Mebel gives her a cynical sideways glance. “I don’t know what you young people are up to these days. Maybe you are about to cook naked in front of the camera. There are all sorts of fetish and I don’t judge.”
“Oh god. Please stop talking.” Gemma looks so genuinely horrified that Mebel feels sorry for the poor kid. “No, I only take videos of my hands.Notin a sexual way,” she adds whenMebel is about to say something. “I do cooking videos. They’re shot top-down and they only show my hands doing the cooking.”
“Oh! Well, like that is okay. Why are you so acting so sus about it?”
Gemma stares at her. “So ‘sus’? Mebel, I beg you, please stop trying to use Gen Z slang.”
“My granddaughter says it all the time. Is it my fault if I am on fleek?”
“Oh god,” Gemma mutters, but Mebel catches the hint of a smile. “Okay, the reason I am acting ‘sus’ is because I’m pretty sure the school wouldn’t be happy about me using their premises to shoot my own personal videos. Same reason why you’re being sus about chopping potatoes.”
Mebel looks down at her small mountain of cubed potatoes. “You have a point. So you are going to shoot a video now? I watch, okay?”
Gemma chews on her lower lip. “I don’t know, I don’t do well with an audience.”
“Have you ever had audience?”
“No.”
“Then how you can know if you do well with an audience or not?”
In the ensuing silence, Gemma’s teeth grind audibly. “Okay, I suppose you have a point. You can watch. Quietly.”
Mebel makes a zipping motion along her mouth. With another sigh, Gemma heads for her worktable and begins unloading the ingredients onto the kitchen counter.
“What are you making?”
“A Scotch egg, but with a twist.”
Mebel has no idea what an untwisted Scotch egg is to beginwith, so she simply smiles and says, “Oh yes, wonderful idea.” She watches as Gemma sets up the tripod and carefully positions her phone. When she turns the ring light on, a dramatic spotlight appears, aimed straight down at the ingredients on the countertop. “Oh my,” Mebel says appreciatively. Who knew that there’s so much that goes on behind the scenes of a simple cooking video?
Cooking has never been a thing that Mebel fully appreciated. For her, food was something to be enjoyed in the consumption of it, not the creation. Food was something that was prepared behind the scenes and appeared at the table every mealtime. She can count on one hand the number of cooking shows she has watched in her lifetime, and she’s never once spared a thought for the amount of prep work that has to be done behind the scenes. And she is thoroughly gobsmacked by how involved Gemma’s “Scotch egg with a twist” turns out to be.
First, there’s the eggs themselves. Gemma boils four of them in water with a splash of vinegar for six minutes exactly before transferring them to an ice bath. Then there’s the meat mixture. Gemma chops up chives and parsley and garlic with such ease that Mebel is both surprised and humbled. So this is what proper knife skills look like. The parsley in particular looks like green dust by the time Gemma is through with it. She opens up a bunch of fat sausages and squeezes out the meat into a mixing bowl, then pours the chopped up herbs and garlic into it. Mebel admires the deftness with which Gemma folds the mixture together.
“You are very skilled,” Mebel says. “What you are adding to the meat now?”
“English mustard. It adds a bit of a zing to it.” Now thatGemma is actually cooking, she’s lost all traces of her earlier anxiety. In fact, after a while, she begins to narrate what she’s doing to Mebel. “Traditional Scotch eggs are crusted with breadcrumbs and then fried, but I wanted to do something different, so I’m wrapping mine in puff pastry and then baking it.” She presents her puff pastry with pride to Mebel. “I made this earlier today. Have you ever made puff pastry?”
Mebel shakes her head. To her, the sheet of pastry looks like any other pastry dough.
“It’s one of the toughest things to master. Layers of dough alternating with butter. You have to make sure the temperature is just right so the butter doesn’t melt into the dough, so you’ve got to work fast. Took me years to get it right.”
“Why anyone would bother making puff pastry?” Mebel says. “I’ve never eat a single puff pastry in my life.”
Gemma stares at her. “So, you’ve never eaten a croissant?”
“What that has to do with puff pastry?”
“Mebel,” Gemma groans. “Good grief, why are you at culinary school?”
“Because my husband decide to leave me for our twenty-four-year-old chef,” Mebel says dryly.
Gemma is now back to gaping at her. “Wait, seriously?”
“Oh yes. It is a bit of shock.”
“Jesus, that’s horrible. I’m so sorry, Mebel.”
