industrial sized bakery.
Forty-Six
The minute Penny got back to the Love Hut she shared with V’rex that evening, she got directly into a hot shower.
“What a day!” she moaned, as she pressed her cheek to the cold tiles while the steaming water sprayed over her. “What a horrible, horrible day!”
Closing her eyes, she went back over her disastrous first day on the job…
It had become clear in the first few minutes that May’bell, who had been assigned to train her, didn’t like her any more than Head Baker Goone did. She had led Penny to a table heaped with thick sacks of flour and nodded her head.
“All right—make the dough,” she’d said, glaring at Penny. “And you better make it right.”
“Uh…what dough am I making?” Penny asked, staring helplessly at the enormous sacks of flour which looked like they weighed fifty pounds or more. “I mean is it for bread? Biscuits?”
“It’s for svetty bread, of course!” May’bell snapped at her. “Our main specialty around here. Ain’t you et any of it before? We got loads of it for sale outside the front door!”
“Not yet, I’m afraid,” Penny said humbly, thinking of the dusky purple loaves she’d seen as they entered the bakery. “I just had my Unification Ceremony yesterday and all I had before that was what they gave us in the Breeding and Conception Center.”
“Well, it’s true you don’t get none of the svetty bread there,” May’bell had acknowledged grudgingly. “All right, I’ll tell you how—just this once.” She held up one thick finger in front of Penny’s face. “And you’d better get it right the first time!”
“Okay.” Penny nodded. “Just tell me how to make it.”
“Ya need two and a half sacks of svetty flour, a bucket and three quarters of water, a half scoop of salt from the salt barrel over there. And two scoops of sugar from the sugar barrel, which is right beside it.” May’bell pointed vaguely to the far corner of the room. “Add a gob of butter from the cooler, a cake and a bit of yeast, and some tinga seeds for texture,” she went on, speaking rapidly. “Let the yeast proof with the sugar in one of the buckets whilst you mix the rest with the paddle—”
“The paddle?” Penny interrupted. She was already feeling overwhelmed, trying to keep the complicated list of ingredients and amounts in her head—what exactly was a “gob” of butter? And how much was a “cake and a bit” of yeast?
“The paddle there—in the mixin’ bowl o’ course.” May’bell pointed to one side of the table and Penny saw an absolutely enormous metal bowl—half as tall as she was herself—sitting on the floor. It did, indeed, have a huge wooden mixing paddle inside it—the thing looked as big as an oar to Penny. She literally could have crawled into the bowl and hidden—it was that big.
“Once you got it all mixed, come and get me so I can test it,” May’bell told her. “And don’t bother me until it’s ready—I got m’own dough to see to!”
Then she’d marched off to another metal table across the room, leaving Penny to stare helplessly at the giant bowl she was supposed to fill with dough. She felt like the princess in the fairy tale who had been left alone in a room full of straw and told she must spin it all to gold or lose her head.
Still, she hadn’t gotten where she was in her profession by being a quitter. Admittedly archeology was a far cry from baking, but Penny wasn’t one to lay down and let life steamroll over her.
Lifting her chin, she decided to try.
She ran into trouble immediately.
First of all, the bags of dark blue svetty flour, which apparently turned pale purple when baked, weighed even more than they appeared to. Penny grunted and strained as she struggled to get one to the edge of the table.
There was no way she was going to be able to lift the damn thing in her arms and pour it in, so she tried to just position it over the mixing bowl on the floor below, which she pushed until it was right under the bag. Then she grabbed the sharp knife, which was hanging from a hook over the table and sliced open the top of the bag, expecting the flour to pour out into the bowl.
The flour poured out, all right—all over the place. To Penny’s credit, most of it landed in the bowl, but a great deal of