Chương 183: The Last Dish of the Ultimate Banquet

With Warm Memory and The Force of Life delivered to the judges' table, Chris turned straight to Kira. Almost three hours gone, and four of the five dishes were done. Ethan's Father's Soup — clear, and full of everything he had — sat in the warmer waiting to be called. One dish left. The card with the first-love apple pie on it. At the start they'd all assumed that card belonged to Emily Jones. High school, first love, apple pie. Ethan had said it was a scene out of an American teen movie, and Chris had agreed.

But going through it one last time, Chris read the card again and stopped on a line he'd skimmed before. Behind the high-school football field, under that enormous apple tree. A football field. He had taken that to mean an American one, an American autumn. But rugby is played by everyone in the northwest of France; there are goalposts at the edge of almost every village school pitch, and at the far end of the pitch, very often, an apple orchard. Chris pulled Madame Dubois's full file.

Under place of birth it said: Normandy. He stayed on that line for a long time. A French woman who had made it her life's work to defend the traditions of French cooking. Rigorous. Some would say rigid. It was hard to imagine a woman like that writing a memory that tender. And it was precisely because it was hard to imagine that she had written it down, sealed it, and handed it to three young strangers. High school, under an apple tree, Normandy, a clumsy boy, a rough and very sweet apple pie.

Chris had planned to make this one himself, using modern technique to interpret sweetness and surprise. He'd dropped the idea quickly. Because he'd watched Kira read that card, and something had come into her eyes he'd never seen there — longing, and envy, and a thin thread of grief. Kira's entire adolescence had gone to knives and kitchens. Her world contained the breathing of ingredients and the stillness of cooking.

That kind of memory — the green, ordinary, lovely kind that belongs to ordinary girls — was a blank page in her life. So Chris made a call on the spot.

"Kira. The apple pie is yours."

"Mine?" She'd been completely thrown, and had shaken her head without thinking.

"I can't. I don't know how to make an apple pie. And it's a French dessert. All I know is Japanese cooking."

"No. You can." He'd looked straight at her and said it a word at a time.

"You don't need to know how to make a French apple pie. You only need to make, for yourself, the apple pie you imagine belongs to being young. Put your longing into it. Put your regret into it. This dish is for Madame Dubois — and it's also for you." The words opened a door in her. She stopped resisting. She took the card and sat alone in the corner and looked at it for a long time. Now it was hers.

The last dish of the entire final was in the hands of the girl who had faced the world with the sharpest knife and the coldest head. Kira went to her station. Everyone assumed she would deconstruct an apple pie through the Japanese aesthetic she knew best. Matcha in place of cinnamon, perhaps. Rice flour in the pastry. Some meditative plating, a Japanese first love. She didn't. The first thing she did was take off the wing-thin black gloves she used to feel ingredients through.

Then she breathed in deeply, as though saying goodbye to who she had been. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. She went to the store and took the most ordinary flour, the most ordinary butter, the most ordinary sugar and ground cinnamon. The apples she chose were green ones from Normandy, slightly crooked, and enormously fragrant. The choice put everyone's eyebrows through the ceiling.

"What is she doing? The most basic ingredients in the room, for a completely traditional French country apple pie?" somebody in the critics' section said.

"Closing a final with a dessert that plain? That's reckless." There was no hesitation anywhere on Kira's face. She went back and started the pastry. She didn't use a machine. She used her fingertips, working the cold butter into the flour a little at a time. Her movements weren't the exact, cutting fusion of hand and knife anymore. They were unpracticed. Almost clumsy. Like the boy in the card. Chris and Ethan watched from the side, barely breathing. They knew what they were watching.

Kira was putting down every technique and every style and every piece of pride she owned, in order to try to understand somebody else's story and get inside it. With the pastry made, she started on the apples. She didn't use a peeler; she used a small knife and took the skin off in one long turning ribbon. Then she cut the apples into irregular pieces of no consistent size. She put the pieces into a pan with sugar and cinnamon and a knob of butter and turned them slowly over the heat.

A warm, sweet smell filled the kitchen almost immediately. And then Kira did something nobody expected. She reached into the decorative flowers standing nearby and pulled out one small white wildflower, still holding its dew. She dropped the whole flower into the simmering apples.

"My God — what is she doing? Boiling a flower? That'll wreck the flavor!" Ethan couldn't hold it in. Chris put a hand out and stopped him.

"Quiet." His eyes hadn't left her.

"Let her work." He thought he understood. That flower wasn't seasoning. That flower was the wind under the apple tree that afternoon. It was the thing the girl had pinned in her hair. It was what the boy couldn't say. It was the one element in the dessert that had nothing to do with taste. It was the poetry. When the filling was done, Kira lifted the flower out carefully with a spoon — half translucent now — and set it aside. She filled the pastry, laid strips over the top, brushed it with egg.

Last she took that long green ribbon of apple peel and coiled it in the center of the pie into a small shape like a rose. A very domestic, faintly rough-looking apple pie was finished. She put it in the oven. While it baked, Kira did nothing else. She stood in front of the oven and watched through the glass as the pie rose slowly in the heat and turned an inviting gold. The look on her face wasn't a cook watching her work. It was a girl's face, full of expectation and nerves.

What she seemed to be waiting for wasn't a dessert coming out of an oven. It was for the boy under the apple tree to say something to her. Ding. The oven called. Kira pulled on thick gloves and lifted the scalding pie out very carefully. Butter, caramel and apple came off it with a trace of cinnamon and a trace of flower, and filled the whole kitchen.

It was a smell with no sophisticated vocabulary attached to it — the plainest and most direct kind there is, and the kind that goes straight to whatever in a person is capable of being happy. Kira set the pie on a wooden board and cut a slice with a large knife. She didn't use anything ornate. She used the simplest white porcelain plate. She laid the steaming slice in the middle of it, and beside it, gently, the half-translucent white wildflower.

Last she set the little rose of green apple peel on the flower's other side. A dish, finished. Its name wasn't First Love. It wasn't Memory. It wasn't Apple Pie. On the card she submitted, Kira wrote one word. Normandy. When the last dish went up to the judges' table, the hall fell quiet. It looked so ordinary. As ordinary as something any French housewife might throw together for her family on a Saturday afternoon. And then the plate was set down in front of Madame Dubois.

This woman, known throughout the profession for being serious and unbending and impossible to make laugh, saw the small white flower on the plate and the rose made of green apple peel, and froze completely. Her hands began to shake, slightly. She didn't pick up a fork. She reached out one finger and touched the half-translucent flower. And then, on the big screens, everybody in the building watched a single tear come out of Madame Dubois's eye with no warning at all.

It fell onto the white cloth and opened a small damp mark there. An arena holding tens of thousands of people went absolutely silent. Madame Dubois didn't wipe her face. She picked up a fork and took a small piece of pastry and apple and put it in her mouth slowly. She chewed slowly. Very slowly. Nobody knew what she was thinking. A long time later she set the fork down and did not reach for a microphone to give her comments.

She only raised her head and, across all that distance, looked for a long moment at the girl called Kira. There was shock in it, and feeling, and memory, and a thank you she didn't say out loud. Then she lowered her head and did not lift it again. The hall stayed silent. Everyone in it had realized this had stopped being a competition. That dish hadn't landed on anybody's tongue. It had landed on a soul. Chris looked at Kira, and Kira turned at exactly that moment and looked at him. Her eyes were red.

She gave him a smile, brilliant and enormously relieved. It was the most beautiful thing Chris had ever seen on her face. In that moment Kira finished becoming what she was going to be. She wasn't a lone maker anymore. She was a cook — someone who could lay down every scrap of her own gentleness for the sake of another person's story.