Chapter 363 --363
She was making the fried dough.
The process was visible and, Elara had always found, genuinely satisfying to watch — the dough produced from a large covered bowl, shaped quickly with practiced hands, the oil in the wide flat pan behaving exactly as oil in a very experienced cook’s pan behaves, the whole thing moving with the specific rhythm of someone who had done this so many times that it had become a form of fluency.
The smell was extraordinary.
Samuel stopped his chair and looked at the stall and said nothing, but his expression said quite a lot.
"Two," Elara said, to the woman.
The woman looked at her, then at Samuel, then produced two portions with the efficiency of someone who did not consider customer contemplation to be a necessary part of the transaction. She wrapped them in paper. Elara paid. The woman was already making the next one before they had moved away.
The fried dough was hot and slightly sweet and had a specific texture — crisp on the outside in a way that gave way to something that was almost the opposite of crisp on the inside — that Elara had not found replicated anywhere else in the city despite having looked, which suggested that the recipe was either proprietary or the result of some specific combination of variables that only obtained at that particular stall.
Samuel ate it with the same focused seriousness he had brought to the flatbread yesterday.
Then he ate the rest of it faster.
"You were right," he said, when it was done.
"I’m usually right about food," she said, "for the same reason I’m usually right about cats. I pay attention to the things that matter."
He looked at the empty paper in his hands. "Can we come back?"