Philippa Gregory - Bread and Chocolate

Brother James unclasped the fingers and stepped away. ‘This is the colour of my order,’ he said gently. ‘It is part of my vow of obedience to wear it. I could not wear anything else.’

‘Oh.’ The director was taken aback. ‘Can’t they let you off, just for once?’

‘I have made a vow, a solemn vow, of poverty, obedience and celibacy,’ Brother James told him firmly. ‘There is no ‘‘let-off ‘‘.’

The director looked at him in amazement. ‘You’ve promised to be poor? To be obedient? And don’t tell me you never –’

It was too much for the vegetable chef. With a wail he dropped his knife and fled from the kitchen.

They took Brother James to the television studio in a long limousine. He sat awkwardly in the back hugging a big box of bread ingredients and his favourite mixing bowl, spoons, and bread tins. He did not release the box until they showed him to the table in the corner of the studio which they had dressed as a monastery kitchen.

‘Is this absolutely right?’ asked the assistant director, a waif-like girl swathed completely in black, peering through her glasses. ‘Just like the monastery?’

‘I don’t have a crucifix hanging over the cooker,’ Brother James remarked.

‘No? OK.’ She turned her head. ‘Kill the crucifix – I mean – sorry, er, Mr James – take the crucifix down.’

‘You call me Brother James,’ he said mildly.

She looked pleased. ‘I’m Liz. Can I leave the Bible in shot?’

‘I don’t read the Bible in the kitchen,’ he said.

‘OK. OK. But we wanted something to show the spiritual element. You say in your book that you bless the bread before you start baking. Would that be with holy water? Or an incense burner – one of those, whatd’youcallit, censers – or something?’

Brother James felt unaccountably weary. ‘I just ask for a blessing on the work,’ he said. ‘This is bread that is going to feed my brothers. It should be made with love and respect.’

That stopped her for a moment. ‘That’s really neat,’ she said. ‘Really neat. And I guess you don’t need incense to do that?’

‘No.’

She glanced at her clipboard. ‘You’re a segment,’ she told him. ‘We’ll do you, and the rising dough, and then we’ll cut away to Caroline. She’s going to do sensual puddings. She’s doing Devil’s Food Cake – a sort of a joke, you see – holy bread and sinful puddings. Then we’ll come back to you for the final kneading and putting the dough in. Then at the end of the programme we’ll see you take the bread out of the oven and break it and say grace. You do say grace, don’t you?’

He nodded.

‘I’ll introduce you to Caroline,’ she said. She hesitated. ‘She can be a little – a little difficult sometimes. But I’m sure you’ll get on wonderfully well.’

He put on his apron and tied the straps around his waist. He felt safer with the armour of stiff white linen around him, and the familiar scent of the clean cloth.

A woman was threading through the confusion of the studio, coming towards them. Unlike everyone else she was not wearing blue denim or washed-out black. She was wearing a deep purple suit, dark as a Victoria plum. The skirt dropped, slim as a spatula, to her knees; the matching jacket swung like an archbishop’s cape as she strode towards him, her hips swaying, her paces long. Her hair was thick: dark and lustrous as liquorice; her eyes brown as chocolate, her mouth a sulky kissable bud, stained as if she had been eating blackcurrant jam.

She had come to complain to the assistant director about a slight, about an oversight, about something wrong with the layout of her table, of the preparation of the Devil’s Food Cake, but when she raised her long eyelashes and saw Brother James she paused.

‘Oh,’ she said.

And Brother James, holding tight to his mixing bowl and his wooden spoon, for the first time in his life looked desire in the face and longed to taste.

‘Oh,’ he replied.

Caroline Davis put out a manicured hand to Brother James. ‘How do you do?’

Her voice was warm and smooth, as if she had been drinking the chocolate she so liberally applied to her famous puddings.

‘You must think this place is a mad house.’

‘It’s very different from the monastery,’ he said shortly.

‘I bet. What sort of bread are you making?’

It was the first time that anyone had asked him about his work. He could not help but warm to her.

‘I don’t know,’ he confessed. ‘I brought the ingredients for everything. I bake plain bread and bread rolls every day for the brothers, and I thought it might be simple and honest to start with a white bread. But we have some wonderful celebration breads with fruit and nuts, and I wanted to share them too. We have corn breads, and sourdough breads…’

‘Show me the recipes,’ she commanded. Suddenly she was brisk and helpful and businesslike. He opened his looseleaf folder and watched her read.

‘This is a treasury,’ she remarked.

‘It matters to me,’ he volunteered. ‘It’s a staple food, of course. But it’s more than that. Our Lord named himself as bread. He ordered us to pray for our daily bread. I serve my brothers when I bake for them.’

‘How did you learn? Where did you get all these recipes?’

‘I was taught by a brother baker. And I will teach my apprentice. The skills are handed down, the recipes too.’

‘I can’t teach. I don’t have the patience,’ she remarked.

He remembered with a flicker of guilt the disappointed face of Brother Gervase. ‘I mean I will teach my apprentice,’ he promised himself. ‘Some time.’

One recipe she rejected at once, pointing out that it would be hard for him to prepare in the time allowed. Another was rejected on the grounds that it would not film well.

‘It’s not how it tastes in television cookery,’ she said dismissively. ‘We can all stand around saying: ‘‘Oh, how delicious!’’ It’s how it looks that counts. It’s how you look while you cook it that counts.’

He hesitated. ‘Where I come from it is never how things look. It is always how they are.’

She gave him a quick sweet smile. ‘This is the outside world now, Brother James. This is all surface, a world of meringue, not meat.’

The assistant director hovered and then approached. ‘Time to go to makeup,’ she said to Brother James.

‘Don’t be a complete fool,’ Caroline Davis said sharply. ‘He’s as handsome as a Greek god. What d’you want to do? Give him lip gloss?’ To James she turned and said reassuringly, ‘Be yourself. Nothing else is more important,’ and then she was gone.

Brother James watched her stride away to the other side of the studio and snap at the assistant cook who was unpacking ingredients from cling-filmed bowls.

‘Was she all right?’ the assistant director asked nervously.

‘Wonderful,’ he said.

He cooked a plain peasant bread as she had recommended and became absorbed, as he always did, in the familiar comfort of kneading the dough, feeling it come alive under his fingers, under the heel of his hand, the transformation of individual ingredients into the wonderful elasticity of dough with its hidden life which would warm and swell under the secret shield of the tea towel.

When the camera crew moved in a rush from his table to Caroline’s he went with them and watched her long fingers pointing at the ingredients, deftly spooning the glutinous shining body of chocolate batter, as rounded and gleaming as a slug. And then came the little miracle of television cookery – the arrival of the perfectly cooked dish at the very moment it was needed. She spun on her heel to the eye-level cooker and produced a cake at the very second of perfection. Smoothly she turned it out on to a wire rack, and it slid from the tin keeping its perfect shape: a sponge as light as air, as dark as lust. He could smell the hot cake from where he was standing and he felt the saliva rush into his mouth like a presentiment of sin. The assistant director had to nudge him to rush back to his own mock-Gothic pine table to bring the loaves out of the oven and to break the bread as part of the closing credits. His bread was golden and wholesome with a toast-brown crust. He broke it before the dark observing eye of the camera and smelt the familiar scent of home.