Page 106 of Cooking Up a Christmas Storm
‘You don’t have to be OK.’ His mum rubbed her eyes. ‘You just have to keep going. One step at a time. Please.’
And now he’d made his mum worry. That wasn’t fair. He nodded. ‘Just let me grab a shower.’
He was the last to arrive for the cookery session, and he hesitated at the kitchen door. The last time he’d been here he’d walked in thinking the world was at his feet and run out a different man. He took a deep breath and stepped inside. The babble of chatter stopped the minute he walked in.
‘Don’t mind me,’ he muttered.
The two younger Strachans looked to the eldest who looked right at Pavel. ‘I’m sorry about your lass.’
The others nodded in agreement. Pavel couldn’t respond.
‘Right then. Shall we make a start?’ Bella clapped her hands together. ‘Strach,’ she nodded at the youngest Strachan, ‘why don’t you work with Pavel today?’
And with that Jodie’s absence was glossed over and the rest of the world moved on.
‘Today we’re looking forward to Christmas. We don’t have time to do a full turkey but I thought that if we learned the makings of some of the great side dishes then you could make them for your own Christmases, or if you want to, bring them along to join us for Christmas here.’
Pavel looked up. ‘Here?’
Bella nodded. She looked even more exhausted than usual. ‘Who knows where we’ll all be next year? So we thought this Christmas we’d invite everyone who wanted to come along. Christmas here for the whole community.’
It sounded wonderful, but somewhere in his heart Pavel knew it could be Bella’s farewell to the village, and if the castle went then all the community groups that had sprung up under its roof would go as well. And then what?
Bella was still talking. ‘And for dessert we’re going to Poland with a traditional poppyseed cake. This is a makowiec – am I saying that right, Pav?’
‘Near enough.’
‘And this is eaten at celebrations like Christmas, yes?’
Pavel nodded. ‘My granddad’s speciality.’
‘So I understand.’
And so Pavel understood. This lesson was for him. This was Bella trying to tell him, with food – the only language she knew how to express this in – that these people saw him and cared for him and wanted to find something that would bring him back to himself. So long as he wasn’t another thing too broken to fix.
The poppyseed roll, it turned out, was an exercise in patience and understanding that these were ingredients that couldn’t be rushed. ‘This is a yeasted dough,’ Bella explained. ‘And the yeast is alive and we need it to bring this dough to life. And like any living thing yeast can be temperamental. You can’t rush it or make it move at your pace. You have to give it all the love you can and then let it do its thing, and trust that everything will come together and work out in the end.’
Pavel let himself be talked through the kneading and the rolling and the waiting, and then the dividing and kneading again, before spreading with the rich poppyseed, nut and raisin filling and rolling and waiting again. By the time the roll was baked it felt like part of Pavel – something that linked him back to his grandfather, who must have done all the same things in his kitchen at home and thought of the rest of his family miles away in Poland. It was the same makowiec he’d eaten as a child but it was also brand new today.
He carried the cake home and placed it on the kitchen table in his mother’s part of the house. ‘Makowiec,’ he announced.
‘Oh my goodness. I had no idea.’
Pavel raised an eyebrow. ‘So Bella thought of this all on her own?’
‘No. But I didn’t suggest it.’
Pavel shook his head. ‘It’s fine. I’m glad you did.’
‘I really didn’t,’ his mother insisted.
‘I haven’t talked to anyone else about…’ But of course he had.
‘Maybe your young lady isn’t quite so bad?’
‘A parting gift,’ Pavel replied. He wasn’t going to get his hopes up again reading anything more into it than that. ‘You were right about taking little steps though. I’m going to go back over to the castle later and make sure everything’s finished off at the coach house. And they’re going to need help getting the ballroom ready as well, with… with Jodie gone.’
His mum passed him a generous slice of the roll. ‘But for now, eat your cake, love.’
