Kathryn Littlewood - Sweet

Purdy rolled her eyes. “Come on,” she said, loading Rose and Ty into the van. “We only have five days before we have to fly to Paris for the competition.”

“Good,” said Sage. “I forgot my blue pyjama trousers at home. I have to get them.”

“Sorry, Sage, but we’re not going back to Calamity Falls,” said Purdy. “We are going to Mexico. We need to pick up your great-great-great-grandfather Balthazar Bliss.”

Albert settled in the driver’s seat and turned the key while the van sputtered into gear.

“We have a great-great-great-grandfather?” Sage asked, brandishing his tape recorder. “Is he a mummy?”

“No, not yet,” Purdy replied. “He’s very spry. We need to see him because he has a second copy of the Booke. Unfortunately, Balthazar’s copy is written in another language, and he’s the only one left in the world who speaks it. He’s been working on a translation, but he’s slow. When last we checked, he’d only managed to translate six of the seven hundred and thirty-two recipes.”

“We need him to hurry it up,” said Ty.

“No time for that. We’re going to need his help.” Purdy grimaced. “Unfortunately.”

“Why ‘unfortunately’?” Rose asked.

Purdy sighed. “You’ll see.”

THE DUSTY MAIN road of the village of Llano Grande cut through a lush green mountain. As the Bliss van rumbled over the dirt, Ty and Sage dozed in the backseat, while Leigh muttered long sentences to herself that no one but she understood.

They’d driven for two days straight, all to get a copy of the Booke. Suddenly an obvious solution occurred to Rose. “Mum,” she asked, “why didn’t you guys ever make a photocopy of the Booke? Just so you’d have an extra?”

“The Booke can’t be photocopied,” Albert replied, turning the wheel with one hand and fanning his face with the other. “You put it on a copy machine, the pages come out blank. It’s an odd trick of the Booke. Can’t be photographed, either. Remember that picture in the newspaper of your mum baking Love Muffins?”

When the photo was taken, the Booke had been sitting open on the chopping block, where it often sat. But in the picture, there was no Booke – only an empty countertop.

“The Booke knows how to protect itself. The only way to duplicate it is to copy it by hand,” he said. “And your mother and I were always too busy. Plus, that would have meant one more copy of the Booke floating around that we had to protect. Bad enough a copy fell into Lily’s hands.” Albert hushed his voice and turned to Purdy. “Imagine if another copy got to. . . you-know-who?”

“Who?” Rose cried.

“Let’s just say,” said Purdy, “that there are far worse bakers in the world than Lily Le Fay.”

“Anyway,” Albert went on, “you can’t even take the Booke apart. Once you remove a page, the recipe goes haywire. There is magic in the Cookery Booke binding that keeps everything in working order. That’s why there are only two copies in the world.”

A minute later, Albert pulled off the main road and rolled to a stop near a brick hut with an overhanging tin roof. Leather saddles and empty canteens dangled from the sides of the roof, and the front porch was littered with sacks of corn and stacks of firewood. A sign hung from the tin roof: LA PANADERÍA BLISS.

“We’re here!” said Purdy, swallowing hard. “Everybody just be nice to him and we’ll all make it out alive.”

Rose touched her finger to the screen door of La Panadería Bliss, and it creaked open. Albert and Purdy stood behind her, with Sage and Ty and Leigh heading up the rear.

It was dusty and dark inside. An empty hostess stand sat next to the door.

Ty glanced back up at the sign. “What’s a panadería?” he whispered.

“A bakery,” Albert whispered back.

“This doesn’t look like a bakery,” Ty said.

He’s right, thought Rose. There were no tables, no chairs, no glass counter top, and no baked goods. It was a tiny, stuffy, windowless room with a damp floor and a toppled stack of chairs in the corner.

“Oh dear,” Purdy mumbled. “He’s probably gone off to a nursing home. I can’t blame him – I mean, he is one hundred and twenty-seven years old.”

Rose noticed a little silver bell sitting on top of the hostess stand. She reached out and pressed her palm against it.

Leigh balled her tiny hands into fists and crossed her arms. “And I suppose it would have killed you to call ahead? Lily, the empress of empanadas, would have called ahead.”

“Well, Lily isn’t your mother, now is she?” Purdy said.

Just then a tall man with a thick chest and shrivelled, spindly limbs hustled through a doorway in the back of the dingy room. His head was mostly bald except for two patches of grey above his ears. He wore spectacles and a sour frown.

“Hola,” he grumbled, grabbing six menus from the hostess stand. “Follow me.”

“Great-great-grandfather Balthazar?” Purdy ventured. “It’s me, Purdy.”

“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.”