The Recipe Card
Grandma Polly's recipe card hangs on the wall of the bakery now, in a little frame by the door, where every baker can see it on their way in.
The pencil has faded. The thumbprint of flour is still there in the corner.
21 crimps. No more, no less. Pepper white, never black.
Next to it, in another frame, is a single sheet of paper.
It's the first page of my notebook. The very first phone call with Martin Kerr. Date. Time. Every word.
Jenna says it's a strange thing to frame. Maybe it is.
But people ask me all the time how a small baker from Trevennick beat one of the biggest supermarkets in Britain.
They want a clever answer. A big lawyer. A secret.
The truth is much more boring than that.
My grandmother wrote down her recipe, so it would never be lost.
My father taught me to write down everything else, so it would never be denied. Greenfields took the recipe. They copied the pastry, the pepper, the swede, the twenty-one crimps.
What they forgot was that I'd been writing them down too.
Every call. Every word. Every date.
In a blue box on a shelf in Bodmin.
Waiting.