Cacao by Ceridwen Lee

1 and a half tablespoons crushed cacao nibs. A satisfying amount of grated dark chocolate. One-and-a-half to two tablespoons of sweetened hot chocolate powder. A cup of milk. A pinch of cinnamon for prosperity. A pinch of nutmeg for love. A pinch or a teaspoon of sea salt for good luck.

The stove is hot enough to hiss. Around me, the house shifts in its sleep. The floorboards creak and the pipes groan as the ghosts settle in. The pages of my great grandmother’s cookery books shuffle dustily on a shelf. Postcards from friends and lovers, long gone, sigh sadly as the magnets slip a little on the fridge. Your ghost is silent. For now.

I press my nose to the steamy window to make out a flicker of starlight where the moon dreams on a silver wire. Everyone else has already gone to sleep. I can hear the reassuringly soft breaths of my beloved nephew (here for the weekend), the shift of the bed as my partner turns over. The dog grunts as he counts rabbits. It is as if we are in two different worlds now; they walk in the softly filtered light of Tom’s Midnight Garden, the world of dreams, while I haunt the world of the living. The tabby cat yawns on the hearth rug.

Try not to clatter the pans. Test the heat of the stove plate with the palm of your right hand hovering, just so. Is it hot enough? Another few minutes, maybe. That’s both the joy and the pain of a woodstove. Mine seems to have a friendly air, the sides glow comfortably with the heat, but it is certainly not good for cooking in a hurry. You cannot be exacting, either. You must feel your way. I find I prefer it. Except, of course, for when I’m really hungry and nothing can be done quickly. Nor is it any good for those sorts of recipes that require a very particular and consistent temperature. My bread always comes out doughy (of course, that could also be due to my slapdash way of measuring, my impatience with lists of instructions—I shall attempt to give you only the barest morsel of either). Souffles will inevitably be sadly burnt. Yet, I persevere with my idiosyncratic stove, cursing it only a little. Only sometimes.

I think of the stove as rather like you and I and these letters, in that it makes no sense to anyone else. My own personal eccentricity. I only write to you now when no one is looking. When the whole house, always full of someone visiting, someone come to stay, echoes with silence. They wouldn’t understand. Why should they? In fact, I’m sure they would think it’s morbid. They’d tell me my mother’s recipes are wasted on you. You’re dead. You never even had a first breath. Yet, who else do I have to tell except you who should have been mine?

I think you would have been a little girl. A little girl with frosted, sugar brown curls like me, and blue eyes. I didn’t want a boy, though I expect I’d have come around to the idea. Grown to love your thumping footsteps, thudding through the house. Your sports and toy cars and chubby baby fingers. Anyway, I think you would have been a girl. A mother knows. So, that’s quite alright.

You have to crush the cacao nibs, or they won’t melt well. Pour a good handful into the pestle and mortar (the heavy, stone one with the chip in the rim, which was your grandmother’s, not the wooden one we brought back from Greece which still smells faintly of garlic from last night’s chimichurri) and grind down firmly. Stop occasionally to tap the pestle on the side, listening to its dull chang-chang, to loosen anything that has become stuck. The cacao will smell slightly bitter and not at all chocolatey, but don’t mind that. It will all come together in the end. You just keep at it until your arm aches. Until you have a very fine, muddled sort of powder.

I put a little wooden stool by the counter for you to stand on while, in these stolen, dark hours, I teach your ghost to cook. It’s round, carved with elephants, with stumpy little legs. I saw it in a junk shop, and it reminded me of you. Just the sort of thing a child would like. Silly, I know, since you aren’t here to stand on it. You never were. I don’t know why I bought it. A moment of madness. It gets moved around the kitchen, slid from one side of the floor to the other when someone inevitably trips over it or finds it in the way. My partner (not your father, he’s been gone a long while, but I’ll tell you about him some other time) looks at it sideways, the way you might view something strange and inexplicable a person does, like eating a banana sideways, but you don’t really want to ask. I imagine you standing on it in a too-big apron with smudges of chocolate on your cheeks, and it brings me a certain amount of peace. As if I can almost see you smiling.

Next, grate a little chocolate. Dark chocolate, if you please. It might not be good to eat, of course you prefer milk, but milk chocolate is far too sweet for our purposes. Try it once and you’ll see. It makes the drink far too sickly. Watch your fingers while you grate. Make a little pile of the curls. How much? Just enough to be satisfying. Enough to make your fingers sticky. We’ll rinse them under the tap with your fat little hand trustingly in mine.

If the stove is hot now, we can begin. Measure your milk in a cup, the very one you intend to drink out of, so as not to waste any. Pour that into the little, tin saucepan with the dents and balance it on the stove plate. Add a big dessert spoon and a half, perhaps two, of sweetened chocolate powder. The amount of this is crucial: too little, and your hot chocolate will be thin and mealy; too much, and it will stick to the roof of your mouth. Then, the rest: the bitter, crushed, and muddled cacao nibs; the mound of grated dark chocolate; a pinch of nutmeg and another of ginger; a sprinkle of cinnamon; a teaspoon of crunchy, Celtic sea salt for luck. Yes, of course you can add a lick of cream. Why not?

This was my mother’s recipe. She made it late at night when we were sad or sick and couldn’t sleep. She made it with stories and laughter and always a glass of something or other sloshing about in her hand. My mother smelled like patchouli and wine. Bells and mirrors flirted on her silk skirts. She made chocolate with a careless hand on the gas stove in the tiny kitchen of our maisonette and, on those nights, the whole house was sugar sweet. Before her, my grandmother made it in the mornings on a stove even older than this one. She would make it for us when we went to stay in the holidays, and she made it all the time when my mother went mad and left us there. Once upon a time, I suppose she made it for my mother, too. Only, my mother didn’t like to think about that, having run away from home with me so very young, and so she only made it late at night when she was drinking.

The next part is the magic. You must stir the chocolate slowly, clockwise for making wishes, anticlockwise to let something go: stir, stir, with a wooden spoon, not metal (I can’t stand the sound of a metal spoon scraping on the pan). Keep the bottom from getting too hot by moving the pan off and on, off and on, and all around, swirling a little with a light hand. It’s so very easy for the milk to burn, all it takes is one mistake, but keep stirring, keep moving the pan, and watch it closely. Let it bubble not boil. Lean into the steam as it gradually rises up. Eventually, yes, a sigh of relief, as you watch a crema, a light creamy froth, forming on the top.

It’s almost ready now. Just a few more minutes.

Tabby winds around my ankles. I let her lick a drop of milk from my finger. A great, fat black spider drops delicately down on an acrobat’s string in the corner. The sworl-whorl marks of half-imagined puca-fairy faces peer in at the clouded windows. The clock ticks in the hall. I can hear it even all the way back here in my basement kitchen. Clocks are terrible things. They drive me halfway mad. After a while, if the house is too quiet, I am compelled to drown out their relentless march with the radio or records played too loudly in the den. Tonight, it feels companionable, though. In the corner, a copy of The Enchanted Places, Christopher Milne’s stories about his father, is splayed on the arm of a battered old chair of indeterminate colour. Piled high with cushions and blankets, it is cast in lumpen shadow by the embers of the dying fire. Indisputably my chair, just as this is my domain. Perhaps that book is why I’m thinking of you tonight. What a complicated relationship Christopher had with his father. How much he left unsaid. Then again, perhaps it’s just the clock.

It’s almost midnight. Witching hour. That’s when you come. When I see you the clearest, crawling on the rug in your pinny, or coming home, defiant, with your first piercing and brightly coloured hair. Teaching you to make chocolate, the way I was taught, late at night when everything seems somehow lost and hopeless. Eating biscuits that went wrong, as they always do, in our silly old stove. Turning cartwheels in the garden with long, skinny limbs you haven’t quite grown into and unruly hair the colour of burnt butter that you hate and a snub nose just like your father’s. It’s only at night that we can whisper those thoughts we must never speak out loud.

You slipped away. I lost you. I thought there’d be more time. Another chance. Only, it never came and now it’s too late.

Did I make the wrong choices?

Will you forgive me?

It’s only quiet enough in the very deepest depths of night to catch the bell-like tinkle of your childish laugh. Then it’s gone again, lost in the echoes of empty hallways and the sounds of the living, stirring in their sleep. Once, I chased it endlessly through the gardens, through the attics, through the smiles and under the bodies of lovers who couldn’t really love me. At last, I’ve learned to listen quietly for your ghost instead.

The chocolate is thick now and sweet, tangy with spices and slightly bitter from the cacao. Perfect. Pour it out slowly, slowly, so as not to disturb the foam.