The Palimpsest and the Chicken Joint

Welcome back to Stranger Than Flicktion, our Flickr-inspired column. We provide writers with five random food-related Flickr images and ask them to construct a fictional short story in under five days. In this edition, our protagonist unwittingly stumbles into a party to which he wasn't invited.

At a few minutes before noon on a cool, rainy Saturday in June of this year, N. Alverforth Rikkes, an authority on the literature of cookery and a well-known collector of its bibliographic highlights, carefully climbed off a city bus at the corner of 11th Avenue and 40th, limped (ingrown nail, left big toe, infected) half a block to Chicken Paree ("Nos Poulets Sont Mieux Que Vos Poulets"), entered the establishment, walked past the host, a tiny, furious man of cloudy ancestry named Ranger who loved sugar cookies, and strode up to the heated buffet tables. N. Alverforth scanned the dozens of stainless steel wells of the restaurant's lunch offerings, all protected by cloudy sneeze guards on which were taped laminated placards that identified ordinary dishes like Chicken in Batter and Salt & Garlic Chicken, but also more exotic fare like Knut's Chicken Sausage Beans, Ho-Bo Chicken, Chicken Hello Fire, Caper Chicken Skrumptious, The Beef of Chicken, Hospital Chicken, Free Chicken Willy, Chicken Up (a carbonated broth), Chicken Bobbitt, and so on.

N. Alverforth noticed with some irritation, and perhaps some hurt feelings, that Chikken Rikkes was not on offer. He would have to speak to Moises, the owner and head chef of Chicken Paree, who N. Alverforth, at least up until this moment, had considered a friend. Moises had seemed interested when, a couple weeks earlier, N. Alverforth brought in one of the rarest works in his collection of cookery books, a unique and unpublished Tudor manuscript of pudding and sausage recipes, bound in the skin of its author, a forgotten culinary genius who bore witness to posterity solely through this slender volume. Moises ultimately refused to touch the nearly 500-year-old book, so N. Alverforth wrote down, in modern English, one of its signature recipes, a kind of medieval chicken pot pie made with suet, blood, and sheep marrow, and encouraged the chef to add it to his rotation.

"Suet?" said Moises. "What are suets?"

"Fatty tissue from sheep, cows, and the like. From near the organs."

"Chickens have suets?"

"Uh, no, I don't think they do."

"I am a chicken restaurant."

"But you use other ingredients all the time, right?"

"Hm. OK, I make. Come back next week."

So N. Alverforth came back next week. But there was no Chikken Rikkes on offer. Nor was there any the week after that.

And there was none today.

N. Alverforth limped over to the host, Ranger, and tapped him on a tiny shoulder.

"See here, sir, I want to talk to your boss Moises—"

The little fellow spun on a heel and glared at N. Alverforth with tears in his eyes.

"Moises is dead!" shouted Ranger. "Now I have no one! I can never enjoy sugar cookies again! And it's all your fault! Because of your awful chicken recipe!"

Ranger stomped on N. Alverforth's infected toe. N. Alverforth screamed a silent scream. Then Ranger chased him out of the restaurant and down 11th Avenue, shouting about Moises' dormant suet allergy, about murder, about revenge. Limping badly, N. Alverforth finally ducked into a building near 33rd. He found himself in a large ballroom filled with older people dressed like librarians. Exhausted, N. Alverforth fell into the nearest available seat, at a round table occupied by three couples. He paid them no mind. He kicked off his left Buster Brown, peeled off his sock-monkey-style sock, and examined his grievously insulted toe.

"Well, well," said a voice. "Look who didn't get the message."

N. Alverforth looked up. Sitting across the table, partially obscured by a flowerpot of some kind of fancy dandelion, was a woman with honey-blond bangs, cinnamon-orange lipstick, and an annoyed smirk, staring at him.

Blossom Blom. The Curator of Books on Food and Wine at Columbia University Library. The Queen herself. And surrounding her were other luminaries in the field of rare culinary works. Lytton Glamb-Twylde, Bustro Ten Boom, Don Rusk, Bo Dewtle, Pam Balb. N. Alverforth looked around the vast room. The entire place was populated with major players—scholars, special-collections librarians, booksellers, curators, collectors, auctioneers, even a few restorers—everyone who was anyone at the intersection of food and literature. What was this? Why didn't he know about this? Why wasn't he invited?

"I thought," said Blossom Blom, "that I made a point not to invite you to the International Committee on Bibliographic Standards for Oenophilic and Gastronomic Literature, N. Alverforth. Yet here you are."

"But … but …"

"Of course you know what I'm talking about."

Yes … yes … perhaps he did.

Six months earlier, N. Alverforth, acting on the advice of an associate, entered Vertesegui's PanAm Pizza on 113th, located Carlos Vertesegui, the owner's son and director of delivery services, gave him a thousand dollars, and explained that all he had to do was refuse to deliver any pizza to Blossom Blom ever again, unless she revealed the text she had discovered hidden inside one of Columbia's medieval manuscripts, a 12th-century Italian Pliny. It was a habit of medieval scribes to reuse parchment, and they would sometimes scrape away a text they considered worthless in order to cover it with writing they considered worthwhile. Under certain kinds of light, this scraped-away text, a palimpsest, will sometimes reveal itself. Years ago, Blossom Blom found, beneath the 12th-century Pliny, a substantive part of a seventh-century cookery text, heretofore unknown. But she has refused to reveal her findings, infuriating many, especially N. Alverforth. Fed up with her scholarly tardiness, and knowing her fatal weakness for Vertesegui's, N. Alverforth sold his prized first edition of Le Guide Culinaire, gave the proceeds to Carlos, and waited.

Blossom Blom saw through the plot immediately. Carlos, while a superb pizza chef and speedy deliveryman, was weak-kneed when it came to librarians, and gave the game away when Blossom came to his restaurant with threats and questions.

"N. Alverforth," said Blossom, glaring at him over the dandelions, "you are not welcome here. Take your injury and your shoe and your felonious bibliographic wiles and go."

N. Alverforth limped out of the building, one foot barefoot.

He trudged down 34th, lost in thought, lost in time. What had he done? He had alienated everyone important to him, he had killed Moises, he had ruined Ranger's life. 5th, Madison, Park, Lexington. Perhaps he would just walk all the way to the East River Esplanade. Perhaps he would jump in.

At the corner of 1st Avenue, N. Alverforth paused to look in the window of a very ordinary-looking bakery. Tom's Bakery. How ordinary. Cupcakes, crullers, pound cake slices, jelly donuts. Whee. Ooh, look, sugar cookies.

Wait, how much?

He went inside. He was the only person there, except the baker, a withered fellow who looked like a cadaver of Jack Lemmon. N. Alverforth took a number, number 98.

"Ninety-eight!"

"How much are the sugar cookies?"

"Can't you read? Five bucks."

"Really? That's a lot for a sugar cookie, any cookie. I know about this stuff."

"They're good."

"Not that good." Oh, if only they were!

"You know you want one."

"Got any broken ones I can try?"

The baker didn't even bother to answer.

"I'll take one."

It was the most sublime cookie N. Alverforth had ever tasted. He bought six more. With the rest of his money he took a cab to Chicken Paree.

When he saw N. Alverforth entering his establishment, Ranger came out from behind his podium and charged his enemy, rage contorting his face, mouth open, preparing to take a bite out of N. Alverforth. But when the tiny angry man got close enough, N. Alverforth simply jammed a sugar cookie into the drooly maw. Ranger calmed down. Ranger grew docile. Ranger became weepy and apologetic. N. Alverforth gave him the rest of the cookies.

And then they found an empty booth, piled their plates high with spicy Chicken Hovering, opened a bottle of Riesling, and plotted to steal a certain seventh-century cookbook from a certain 21st-century harridan.

This post previously appeared on MUNCHIES in August, 2015.