By D.A. Straith
SHARKWATER, ONTARIO—Recently Mrs. Ettina Wimbletwim wrote to me with enthusiasm about her homemade English muffins, and one in particular that took her by surprise. Mrs. Wimbletwim has written to me previously about finding the figure of Jesus Christ in a jam spill and has long been hoping for another sighting. Much to her shock, however, upon cutting into a fresh English muffin last Tuesday morning, she found not the Lord’s face, nor even the voids and bubbles that give a good English muffin its texture, but the entire text of Anna Karenina (Garnett’s translation) printed in the crumb.
When asked how such a thing was possible, Mrs. Wimbletwim invited this reporter to witness it for himself. Imagine my shock when, in the small kitchen of the Wimbletwims’ comfortable home, I found myself looking not at a second plate of breakfast, but at those famous opening words about the uniqueness of unhappy families. They were typeset in perfectly legible script, though warped slightly by the natural rumples and fissures of the dough, and slightly dry at the edges owing to the fact that the muffin was by then a few days old.
(To those who will write to this esteemed publication questioning the ethics of a journalist accepting the generosity of a source, I say only that when one is paid by the word, one eats by their wits, and that I accepted only the meal offered to me; and that if they were to wish me to cease this behaviour, they would only have to ask the publisher to pay a dependable wage. Of course, the editor may not permit this to go to print, or perhaps he will be so asleep at his desk from overwork, and the typesetter so rushed at her type case from hunger and exhaustion, that this letter will find its way through intact.)
What was more unusual to me than finding the beginning of Tolstoy’s work in a days-old portion of bread was that if I started at the beginning sentence and continued from there, I could read the entire book that way. It maddens me that I cannot explain how it fit there, for at first glance it appears that only a few sentences are printed in the muffin, but I assure you, the riveting plot of Mr. Tolstoy’s 1878 drama about Russian family life and politics fits, in its entirety, into that single serving.
Mrs. Wimbletwim was at an utter loss as to how this might have happened. “I didn’t even change the recipe,” she said to me during our visit, pointing to the recipe-cards on which her grandmother had inscribed the original instructions. “Not a grain out of place. I’m very precise, you know.” Nor had she even read Anna Karenina before, being an admitted connoisseur of pulp rather than literature.
So if this was not Mrs. Wimbletwim’s doing, nor the doing of the recipe, how is it that an 800-page book of classic literature, in translation no less, found its way into a palm-sized bit of breakfast food? Sharkwater’s local doctor and natural historian, Dr. Richarding Roundyround, who did not even offer this journalist a cup of tea, had this to say: “We have long been aware of the failures of spontaneous generation theory. I would venture that unless the pastry in question—complete with text—can be replicated, we ought simply to call it a sport of nature and move on. Now can the neighborhood please find something else to gossip about?”
When confronted with the fact that the English muffin in question was neither technically a pastry, nor a natural product—it was entirely woman-made—Dr. Roundyround dismissed me. I got no further comment out of him.
As to the current status of the English muffin, Mrs. Wimbletwim—having successfully had it as a guest at her visiting hours for over a week—says she has passed it along to a pair of professors of her husband’s acquaintance. They have spirited it away, she says, in a specially padded bread bin, so that it can be studied.
Wrist-deep in kneading—Mrs Wimbletwim had invited me to join her in baking a batch according to her grandmother’s recipe—I asked Mrs Wimbletwim whether she burned to know more, whether the English muffin kept her up at night, whether there was any question still lingering in her mind about the secrets of the gluten. Whether she was as utterly consumed as I was by the need to know more.
Her response was mild: a one-shouldered shrug and a bashful smile as she punched the air out of a ball of proofed dough. “Would it improve things for anyone, for me to know?”
Unthinkable though it might seem, she has not lost a single night of sleep since the whole saga began.
Where Mrs Wimbletwim has now concluded her involvement with the business, I, on the other hand, have only gotten more deeply embroiled in it. I threw myself wholeheartedly into our baking sessions, tiring my shoulders and arms to their limit, and soon knew that I would need to make an independent attempt. Know that I also asked for the recipe directly. At first reluctant to share the contents of her grandmother’s closely-guarded card, Mrs Wimbletwim did eventually permit me access. I committed the working to memory through a series of chanted verbal repetitions.
Suffice it to say that I no longer require the card or the chants. Now my body knows this breaden choreography, traversing the kitchen and labouring over the dough without encountering the need even to measure. In dozens of batches, I have only achieved the first nine pages of Mrs Beeton’s (largely index). Switching to crumpets caused me only once to get—instead of those many satisfying, butter-capturing alveolae—the many blinking eyes of an angel and a garbled “be not sautéed.” Perhaps the ambient temperature, the conditions, the tools I am using, or the exact ingredients do not suit the desired outcome; perhaps I am not delivering with sufficient power the words the recipe entreats me to intone over the ferment. Or perhaps it is simply that Mrs Wimbletwim’s guileless disinterest makes her the ideal recipient of this strange blessing. Perhaps we should all strive to be as graceful as she in the face of the unknown.
That said, I have not stopped making English muffins in search of great works. Indeed, this whole affair has infused me to the point that I now consider it my primary occupation—certainly it feeds me better than my journalistic aspirations have. This is why the words you read will constitute my final article in Sharkwater’s fine periodical. You may henceforward find me employed as a baker in our town’s best breakfast establishment. Here I can wholly devote myself to the baking of leavened breads, and therewith, to the unceasing pursuit of the mysteries.
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D.A. Straith (they/them) is a writer of speculative fiction based in the Greater Toronto Area, with short fiction published in Augur, Flash Fiction Online, Inner Worlds and elsewhere. A student of the inaugural Clarion West Novel Workshop, when not writing, they can be found running long distances very slowly. If you enjoyed this story, you can find more at www.straith.ca.