Drink to Remember, Smoke to Forget

11: Victim of Time

August 22nd, 1773

"Louis, dear, please do remember to mix in the Indian meal while the milk is still scalding," Mrs. Beall hollered from across the kitchen, emphasizing each word with a laborious hack to the piece of ham hock before her. "Then remember to leave it to cool before you add in the rest."

Louis nodded his head in the direction of the old woman. "Uh-huh."

Despite his best efforts to prove otherwise, it was no secret to anyone in the kitchen staff, including Mrs. Beall, that Louis was—to put it gently—inept at eighteenth-century cooking. Had he been left to cook unsupervised, without Mrs. Beall's careful instruction, Louis would no doubt have poisoned them all—or at the very least, burned the manor down to ash.

With an exasperated sigh, Louis silently wiped the sweat from his brow and looked once more at the recipe—or "receipt," as the kitchen staff called it.

As far as Louis could decipher from the short handwritten passage in Mrs. Beall's personal cookbook, the Indian pudding he was instructed to make called for three pints of scalded milk, seven spoonfuls of "fine Indian meal" (table or teaspoon he did not know), seven eggs, half a pound of raisins, a "gill" of butter (whatever that was), and an unidentified amount of "spice" and sugar (or molasses, if one wasn't as wealthy as Mr. Abrahams).

"Seems easy enough," Louis whispered to himself as he re-adjusted his thick linen apron and cautiously slicked back any stray wisps of hair behind his ears. If having poor cooking skills—and being a male in the kitchen—earned him a few chuckles behind his back, Louis could only imagine how the kitchen staff would treat him if he were to light his clothes or worse his hair on fire. Harry Styles' level of mockery, Louis was sure.

Best to be cautious, he thought.

Following Mrs. Beall's instructions, Louis gently poured the raw milk—fresh from the earliest morning milking—into a cast iron pot and hung it above the flickering flames of the hearth with a heavy thud.

Louis exhaled in relief. His task might not have been nearly as easy as churning butter—his typical assigned cooking job whenever he was in costume at the museum—but it sure seemed a heck of a lot easier than whatever Mrs. Beall and the kitchen maids were tasked to do. No way did Louis want to even think about preparing the ham hock. Just looking at it made Louis throw up a little in his mouth. And God only knew what would happen if he was forced even to touch it, or worse, carve off the grimy layer of creosote like what Mrs. Beall was in the process of doing. Louis would probably die on the spot—in a pool of his vomit.

Thankfully, in all the days Louis spent in the kitchen under the care of Mrs. Bealle, the head cook for Mr. Abrahams, he had not been asked to do such tasks. Resigned to the farthest corner of the kitchen, Louis was most often instructed to prepare the sides of the meals: boiled vegetables (root cellar potatoes, various lettuce, beets), bread and butter, coleslaw, pickles, or applesauce. However, there were times—such as this morning—when Mrs. Beall allowed Louis to make the evening's baked good.

So far, after a little less than a month in the kitchen, Louis had made only one other baked good. And well, suffice to say, his gingerbread did not taste as good as everyone had hoped—he had accidentally put in a dash or two more rose water than the receipt had called for. And suffice to say, the results were unfathomably inedible. No one dared eat it, not even Harry.

Louis prayed the same would not be said of his pudding—for everyone's sake and his own. Louis was dreadfully aware of the fact that if he were to make yet another mistake of a dish, he would never again be given another opportunity. It was apparent that, depending on the results of his pudding, Mrs. Beall could and would cash in on her ever-looming threat to revoke his invitation into the kitchen. Not that he'd blame her, though he'd still shed some tears.