Chapter Text
I was standing in the bakery listening to Jason, my apprentice, the boy who’d come to me as an uneducated heroine addict, calling me prejudiced. I was outraged.
‘But just listen, Corinna…” Jason said.
“No! Making that famine bread was one of the worst things I’ve ever done. It was tasteless, dry, and they turned out to be a weird cult.” I declared. “Earthly Delights has a reputation for good bread. We are not, repeat not, going to sell gluten free bread.”
Jason scowled at me.
“Corinna, we are missing out on trade. We get someone in every week now asking if we make gluten free bread. People who can’t eat gluten want something better than the cardboard they can get from the supermarkets or the wholefood shops. Have you tasted that Well & Good stuff? I don’t know how they can call it bread.”
I matched his scowl for a glower. I knew what he wanted to hear. Jason was 20 now. He’d finished his apprenticeship a year ago, and was now a full time employee. Although I was a much better bread maker than he was, he now knew more about cake making than I’d ever contemplated, and his muffins were one of the signature bakes of Earthly Delights. He didn’t know it but I planned to offer him a partnership when he turned 21: he’d earned it in sweat equity and inventiveness, for Jason, unlike me, was a scientist. He loved experimenting – he’d got the top marks for his final apprentice piece even though I’d had to proof read it for him—and many of the cakes and muffins in the shop were the results of this. When you thought about it, gluten free bread might well have more in common -- process wise--with cake.
“OK” I capitulated. “I’ll let you experiment for one month. Order the ingredients you think you need. But remember, if you want to sell this bread in the shop it has to be both as mouth watering as everything else you sell, and you have to figure out a way to bake it safely. I don’t know much about gluten free bread but I do know that people with coeliac can’t eat food cooked around wheat flour.”
Jason smiled. He smiled a lot more these days and it always lit up the room.
TBC