The Secret Ingredient

by Kilby Blades

  Cella rolled her eyes, grabbed her recipe book, and went to the table to sit at her computer, thinking again how people rarely challenged her any more. Cella could always count on Gianna or other big chefs to hand her her ass if she was wrong about something in the kitchen, but no assistant had talked this way to her in years.

  There was something so real about Max, so unaffected by her celebrity, so casual about his interactions with her. He let her witness his everyday tasks, punctuating breaks from their cooking with doing laundry and letting her tag along to take Cujo for his mid-morning walk. There was no pretense, no posturing, and nothing self-serving. And she couldn’t help but to think that he had just crossed the threshold to Stage Two.

  7 The Apology Dinner

  “Do you like scallops?”

  Cella had been quiet for the better part of thirty minutes, transcribing her handwritten notes as Max cleaned up the kitchen. He’d put on mellow music—the soundtrack from a Brazilian film he liked. He enjoyed the vision of her tapping her finger silently to the rhythm and humming along.

  It had taken courage for him to ask her to eat with him for a third day in a row—he was sure she had better things to do. Plus, he was nervous that he had offended her earlier. She looked up from her screen and blinked.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll defer to you on how they should be cooked,” he continued. “I won’t say the word ‘cheese’. I’ll even open a bottle of apology wine.”

  Her gaze softened. “Apology wine?”

  “Maybe a Sincero?”

  Sincero meant ‘sincere’ in Italian. He could see from the recognition on her face that she had picked up on his little joke. He wiped his hands and took a step toward her, looking her squarely in the eye.

  “It’s your book, Cella. I have no right to my strong opinions. Tomorrow, I’ll tone it down.”

  “Your puns are really bad,” she informed him, with a piteous smile. “If you’re going to apologize for anything, apologize for that.”

  His deep voice made for a low chuckle. “Does that mean you’ll stay for dinner?”

  “I do like a nice Sincero…” Half an hour later, they had assembled another delectable meal.

  There was something calming about the way they cooked together. They’d been doing it all day, of course, but the pace of cooking to develop a recipe was halting and unnatural. Going through each step slowly, stopping to take photographs, and to analyze each phase and element was a far cry from the natural rhythm of cooking.

  When faced with the commonplace task of making dinner, something in the way they work felt connected. They said few words, yet somehow anticipated the other’s every move. He handed her fresh bone broth from the refrigerator and a bottle of sherry just as her rice was starting to crackle. She turned down the heat on his pan after the olive oil reached the correct temperature. After he’d turned his scallops, she plucked half of the garlic cloves from a prep bowl—a bulb’s worth that she’d already husked, halting him from peeling the intact bulb that he’d just picked up.

  Maybe it was because she was a professional. Cooking with her those past days had proven ten times over how much experience she had on him. She was gracious and supportive as she taught him dozens of skills and tricks. He was utterly grateful for the tutelage, but it reminded him what an amateur he was.

  Max lit a citronella candle to keep the bugs away while Cella set his outdoor dining table with their finished plates. He did pour the promised Sincero. Before he could make a toast, she beat him to it by speaking first.

  “To candor,” she said simply, fixing him with a playful smile.

  “And to grace,” he returned.

  “Hear, hear.”

  She complimented him on the wine and they complimented one another on how their dish turned out. He didn’t think he would ever forget the feeling he got from simple pleasures like this. Eating this amazing meal in his favorite place with this woman, the vision of her hair stirring in the ocean breeze, was paradise compared to the way he spent most evenings when he was away.

  “I like that you’re honest with me,” she said as they tucked into their meal. “Nearly nobody is anymore. It’s one of the hidden perks of being famous.”

  “Finally, you admit it.”

  “Don’t you think it’d be weird to say out loud? Like, ‘here, I’m famous—come kiss my ring’. I don’t like to draw attention to myself.”

  “No, I get it. I’m the same way. I don’t think I’d enjoy all the attention, let alone people being afraid to say what they think around me.”

  There was no elegant way to ask the question that he’d been wondering all week, and he didn’t know whether a better moment would arise.

  “So what’s it really like?”

  “Do you want the short answer or the long answer?”

  He could tell she meant the pat answer or the real answer.

  “Candor, remember?”

  She stopped chewing and stared into her dish. When her eyes shifted to the horizon before coming back to his, her gaze held more emotion than he’d anticipated.

  “It’s exhausting.” She looked at him sadly. “Being famous because you’re good at something is different from being famous because you like the spotlight. Some people thrive off of the attention.”

  “But not you.”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s strange…always being surrounded by people, but feeling alone. I’m not an intimidating person, but people are intimidated by the idea of me, no matter what I do to try to disarm them.”

  “You disarmed me easily enough,” he offered.

  She smiled playfully. “I cheated. I got to you through your dog. Anyway…sorry. There are things I hate about it, but it feels so wrong to complain.”

  “You’re not complaining. I’m asking.”

  “It’s just… a lot of pressure, never being able to have a bad day. Having to use a pseudonym to do simple things…”

  “What’s your pseudonym?”

  She picked up her wine glass. “Anita Snack.”

  He chuckled. “For real?”

  “Sometimes you gotta laugh to keep from crying…the cameras are always on and the schedule is always full. I always have to look presentable and be gracious, even if all I want to do is walk around in my pajamas with no makeup on and be a total bitch.”

  Both of them smiled.

  “I’ll bet you look cute in pajamas. The press would eat it up.”

  “Actually, I do,” she said a bit self-righteously. “But if I ever walked to my mailbox without makeup on or without my contacts in, the Internet would lose its shit.”

  For as ridiculous as it sounded, he was certain it was true. Without platitudes or solutions, he sent her an empathetic look before asking, “You wear glasses?”

  She gave him a self-deprecating smile.

  “They’re like coke bottles. Seriously, I’m blind as a bat.”

  When he laughed, she did, too.

  “Well, you don’t have to wear contacts and makeup on account of me.”

  “Be careful what you wish for,” she quipped, but he could see a shadow of sadness in her eyes.

  “You look better without it.” He stopped just short of saying that she was beautiful exactly as she was.

  “You’ve never seen me without makeup.”

  He spun the stem of the wine glass in his fingers. “That’s not true. You weren’t wearing makeup the day we met.”

  She wrinkled her nose, as if trying to remember. His heart sped as he prepared to spill his words.

  “Your freckles are beautiful. I was kind of hoping I’d get to see them again.”

  She shook her head and rolled her eyes a little, setting her gaze toward the ocean, but not before he saw her subtle smile. They were quiet for a long moment, and soon he joined her in looking at the horizon. The sea had calmed and the sound of the rolling waves was soft.

  “What’s it like for you?”

  “Being famous?” he quipped.

&nb
sp; “No…” she drew out. “Being an introvert in an extrovert’s job?”

  Her observation was astute. He loved his job, but at times it overwhelmed him.

  “That’s what you do when you show up to help people, right? Ride into town on your white horse? Everybody looking toward you to be what they need you to be?”

  He said out loud to her things he’d never admitted to anyone. “It’s a lot to live up to, when people put you on a pedestal and hang their hopes on you solving their problems. It’s not even close to what you deal with…but I crumble under it a bit. When I need to get away, I come hide for a while in my little beachfront town.”

  From the look in her eyes as he said it, Max knew he had stumbled on something. Cella wasn’t just there to write a cookbook and relax by the beach, she was there to hide.

  “What’s it really like out there?” she asked.

  “Complicated,” he said. “It sounds good on the surface, you know? Going to places where the level of health care we have just isn’t accessible. Treating people who wouldn’t get treatment otherwise. But we’re outsiders. Some people resent us being there, and I understand why. The longer I do this, the more doubts I have about whether the foreign aid industry is really helping people. It’s starting to feel like one big, inefficient crutch.”

  “The whole give a man a fish versus teaching him how to fish,” she murmured.

  Max nodded. “It’s the classic quandary. The last surgery I did before I came back was on a kid living in a village that my organization has served for more than forty years. The kid’s mom told me that my non-profit had helped her sister when they were kids. With all the money they’ve spent paying for doctors like me to keep going over there, they could have sent kids from the village to medical school.”

  She nodded in empathy as she picked up the bottle to refresh their glasses, pouring out the last of the wine.

  “But then there are moments—these situations—when people say amazing things to me about what my work has meant, or when I see how much better someone’s life is because of what I’ve done. Two weeks ago, the day he went home from recovering from surgery, a six-year-old kid looked at me with tears running down his face. And do you know what he said to me?”

  A lump formed in Max’s throat as Cella shook her head.

  “He said, ‘Thank you, mister. Now my father will accept me.’” Max took a shaky breath. “But there are so many other moments, when I have down time and I’m exploring the places where I’m staying, and it feels like my own life is passing me by. Seeing people with their families, and their friends, playing with their pets…it makes me sick for home.”

  “But when you come home, it doesn’t feel like that,” Cella finished for him. “Because everyone else has kept moving and it feels like you’ve been gone too long.”

  Max swallowed another lump in his throat.

  “I envy you, Max,” she said, and he could tell it cost her something. “These people—they love you. You may not be here every day, but I can tell—to them, you’re not gone. I’d give a lot for what you have. For me, there’s no place that’s home.”

  “What about your parents? Do they still live wherever you’re from?”

  “I’m from nowhere,” she said. “I lived in six different states growing up. My dad could never keep a job. We moved around a lot.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “My dad died a few years back. By then, I was already doing well. I bought them a house in Florida. My mom still lives there. She’s basically retired. What I’m saying is, even if you feel like they’re dying, you still have roots. That’s a hell of a lot more than I have.”

  He didn’t want to trivialize her story, but he didn’t like how dejected she sounded.

  “You could put down roots somewhere.”

  “But, where? And, better yet, when? I have contracts coming out of every crevice. I’m committed to recipe books, and restaurants and TV shows. The extroverted half of me loves the traveling, and the show and meeting my fans. I’ve had amazing experiences I wouldn’t trade.”

  “And the other half?”

  “The other half of me wants to retire at the tender age of thirty-two and buy a house in some out of the way place. I’d raise a garden and cook whatever I wanted. I’d read books and throw dinner parties and make pottery or something. Maybe I’d even get a dog.”

  There were a dozen things Max wanted to say. He wanted to tell her that Longport was the best place in the world and that, if she wanted to, she could have a home there. He wanted to tell her to break her contracts, and to say she could buy the house next door. But he didn’t say any of those things.

  “Which half is winning?” he asked instead.

  She shook her head and looked toward the ocean. “I honestly don’t know.”

  8 The Taste

  Cella sighed as she threw down her pen. She’d been there an hour and they hadn’t even started cooking. Max had taken her advice to be honest to heart. They stood in the kitchen, locked in hot debate. Now that they’d gotten the basics down, deciding what recipes would make the cut was proving a challenge.

  “Look. I hear what you’re saying.” She pinned him with a rueful glance. “But these have to be recipes people recognize. They won’t venture into the unfamiliar until I’ve won them over with a good Fettucini Alfredo and Spaghetti and Meatballs.”

  “Spaghetti is Italian and meatballs are Italian, but no one in Italy eats them together, let alone with marinara. You can’t say you’re writing a cookbook on classic Italian cuisine if most of your dishes have been Americanized.”

  “80% of my sales are in the American market.”

  “80% of Italians would call bullshit. You’re not Chef Boyardee, you’re Cella fucking Dawes.”

  Max had a way of stepping closer when he was fired up, a way of getting right into her space. She might’ve laughed if she hadn’t been so distracted by his proximity.

  “I can’t ignore the consumer. Or my publisher for that matter. At least half of these need to be recipes that people know.”

  “Either that, or recipes people will come to like. You could educate people about real Italian cooking.”

  “There’s no such thing. No singe dish is ever made the same way. In Puglia, Lasagne is for Christmas. In Marches, it’s for weddings. In Emilia-Romagna, it’s used to celebrate the birth of a baby girl. In Marches, they use chicken liver and Marsala wine. The béchamel and Bolognese are used in Emilia-Romagna. In Liguria, it’s made with pesto.”

  When Max ran his fingers through his hair, she caught a whiff of his clean scent. Both of them were right. On one hand, she had no business passing off recipes that weren’t eaten in Italy. On the other hand, she had a crowd to please.

  “You’re missing what people want. They’re in love with the idea of something that came from the old country. They want to know how someone’s grandmother made it.”

  She thought of their conversation that first night, about legacies and keeping them alive.

  “So where do I draw the line?”

  “Tell the truth about where the recipes come from. Call the chapter Italian-American. Tell them the history of the dishes they know and tell the stories of those they don’t. With a microphone as big as yours, you can really bring them inside.”

  Cella picked up her pen again, leaned her hip against the granite island, and played with the cap in her teeth as she went about structuring such a book in her mind. She and Max looked intently at one another before her own gaze shifted to the side. She contemplated the mechanics of it all as she watched Cujo sleep on the porch in the morning sun.

  “We’ll step people through…” She spoke her vision aloud as the thoughts began to form. “…start out with the Italian-American angle, then go into dishes that are eaten in both places. For people who want dishes that they’d be hard-pressed to find in America, we’ll give them a little of that.”

  Max’s eyes lit up. “It’ll be like an initiation. The farther you g
et into the book, the more indoctrinated you’ll feel.”

  Cella thought of her publisher, about how the first cookbook she’d written was more like what Max was suggesting. She still remembered how heartbroken she’d been when her draft had come back from the editor, how heavy their red pen had been and how severely they had watered it down. But that had been five years ago, before she’d gotten big. Before she had so much bargaining power. Before she’d become Cella fucking Dawes.

  “Okay.” She was ready to stop parroting what the people who managed wanted.

  He blinked, perhaps having anticipated an extension of their debate. “Okay?”

  “Well, did you want to convince me or didn’t you?”

  “I’ll take it.” He put his hands up in front of him, as if he were the one who had just surrendered.

  “Alright. Let’s get it on paper.”

  “Taste this.”

  The smell of something wonderful coming close to her nose made Cella turn her head a second before Max prodded her lips with a spoon. She raised startled eyes, the halting intensity of his starburst gaze momentarily forgotten as her palate registered a complex flavor.

  “What is that?” Her responding smile was involuntary. Such was it always with Cella and flavors this exciting. The sweetish liquid felt familiar but held notes that rendered it unidentifiable. She broke their gaze long enough to peer around his shoulder, down the counter to try to get a hint.

  “White balsamic reduction.” He stepped aside, revealing a shallow sauce pan with a thickish liquid the color of tupelo honey. He dipped the spoon a second time to have a taste of his own.

  “For the Caprese?” All manner of balsamic glazes had been showing up on restaurant menus. The sweet reduction added bolder flavors that tended to be appreciated by the American palate, and the darker version added a bit of color to the plate.

  “I use it in a lot of things. It’s not as cloying as dark balsamic, and the higher acidity does a better job of bringing the other natural flavors out.”

  Cella tended to think the trend toward glazes like these was overdone. Using the white balsamic would add the desired balance without overpowering the dish. She hadn’t seen anybody do this before.