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apparitionism · 6 months

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Confection 4

Welcome back to Confection, which began its life as last year’s holiday story but went on hiatus due to this year’s gift exchange story, which in turn ran far longer than it ever should have. But the whole point of a hiatus is that it ends, so: this part continues an AU wherein Bering and Wells are chefs competing on a TV show titled “This Without That,” in which cheftestants are charged with making well-known dishes without their primary ingredient. The competition in which Chefs Myka and Helena find themselves is Christmas-themed, a fact that relates to their shared history... some of which was revealed in part 1, part 2, and part 3. I'd mumble something about the whole thing being undercooked, but that probably goes without saying at this point.

Confection 4

Decide, and do it fast, Myka told herself as she examined the produce and other ingredients available to the contestants. Cranberry sauce without cranberry—a tart fruit. Could she reasonably tweak a sharper version of her fruit pickle into a sauce, but maybe using raspberries, for the appearance? Yes, most likely, but only if she could find raspberries. She scanned the refrigerator... okay, raspberries found.

Move on, and do it fast.

Candied yams without yams? She saw golden beets and envisioned (entasted?) merging their earthiness with some similarly earthy sweetness (to be determined), plus a creamy element (also to be determined) that might evoke the traditional marshmallows.

For now, she was satisfied with her choice of major components.

These were decisions—fast ones, even! Now all she had to do was cook.

Okay, fine: and keep from distracting herself with glances at Helena, who was clearly also deciding fast, gathering ingredients, her overflowing-with-produce arms transforming her into some metaphorical—or maybe actual—goddess of the harvest.

Quit thinking like that! Myka admonished her overheated, now goddess-oriented, imagination.

No! that imagination shot back. She is a goddess!

Myka marshaled every bit of her superego to command, We. Are. Focusing. On. Beets.

And yet her id kept sneaking glances.

Her ego, meanwhile, noticed that Chef Artie wasn’t having to decide fast. He’d done nothing, even as Myka, Helena, and Chef Walter, his attitude notwithstanding, had filled their stations. His indecision prompted a producer huddle around him, and Myka heard snatches of phrases: “you could use,” “or maybe try,” “okay, we’ve got.”

****

Myka’s departure from Apples had happened quickly: two days after the Christmas party, she interviewed for the job at Secret Service, getting the offer on the spot, and that evening she gave her notice to her direct supervisor on the line. Not to Helena—Chef Wells—for the chef hadn’t been present in the kitchen.

That was unusual... did it have something to do with strings being pulled? Myka told herself she didn’t need to know. She told herself, equally untruthfully, that she didn’t need to care.

Not that Helena—Chef Wells—was even going to notice Myka’s absence. People came and went all the time in restaurants. What did one line cook matter?

After leaving, Myka tried not to ruminate on how much she had wanted to matter.

She tried also to evict Helena Wells from the top of her mind. She didn’t give in to the temptation to walk by Apples; that would have been another of those teenage-reminiscent impulses she needed to prevent her presumably adult self from indulging.

The setting of a Google alert, however, she justified as professional. Practical. Keeping track of a former employer.

Which was how she learned that Helena Wells would be appearing on This Without That.

Which she tried to convince herself she did not need (need...) to watch.

Which attempt was, she had even then acknowledged, doomed to failure, because watching the show meant she would at least be able to look at Helena, a thrill of which she’d been deprived for what felt like forever. Need... need. She could—and did—replay her memories, but she was starving for new images.

The show didn’t disappoint on that score. Myka was captivated anew from the first shot of Helena in talking-head closeup: her hair was down, lusciously so, and if Myka hadn’t been anxious to see how the competition would unfold, she might have stopped the show there, just to savor the sight.

When asked to describe her style in the kitchen in one word, talking-head Helena said, “Take no prisoners.”

“One word,” an off-camera voice said.

“It’s hyphenated,” Helena responded.

Myka added the hyphens in her head, retrospectively.

She paid little attention to the introductory attributes of the other contests—Chefs Marcus, Leena, and Hugo—because: not for one instant did it occur to her that Helena might not win.

She was well aware that she knew nothing about television production but clichés; nevertheless, she found herself stuck on one in particular as far as Helena was concerned: “The camera loves her.” And Myka found a similar lover’s elation, if tinged with a lurker’s shame, in her surreptitious alignment with that camera and its gaze.

The dish for the first round, the appetizer, was clams casino without the clams. “Mushrooms,” Myka said aloud the minute Steve Jinks announced the challenge. The rest of the dish was traditionally pretty simple—breadcrumbs, butter, bacon, bell pepper, lemon—with the only even vaguely difficult part getting the proportions right. But mushrooms stood out as the clearest substitute, texturally, as long as they were cooked with great precision so as to simulate the clams’ chewy-but-not-rubbery distinctiveness, and that would be, she thought, the real challenge. That and choosing an appropriate variety of mushroom, one that could be coaxed to a sufficiently correct mimic.

Myka was thus unsurprised, if gratified, when talking-head Helena said, “I thought immediately of oyster mushrooms. But then I discerned that Chef Marcus might be aiming for them... so I moved quickly.”

The next shot of the kitchen depicted Helena darting in front of Marcus, a tall and somewhat sinister figure, and appropriating all the oyster mushrooms. Then, as if just realizing the other chef’s presence, she said, “Oh, did you want these as well? Surely there are enough for two.”

That struck Myka as pretty magnanimous.

She revised that down a bit after the next talking-head Helena said, “Had I kept them all for myself, how could I have demonstrated my superiority?” Then she smiled: wolfish, with the edges of her teeth. “Not to mention, I had a trick up my sleeve.”

****

As Myka began her preparations for her cranberry sauce without cranberries and candied yams without yams, she felt herself moving with extraordinarily swift precision... had she been dosed with performance-enhancing lightning? Or some other quantity granting an efficient-motion superpower? Then she realized: she was showing off. For the camera? No. For Helena. Who was most likely focusing far too closely on her own cooking to look over and be impressed by Myka’s ability to prep beets for the oven at speed.

While the sauce-pickle simmered and the beets roasted—she would soon peel and purée those—she sought the finishing flourishes for the latter dish. In her search for sweet, she thought of molasses, but then she noticed Helena had that bottle at her station. Casting about, she found her eye caught by a jar, very small, of manuka honey, and its likely kiss of bitterness seemed instantly correct. To provide additional interest, she saturated figs in that honey in a sous-vide bath, with an aim of creating a soft-yet-chunky topping for the beets, texture balancing taste.

Cream, now: maybe yogurt? The tang of plain Greek yogurt rhyming with the pickle’s bite? But she needed depth... she toasted a vanilla bean, ground it, then mixed it into the yogurt; tasted; yes. A dab of honey, then, to match what it topped, and that element was complete.

She allowed herself a breather, while the pickle matured and beets reached peak melt-in-mouth texture, to assess the other competitors’ approaches.

(Not Helena’s, though. Helena’s presence was distracting enough; attending to her cooking was likely to render Myka entirely incapable.)

Chef Artie was doing something with red beets—she’d heard those mentioned by someone (not Chef Artie) in that prior huddle—and something else with butternut squash. Chef Walter, like Myka, was working with raspberries.

Myka felt a flicker of Helena’s “demonstrate my superiority” bravado. She hoped it would prove out.

****

The trick Helena had up her sleeve turned out to be an innovation to replace the clam shell in which the clams casino was traditionally served: she scraped the ribs from a portobello mushroom cap, then dropped it in the deep fryer. She pulled the fryer basket out as the round’s final milliseconds ticked away, then plated her entire oyster-mushroom casino with speed that Myka wouldn’t have imagined possible.

But: This is Helena Wells, Myka reminded herself.

Anything was possible.

Helena was, unsurprisingly, right about demonstrating her superiority. Myka watched her smile as the judge charged with delivering the first-round verdict sent Marcus to his doom, telling him, “We couldn’t overlook that fact that the texture of your mushrooms was no match for that of Chef Helena’s.”

“She tricked me,” Marcus said into the camera as he exited the kitchen.

“She outcooked you,” Myka corrected, a bare instant before talking-head Helena said, smugly but equally accurately, “I outcooked him.”

Myka would have reveled in their consonance but Steve Jinks then announced the entree challenge: beef Wellington without beef.

Now that was a challenge, and Myka was gifted a commercial break to ponder what she might produce. She came up with nothing more than “something else Wellington”—some other protein encased in pâté-slathered pastry. But what protein? And this is why you aren’t on the show, she told herself.

So she paid attention, if a bit begrudgingly, to the choices the other contestants made. Chef Hugo chose venison, which Myka had no trouble imagining would pair well with that expected pâté. Chef Leena chose chicken, but instead of pâté, she used a butter-herb mixture that Myka immediately recognized as intended to bring a cordon-bleu sense to the dish. It seemed nothing like beef Wellington, but it did seem special, invented just for this competition.

Helena was up to something special too, but Myka didn’t fully understand it. She was wielding a mallet on a flank steak, rendering it thin, thin, thinner, and bringing the same thin-thin-thinner energy with a rolling pin to pastry. Myka couldn’t see where the Wellington—its richness—resided... maybe in the duxelles she was making, the sauté of mushrooms that was sometimes paired with the Wellington’s pâté, sometimes substituted for it. Helena had pâté on her station, but she didn’t touch it.

Myka waited impatiently through Chef Hugo’s venison and Chef Leena’s chicken, until it was finally time for Helena to be judged. She cut into her Wellington.

Somehow she had managed to roll pastry, steak, and duxelles into... a pinwheel? Yes, a beautiful swirling pinwheel, with seemingly infinite layers.

Surely she’d been saved for last because her dish was astonishing.

However: “You seem to be attempting to subvert the rules,” a member of the panel, a Chef Kosan, told her. He looked down at his portion disapprovingly, then up at Helena the same way.

What was that about?

“Do I?” Helena was calm, the picture of confidence. Myka was reasonably sure she herself would have been dissolving in anticipatory terror...

“Chef Leena and Chef Hugo both managed to make beef Wellingtons without the beef. You, however—”

“Have as well,” Helena interrupted. “Without the beef tenderloin, ‘tenderloin’ being implied, even if not explicitly stated. Or has the constituent ‘beef’ element changed since I was in culinary school?”

She was obviously right. The “beef” in the name didn’t cover all beef. Myka would have made the same argument.

When the program returned from that commercial break, Steve Jinks rendered the verdict, drawing out the suspense, saying a long and lingering “Chef....”

Myka idly wondered whether venison or chicken would lose.

“Helena,” Steve finished. “Unfortunately, this competition will continue without you.”

Myka blinked. Surely she’d heard that wrong?

But Helena’s incredulous expression suggested she’d heard exactly the same thing.

Chef Kosan was charged with explaining the panel’s reasoning. He began, “In your Wellington, we did find the lean flank steak well-balanced by the richness of the duxelles, even more so than Chef Hugo’s venison was by his pâté—he needed more of that richness.” Myka saw that as a point given to Helena. How had she lost it? He went on, “But his failure in that arena was your fault. You appropriated all the pâté, then gave only a limited portion of it to Chef Hugo, despite the fact that you clearly had no intention of using it the remainder yourself.”

“He was entirely free to ask for more,” Helena said. She didn’t say anything about her intentions.

Chef Hugo, meanwhile, looked bereft. Myka felt something like sympathy for him, for certainly interrupting Helena at work was a frightening prospect. Then again, he was supposed to be competing.

Chef Kosan narrowed his eyes. “The ingredients are not yours to dispense. That struck us as inappropriate gamesmanship.”

“And yet this is a game, is it not?” Helena asked. Myka chalked up another point for her—not that this tally in her head would do anything other than torment her.

Chef Kosan continued, “Nevertheless, in the end the substitution of one type of beef for another struck us as insufficiently creative, if not actually against the rules. Of the game. As did your use of the rather obvious mushrooms in the clams casino.”

If she squinted, Myka could maybe see his point with regard to the mushrooms. But wasn’t changing the Wellington into a pinwheel a creative change? Why hadn’t that outweighed the beef issue?

Helena’s thought process seemed similar: “A puff-pastry pinwheel Wellington was insufficiently creative,” she said with heavy sarcasm. “And both were beautiful dishes, worthy of the Apples menu.” Did she now sound petulant? Myka couldn’t honestly blame her.

“Pursuant to that,” Chef Kosan said, “we’re genuinely curious: how did you manage to get the pastry entirely cooked?”

“Skill,” Helena said. That was a full sneer.

Myka had been curious about the same thing, but she was also imagining getting access to that skill, were she still at Apples and had the dishes made it to the menu... imagining what it would be like to cook those dishes on the line... imagining getting those mushrooms’ texture exactly right for the casino... imagining balancing the Wellington’s fat and lean, while seeing to it that the pastry was indeed entirely cooked. And all right, yes: she was imagining Helena leaning over her shoulder, breathing near her ear, insisting on all of that.

As Helena performed the apparently obligatory walkout of defeat, she pronounced, “I’m far more skilled than this result indicates.” Her tone situated scornful quotation marks around “result.”

That had sounded very Helena. And very true.

Helena then said, “This won’t be the last you see of me.”

Myka had at that point cut off the television and prayed—yes, prayed—for that also to be true.

****

She did not recall the memory of that prayer in its specificity until she was competing alongside Helena in a Christmas-decorated studio in August.

Mysterious ways.

TBC

#bering and wells #Warehouse 13 #fanfic #Confection #part 4 #AU week #holiday (but not yet gift exchange)#honestly the hardest part of this #is coming up with the dishes and substitutions #I would like to try everything out before putting it into the story #in a test kitchen as it were #but I've been a strict vegetarian for basically forever #so I have to imaginatively project most of the proteins

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