door on to a noisy, sunny patio crowded with picnic tables. Dozens of tanned Mexican farmers and their children were sitting at the tables, laughing as they gobbled slices of moist cake and brilliant red pie from paper plates.
“This is the bakery.”
Rose noticed a young woman and a young man sitting across from each other at a table, both eating some sort of goopy yellow mush from white bowls. Rose stared at it, furrowing her eyebrows in confusion. What is that stuff doing in a bakery? she wondered.
“What?” said Balthazar crankily. “You don’t like the look of my polenta, Marjoram?”
“It’s Rosemary,” Rose mumbled.
“Whatever, Marjoram. Come to my office. All of you.”
Balthazar led the Blisses to a tin shed at the back of the patio. Inside was a shady room with an odd concrete structure in the centre. The structure was shaped like an Olympic podium, with two lower platforms flanking one high column. At the top of the column was a grate, and beneath it roared a wood fire.
“My stove,” the old man grumbled. “I know it’s not one of your high-tech American wall ovens, but it serves my purposes just fine. I don’t do fancy frosting on my cupcakes and all that useless, time-wasting ornamental junk. I bake to feed people.”
Rose looked round the room. Lining one wall were giant sacks of ground corn, and lining another were shelf after shelf of blue mason jars, all labelled in Spanish. Rose burned to know what was in each jar and how to use it.
Balthazar stepped into the room. “For ten years I’ve been inventing new recipes using ground cornmeal. The golden porridge you were thumbing your nose at out there, Marj,” he said, pointing to Rose, “happens to be called Polenta of Plenitude. And it’s very useful. Unlike your American cupcakes. All style and no substance, I think.”
As Balthazar launched into an oration on the various incarnations of ground corn, Sage and Leigh wandered off to investigate a rack of cooling strawberry pies, while Ty stepped back on to the patio to seek amigas. Purdy and Albert asked smart questions and settled into chairs to listen.
And so did Rose. After a while she noticed that some of the lines on her great-great-great-grandfather’s face had softened into something that approximated a smile, or at least a non-frown.
“See, the Polenta of Plenitude gets made,” Balthazar explained, “by stirring ground cornmeal in water and milk over an open flame.” He poured a cup full of golden corn dust into a pot with two cups of milk, then swirled the pot over the iron bars of the stove-top grid. “Then you add honey, a sprig of rosemary, and this.” Balthazar stepped over to the wall of blue jars and removed one labelled EL SAPO INFLADO.
Rose peered inside and saw a huge bullfrog leaning back against the side of the jar, his legs splayed out and both webbed forehands cradling his monstrous, swollen belly.
“The burp of a bloated bullfrog,” he said, lowering the unscrewed jar to the boiling pot. The frog punched his gut with a tiny amphibian fist, then let out a rumbling, rolling belch that smelled, not surprisingly, like garlic.
A bubble grew out of the cornmeal, filling the entire pot, then swelling until it reached the ceiling of the tin shed before bursting in a sigh and dropping back into the pot.
“There,” Balthazar huffed, stuffing the poor bloated bullfrog back on the shelf.
Balthazar dipped a spoon into the pot and handed it to Rose. The Polenta of Plenitude was some of the best stuff she’d ever tried: velvety, fresh, moist – the perfect balance of savoury and sweet.
“Mum and Dad!” Rose said. “You have to try this!”
Each tasted a spoonful of the masterful corn mixture.
“Wow!” said Purdy. “You’ve really made something special here, Balthazar!”
Balthazar swatted Purdy’s compliment away like a fly, grumbling inaudibly. “I don’t eat sweets any more,” he said. “You eat too many sweets, you get too big to run away when people come after you. When this masa works its magic, you can’t eat like most people do, stuffing themselves to the point where they’re bloated like a couch potato. Eat a little of this masa as an appetiser, and you’ll eat just enough of your main course to stay healthy. Unlike my cat over there, if you could call him that.”
“What else would they call me?” came a low voice from a dark corner of the room.
Rose couldn’t believe her eyes: a pudgy grey cat as wide around as a bowling ball lumbered out from behind a box and climbed up a ramp on to a rolling wooden chopping block. He sat upright on his haunches and licked under his front leg, which was quite thin compared to his thick face and rotund body. Most striking of all were his ears, which didn’t stand straight up like a regular cat’s but were pinched and rumpled into two folded lumps atop his wide face. “Balthazar, you should have told me we were having people over. I would have bathed. I’m in a shambles!”
“Whoa!” Sage exclaimed. “You have a talking cat?”
“Unfortunately,” Balthazar replied. “He wandered into my parents’ kitchen when I was fifteen, and he got his grubby claws on a batch of Chattering Cheddar Biscuits I made. He hasn’t shut up since.”
“Allow me to properly introduce myself since the old man can’t bring himself to do it for me,” the cat said. He sounded like a butler in a mansion outside of London. “My name is Asparagus the Green, but you should call me Gus.”
“But you’re not green,” Sage said. “You’re more of a dark grey.”
“Minor details.” The cat blinked. “I am a Scottish Fold, and—”
“Is that some kind of soldier or something?” asked Sage.
“It is the name of my breed. I am pure Scottish Fold, hence my exquisitely folded ears. I am not from Scotland, however. My dearly departed mother and father hailed from London. And who might you be?”
“This is my great-great-granddaughter Purdy Bliss; her husband, Albert; and her herbaceous children, Parsley, Sage, Marjoram, and Thyme.”
“Rosemary,” whispered Rose.
“Sure,” Balthazar continued. “And they are here because—” Balthazar stopped and turned to Purdy. “Why are you here?”
“We’re here for the translation of the Booke,” she replied nervously. “We need it, now.”
“Why?” he asked. “Can’t you just use your own?”
“Our copy is indisposed at the moment.”
“What do you mean, ‘indisposed’?”
Rose and the rest of the family gathered around one of Balthazar’s