The Recipe Book

Camila had been working at the Little Crescent Cafe in Bath for almost a year when she found the book. It was a rainy Thursday afternoon in November, and she was wiping the tables before closing time. On the chair by the window, half hidden under a cushion, there was a thick notebook with a faded green cover held together with an elastic band.

She knew at once who must have left it. Every Thursday, an elderly woman with silver hair and a red umbrella came in at three o'clock, ordered a pot of Earl Grey and a scone, and sat in that exact seat for an hour, writing. She was always polite but never chatty, and in all those months Camila had never asked her name. Now she wished she had.

Camila opened the book, hoping to find an address or a phone number. Instead, she found recipes. There were hundreds of them, written by hand in blue ink: cakes, tarts, breads, biscuits, some in English, some in French. Many pages were stained with butter and chocolate, which suggested they had been used again and again in a real kitchen. But what caught her attention were the notes in the margins.

Next to a recipe for a lemon and lavender cake, someone had written: Final, 1998. Judges said it was the best they had ever tasted. Next to a pear tart: Served at the Paris opening. Queue around the block. And beside a chocolate cake with an impossibly long list of ingredients: Never again. Took three days. Worth it. Camila read these notes several times. The owner of this book must have been a professional, and not just any professional. She must have been famous.

That evening, Camila did some research. A pastry chef called Eleanor Price had won a well-known television baking competition in 1998 and had later opened bakeries in London and Paris. There were very few photos of her online, and she had stopped giving interviews about fifteen years earlier. But in one old newspaper picture, a woman in a white jacket was holding a lemon cake and smiling at the camera. She was much younger, but Camila was almost sure it was the woman with the red umbrella.

The following Thursday, Camila brought the book to work and waited. Three o'clock came and went. So did four. The woman didn't appear. Camila felt terrible. She should have run after her that afternoon. She shouldn't have waited a whole week. Perhaps the woman had already been back to look for the book on a day when Camila wasn't working, and the other staff hadn't known anything about it.

It was her manager, Rob, who suggested looking at the last page. "People sometimes write their name at the back," he said. There was no name there. Instead, there was a short message in the same careful blue handwriting: For whoever finds this and actually bakes. Camila stared at it. It didn't sound like the note of someone who had lost something. It sounded like someone who had left it on purpose.

She suddenly remembered something. A few weeks earlier, during a quiet afternoon, she had been drawing designs for birthday cakes on a paper napkin behind the counter. The woman had been watching her from the window seat. When Camila had looked up, the woman had quickly looked down at her tea. At the time, Camila had felt a little embarrassed. Now she realized she must have been noticed.

Two weeks later, the woman came back, shaking the rain off her red umbrella as if nothing had happened. Camila brought her tea and scone, then placed the green notebook on the table beside them. "I think this is yours," she said. The woman looked at the book, then at Camila. "Did you try any of the recipes?" she asked. Camila admitted that she had made the lemon and lavender cake twice. "The second time was better," she said.

Eleanor Price, for that was indeed her name, smiled for the first time in a year of Thursdays. "Then it isn't mine anymore," she said. "But you used too much lavender. Come to my kitchen on Sunday, and I'll show you."