Bottled in Bond by Jennifer Bramseth

Author:Jennifer Bramseth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Jennifer Bramseth

Having lunch with Candace should’ve satisfied her cravings for comfort food. The burgoo and dessert were wonderful. And even though the weather was still warm, that was during the daytime. The year had reached that point in the fall when the evenings were just cool enough to justify whipping up a batch of soup, making a fire, curling up with a blanket, and slowly sipping one’s go-to pour.

Coraleigh planned to do all three that night.

She’d gone to the largest chain grocery store in the state, which happened to be in her hometown of Versailles.

Yeah, usually the cook did the shopping. She rarely made grocery runs, unless, like today, there was something she was particularly hankering for.

And that put her in mind of the late-night runs to the old grocery store back in her college days and when she, Candace, and Jessa would spend weekends together occasionally at Traveler’s Rest. They would return to the house with bags of junk food. Sometimes they’d eat it. More often than not, they’d nibble at it just to have a taste. The fun was in the going and the buying.

But no junk food today. Just the fixin’s for the soup her grandmother used to make.

Well, it wasn’t really a soup. At least not how she liked to make it.

Corn dumplings.

Not, as some people heard when she said the dish, chicken and dumplings.

When she was little, she couldn’t understand why people put other things in dumplings beside corn.

And butter. All the butter.

For her, the basic ingredients of corn, homemade dumplings, milk, and more butter than should be legal constituted perfection. Once someone had commented that the whole dish was like a buttered-popcorn casserole.

It was the perfect description.

And who had said that?

It must have been Candace or Jessa or—

The memory hit her, the emotional punch nearly knocking the appetite right out of her.

Clay so aptly had described the dish. That was years ago, before the break, when their families had often shared a table.

Coraleigh and her mother had made the dish themselves. It had been during a stretch of weeks where her mother had been endeavoring to teach her how to make the many historic dishes that had been passed down for generations in the Duncan and Boyle families.

They were using Grandmother Boyle’s recipe, the ingredients and instructions scratched in pencil on a yellowed and worn index card. The dish was supposedly of German origin, her grandmother having acquired it from one of her forebears. Coraleigh could still remember a few snatches of scrawled German in red pencil instead of black.

That learning experience had been a success; Coraleigh mastered every one of the dishes. Her favorite had been the corn dumplings, followed a close second by the recipe for her own mother’s chocolate pie.

They had served it one late July evening, the occasion unremarkable except for the gathering of friends. Due to its heavy nature, it was more suitable for the colder months, but her mother had always insisted on making it in the summer, when the corn came in.

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