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A Menu for Another Morning
On an ordinary Wednesday at Fern and Fell, owner-chef Noa Vasilenko finds six hands on the recipe card for a sauce she has cooked for nine years.
- ~47 min (estimated)
- 10365 words
- 18 scenes
- 5 branch points
- 4 endings
- One Wednesday in early autumn 2024, 15:02 to after midnight, Fern and Fell, a thirty-two-cover restaurant on a harbour c
20 recorded plays (one per visitor per day)
No cover art yet · listing metadata: listing.json · counts: authored
About
Noa Vasilenko has owned and run Fern and Fell for nine years and has cooked out of a black composition notebook for all of them without ever sitting down with it. On a Wednesday, an A5 index card turns up in her ticket clip, and page eleven of the notebook turns out to carry three hands: her mother's twelve minutes, a smaller harder hand correcting it to nine because the left ring runs hot on its outer edge, and a third hand in block capitals insisting on 9, NOT 12, I HAVE TIMED IT ON THREE DIFFERENT RINGS, in a kitchen that only has two. Over one service the seven of them establish that the notebook has six hands in it, that the wall card has been crediting a recipe to a woman who did not write it since 1994, that the almond cake on page thirty-one carries a pencil correction the pastry cook made at two in the morning in 2019, and that a journalist who has eaten here for nine years printed a false claim about the salt line in a national paper in 2011 and has never been asked about it. The story is a closed-room argument about whether a corrected number is an error to be fixed, a fix to be owned, or a process to be recorded, and it resolves into four endings about what, if anything, is allowed to go into print: a second edition with an errata page, a working edition set in two columns, nothing at all but a laminated-proof card at the pass, or a twelve-page pamphlet handed out on the counter.
Content notice6 topics · tap to review
- an owner contradicted in front of her own brigade by a section cook who has been in the building for twenty-two years
- a fish cooked past the point anybody wanted and found dry, in the four-minutes-a-side branch only
- a middle-aged woman learning that a dish she has cooked for nine years was largely authored by somebody else
- a recipe published in a national paper since 1994 under the name of a person who did not write it
- a journalist publicly correcting her own printed falsehood in front of customers, at a counter, at nine twenty
- the death of a named figure, Alma, eleven years before the story, present only as handwriting and one telephone call
Cast
- N Noa Vasilenko no portrait yet
- B Bettina Nkemelu no portrait yet
- C Cato Brandt no portrait yet
- I Irena Sologub no portrait yet
- T Toby Ferreira no portrait yet
- P Petra Kalu no portrait yet
- G Geri Fallow no portrait yet