Kitchens of the Great Midwest

by J. Ryan Stradal

  It did turn out that registering for Petite Noisette’s annual “Best of Bake” affair was a bit more of a rigmarole than registering to enter the County Fair, but it was nothing that Pat couldn’t handle. She needed to submit the names of two people in the food or hospitality industry willing to nominate her; calls to Aunt Jenny Sjoholm and Joe Cragg, her former manager from her waitressing days at the Perkins in River Falls, before she married Eli, secured those. A week later, the Petite Noisette people e-mailed her to tell her she had earned one of the fifty spots, asked for the forty-dollar entry fee, and then later sent another e-mail with a registration number and event info. And that was it. She was in.

  • • •

  Unlike most baking contests, this Petite Noisette one took place at eight o’clock at night, and was at a fancy-looking hotel in Minneapolis called the Millennium, and had entertainment supplied by people with the names “Qwazey” and “DJ June Gloom.” With all the attention paid to extra stuff like that, Pat reasoned, there would be less paid to the food, which would be to her advantage. In her experience, younger people didn’t bake much anymore, and she wondered if she’d start a flood of Deer Lake ladies down to win the Best of Bake contest every year, and maybe by the time she was sixty they’d move it to a more reasonable hour.

  As for Petite Noisette itself, it seemed a little weird. Nothing she’d much care to read regularly. They reviewed restaurants and boutique hotels and seemed intensely concerned about where stuff like the cotton in the hotel towels came from or the chives on a baked potato were grown. They sourced every ingredient of every meal they reviewed and put them all on little maps. Pat assumed they weren’t very trusting people.

  • • •

  The week before the contest, Pat decided to make her bars one more time, but with Grade AA butter, the kind that Celeste used, just to see whether it made much of a difference. She had just set the ingredients on the counter when she heard a knock on the front door.

  Madison Mantilla, dressed extremely immodestly in a bikini covered up by some kind of oversized sleeveless T-shirt thing, stood in the doorway of Pat’s house with a fancily wrapped box under her arm, tapping her cell phone.

  “Oh, hey,” Madison said, glancing up at Pat. “Sorry, Sam usually lets me come right in. I texted him, he knows I’m here.”

  “You just about frightened the pants off of me,” Pat said.

  “Sorry,” Madison said, putting her cell phone in the waistband of her bikini bottom and holding out the box for Pat. “Oh, hey, this is from my mom.”

  She was taken aback, and forgot to sustain her offense at the girl’s rudeness. “Thank you. What is it?”

  “Just open it.”

  It was clear that Madison expected Pat to open it, right then, in front of her. Pat gently separated the tape from the folded paper with her fingernails—perhaps she could save this fancy paper to use again—and revealed a Sur La Table box with a beautiful copper mixing bowl inside.

  “My mom said you should use it for the contest. And to say good luck and everything.”

  “I can’t possibly accept this,” Pat said.

  Sam’s voice, brazen and unstable, broke into their exchange. “Hey, what are you doin’ out here?” he asked, standing where the hallway met the living room, staring at Madison. “Quit dickin’ around and get back here.”

  Pat looked at her son. Where had he learned to talk like that to women?

  “Fuckin’ chill for a sec!” Madison said. “I’m bonding with your mom here.”

  “All right, I’m gonna get started without you, then,” Sam said, and turned and walked back down the hall. Started on what? Pat wondered, but was afraid to ask.

  “Well, tell your mom thank you,” Pat said, wanting this whole exchange to be over. “I guess you’d better go see my son now.” She put the copper bowl back in the box and took it over to her bedroom, but Madison followed her.

  “You have your own bedroom? Cute,” Madison said, standing in the doorway of Pat’s bedroom, taking it in. Pat was happy with the modest little room, which was furnished with a queen bed in a hand-me-down wooden frame, a plain dark wood end table, a small IKEA lamp, and a yellow dresser.

  “Yes, it is,” Pat said, and moved into the doorway.

  Madison picked up a framed picture of Eli, Pat, and Sam from the dresser. “Why don’t you share a room with your husband? Is he totally gross?”

  “I left butter sitting out,” Pat said, walking from her room across the hall into the kitchen.

  “Why did you put it in your bedroom?” Madison said, following Pat back into the kitchen with the copper bowl, setting it on the counter.

  Pat looked at the bowl. It was gleaming and perfect and would be, by far, the most expensive thing in her kitchen. “I don’t know,” she said.

  The girl leaned against the counter and sighed. “My parents should get separate rooms,” she said. Pat glanced at her and thought of a peacock at rest. “I don’t know why the hell they’re even still together,” Madison said, out of nowhere.

  Pat wondered for a second if Madison was a spy from Celeste, sent to draw out her real feelings, but no—Madison seemed sincere about this. Maybe she just didn’t have any other adults in her life to talk to, someone with the benefit of perspective like Pat. Pat considered all of this when she, at last, replied.

  “Because it’s what you do,” she said, facing the girl. “You make a vow before God, it should mean something.”

  “Not to a lot of people, it doesn’t,” Madison said.

  “It’s work,” Pat said. “And the work never stops.”

  “But why even stay together if it’s no fun and all work? My parents don’t do anything fun anymore. The only time my mom has fun is when she’s out with you.”

  That was interesting for Pat to hear, but she decided to let it go unremarked upon. “Because it’s not just work,” she said. “It’s family.”

  “My mom should at least get her own girl cave when I move out,” Madison said. “I told her she could have my office.”

  “That’s nice of you,” Pat said.

  “And by the way,” Madison said, pointing toward Pat’s room, “you should girl it up more in there. Maybe get some shabby chic French provincial furniture.”

  “I don’t know.” She did not intend to say more, but heard herself continue. “There are other spending priorities at the moment.”

  “Well, maybe when you win that big contest.”

  “Maybe then.” Pat squared her body to look at Madison, wishing to end the conversation. “Thank you. And thank your mom.”

  “What? Oh yeah, for the bowl. Duh. Well, nice talkin’ with ya, Sam’s mom.”

  Pat heard Madison knock on Sam’s locked door, waited for the door to open, and waited, finally, for the sound of the door locking behind them, before she could breathe and focus. Standing at the counter, over her plain ceramic mixing bowl, she drove everything that upset her into her hands, and put those hands to work making something delicious for everyone to enjoy. God did not make her a vengeful person; God made her a giving person, and even in this house of people who could be so hateful and hard, her one skill, she knew, was to serve them and make them happy, the way even an unwatered tree still provides whatever shade it can.

  • • •

  The day of the Petite Noisette contest down in the Cities, Pat couldn’t find any of her friends to accompany her. Everyone had family in town, or was out of town, or had just come back from being out of town and weren’t settled yet. Finally she convinced Sam to join her by offering him unlimited use of her car the last week before school started; she would walk to church or get a ride. Some mother-son bonding time before the start of the school year. It would also be six hours of his life where he wasn’t running his marijuana empire or hanging out with Madison, so that was a blessing right there.

  • • •

>   Pat’s car only had a tape deck, but Sam brought his adapter that connected his little MP3 player to her car and allowed him to play his music. He put on Pink Floyd, which reminded her of her older brother Mark, and how he had defied the wishes of their parents when he drove way out to Milwaukee once in the late 1970s to see them with his friends. Mark said at the time that he wished the trip was longer so he could spend even more time away from their parents.

  Pat hoped that Sam didn’t feel that way about her, but it was hard for her to tell sometimes.

  • • •

  Pat hadn’t actually been to the city of Minneapolis in more than two years, and as she got older, each trip down there seemed to overwhelm and exhaust her before she even got out of the car. She was just about shocked out of her shoes when she saw how much it would cost to park at the hotel garage, but told herself that it was much safer than parking on those streets.

  In the hotel lobby, which was very fancy and clean, if a bit spare on the décor, she didn’t see many women her age, or many women who looked like her at all, and certainly nobody carrying around a glass tray of bars covered in plastic wrap. They were all the way up to the floor the ballroom was on before she even saw somebody carrying something that might have food in it. A tall blonde woman in her twenties, dressed in an immodest striped dress, with unsettling tattoos of tigers on the backs of her exposed thighs and calves, was carrying some kind of rectangular maroon duffel bag that looked like a nicer of version of what pizza delivery guys use.

  Pat and Sam followed the woman to a registration table set up outside two large open doors. A sign mounted on an easel read PETITE NOISETTE BEST OF BAKE EVENT. They watched as the woman handed her large bag over to the pretty girls seated behind the table, one of whom ran it inside to the ballroom behind her while the other checked the woman’s name off a list and asked her to sign some papers.

  As the tattooed woman pranced into the ballroom, one of the girls at the table looked directly at Sam.

  “Sir?” she asked. “What’s your name and registration number?”

  Sam looked blankly at the girl’s upbeat face. “Huh? No, I’m here with my mom.”

  “Oh,” the pretty girl said, then looked at Pat. “Oh, cool.”

  Pat set her bars down on the table. “Hi, I’m Pat Prager, and this is my son, Sam.”

  “OK,” the girl said. “It’s a twenty-dollar admission for guests.”

  “What? Oh gosh,” Pat said.

  “I got it, Mom,” Sam said, opening a surprisingly fat wallet; Pat didn’t even want to know.

  The girl accepted the twenty from Sam, and then looked at Pat, as the other girl poked the red plastic wrap on Pat’s bars with her pen. “And this is your entry?”

  “Yes, these are my peanut butter bars.”

  “Do you have an informational card with the recipe or ingredients?”

  “Ah, no, I didn’t know I was supposed to bring one.”

  “It’s OK. Are they vegan, gluten-free, celiac, non-GMO, all of the above?”

  Pat looked at the girls and then at Sam. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Any of the above?”

  “None of the above, I don’t think.”

  “Where did you source your ingredients from?” one of them asked. “Are they local?”

  “Yeah,” Pat said, “they’re from the store about a mile from my house.”

  One of the girls behind the table laughed. “Sorry,” she said.

  Pat was so confused. “Well, they are. I maybe even have the receipt in my purse.”

  “No, that’s fine. Go on in, peer voting just started and will go until eight-thirty. Get your ballots at the red table.”

  “Have them sign the release forms,” the other girl said.

  “Oh, yeah, sign these. This one’s to consent to video- and audiotaping, and this one basically says that you are responsible for what you eat and supply to be eaten, and it waives Petite Noisette from any damages.”

  Pat never heard of anybody suing the organizers of a bake-off before, but she already knew she wasn’t dealing with the usual crowd here. Being a good sport, she and Sam signed everything and stepped into the doorway of the ballroom.

  It was like something out of a movie. One entire wall was a half dome of glass triangles that looked out upon the dark, twinkling Minneapolis skyline. Young people in summer yellows and pale greens moved plates of cinnamon and caramel and vanilla scents across the dark carpeted floor, setting the desserts up on small cream tables tagged with black numbers. Up a couple of stairs, at the far end of the long carpeted room, a tattooed young woman in a tasseled stocking cap and a basketball jersey stood behind two laptops, as some kind of jittery music played from the speakers on both sides of her. She remembered when popular music didn’t sound like a chainsaw falling down a flight of concrete stairs and actually made people want to dance.

  Backing away into the doorway of the ballroom, Pat realized that she could hear the registration girls talking.

  “Locally sourced ingredients,” one of them said. “From the store a mile from my house. I might have to tweet that one.”

  “These are so weird and gross.”

  Pat, still standing in the doorway to the ballroom, watched as one of the girls from the desk brought her tray of bars to a man in a black suit, who brought them to a long table and scooped them out onto an empty platter labeled with the number 49.

  Pat thought she was going to cry. “Did you hear that?” she said to her son.

  “Yeah, fuck ’em,” Sam said, and she was actually slightly pleased to hear her son swear. “They’re a bunch of snobs. Let’s see what the hell they think is so damn good.”

  Sam walked to the nearest table, where something labeled CHOCOLATE CHIP BANANA OAT CAKES—VEGAN/GLUTEN-FREE/SOY-FREE sat on a platter next to the number 3.

  Pat looked at the card next to the platter.

  2 cups gluten-free oats sourced from the organic, pesticide- and GMO-free farm of Seymour and Peonie Schmidt, Faribault, MN, home-processed into oat flour

  ½ cup regular oats, not processed (same source as above)

  ½ cup brown sugar, homemade: fresh unsulphured molasses, stirred into organic fair trade Hawaiian cane sugar, each purchased at Frogtown Community Co-Op

  ½ teaspoon ground Ceylon cinnamon: fair trade, purchased at Frogtown Community Co-Op

  ⅓ cup Gala Apple applesauce, homemade, apples sourced from McBroom Orchards, Hudson, WI; organic, GMO- and pesticide-free

  2 medium very ripe organic bananas, fair trade, purchased at Frogtown Community Co-Op

  2 tablespoons Sunrise Hills brand low-fructose Artisanal Blue Agave syrup, purchased direct from manufacturer, Taos, NM

  • • •

  Pat stopped reading there. Sam chucked one of the oat cakes in his mouth.

  “Nothing special,” he said. “Kinda weird. Kinda like eating a banana-flavored granola bar or something. Want one?”

  Pat shook her head. She didn’t want to know what it was like.

  “I’ll tell you this, Mom,” Sam said. “Eli would throw a shit fit if you served that as dessert.”

  “These ingredients, they’re so specific,” Pat said. “These people make their own oat flour and brown sugar?”

  “It all looks the same in the toilet the next morning,” Sam said, and Pat laughed a little. Thank God for him.

  A young man in tight jeans, a plaid shirt, and a bow tie walked up to Sam. Kind of a weird fashion sense, but he was smiling, and that’s what counted. “Hey man,” he said. “You need a ballot.”

  “Oh yeah, that’s right,” Sam said. “We have to vote.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sam Jorgenson,” he said, glancing at his mom.

  “Dylan, and that’s my wife, Oona, over there,” the young man said, pointing to a happy-looking young wom
an in yellow high-waisted pants, standing near the DJ. Didn’t those kinds of pants go out of style a long time ago? Maybe they were on sale, and she was trying to save money. “You brought your mom with you, that’s cool.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. Pat could see that once again her son was mistaken for the chef, and this time she stepped back and remained silent, remembering the last time she opened her mouth to this crowd.

  “It’s great to see someone so young be so serious in the kitchen. How old are you?”

  “I turn seventeen next week.”

  “You gotta be the youngest person here. I had to come over and meet you. What’s your specialty?”

  “Brownies.”

  “Nice. Where do you buy your ingredients?”

  “Well, the main ingredient, I grow myself at home.”

  “I love it!” the young man said, genuinely excited. “That is so awesome.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We made the Raw No Bake Chocolate Torte, number 8 over there. What about you, you enter your brownies?”

  “Oh no, we got the peanut butter bars, number 49.”

  “Let’s try ’em,” Dylan said, waving his wife over. “I’ll vote for yours if you vote for mine.”

  “Sure.”

  “Go get your ballots at the red table,” Dylan told Sam and Pat. “We’ll meet you at number 49.”

  “That was a friendly young man,” Pat said. She looked around the room at the pretty, strangely dressed young people. Celeste had put her up to this. If Pat’s bars somehow won over this crowd of picky eaters it would be because she once again met a test and overcame it. She had held on to her faith at the County Fair, and God blessed her; perhaps, in this strange land, He would bless her again.

  • • •

  Pat and Sam found a stack of sheets on the red table that had check boxes next to the numbers 1 through 50, and a short line for comments next to each. Pat thought it was extremely strange to have a baked goods contest where the contestants voted, but didn’t want to say anything to anybody. She just wanted to skip to the end.

  She looked across the room at Dylan and Oona, who were now consuming Pat’s bars back at number 49 with a third person, a serious-looking, solidly built woman in her midtwenties wearing a white T-shirt and cargo pants, who stood out from most of the room because of her plain, unfashionable clothes.