Chapter Text
When Kremy was little, his Ma had taken him and Kermy to the library, to fetch books, and they’d gone to a little one-room schoolhouse on the near side of Bogpossum, about an hour’s walk away, where an elderly swamp goblin had taught them their letters and numbers. She’d dressed herself up in brightly coloured prints and made sure her boys were presentable on the equivalent of Sunday, but the rest of the week they could make do with their tattered hand-me-down clothes, permanently muddy from catching crayfish in the swamp.
She’d cook it up, teaching them how to make gumbo and their namesake étouffée with her mother-in-law’s recipe, so that even at the age of three, Kremy could be left to watch a roux and bring it to the right colour for the right dish, without her needing to worry that he might burn himself.
Decades later, he still remembered his confusion at discovering the colour of a blonde roux was named after the hair colour on mammals and not the other way around. Surely a roux was a fundamental truth of life, and not having yellow hairs coming from your head?
She took them to his Meemaw’s house, her own Ma, and Meemaw taught him her recipes too. She lived in Bogpossum proper, but on its furthest side, in a neighbourhood where they had row houses that all looked the same but in different colours on each side of the grit-paved road. Her door was light blue, with a black rooster painted at the bottom as though it was a silhouette against a blue sky.
Her dark roux étouffée wasn’t as good as his other Meemaw’s caramel roux recipe, he had bluntly told her at the age of four, but her gumbo was better. She’d feigned outrage - or perhaps just barely suppressed real outrage - approaching him with her fist clenched around her wooden spoon, but it became clear that he didn’t even understand the threat.
“Here, I’ll show you if you have another pot,” he told her, too innocent of the world to mind his Ma’s watchful eye or Kermy’s shocked expression, as he boldly took it from her hand and began to cook a second dinner in his Meemaw’s kitchen.
She had laughed and watched him as he searched her pantry for ingredients, pulling out a chair for himself to reach the flour.
“Where’s the crawfish? Or the shrimp?” He’d asked, when his search turned up nothing.
“In my étouffée, little man!” His Meemaw had cawed. “Shellfish don’t stay fresh long in this heat!”
“Well, you best send Kermy out to get more real quick,” he told her earnestly. “It’s almost time for it to go in!”
The adults had indulged him, for their own entertainment, and sent Kermy out to fetch a silver each of shrimp and crawfish from a stall at the end of the road.
“Kermy, you better run!” Kremy had said, bouncing up and down on the chair he was using to reach the stove.
“Careful, boy, you don’t want to end up in the pot!” His Meemaw had grabbed the spoon from him as he bounced, snappish and hangry now that not only had dinner time been pushed back and her food rejected, but the price had doubled.
He snatched it back. “You mustn’t stop stirring when you’re making a roux! It’s prolly how yours ended up too dark. It caught on the pot!”
Even though it was his first time cooking the recipe to completion, and he’d struggled to crack the stubborn crawfish from their shells, he had insisted on serving them all as though it were a sit down dinner in the type of restaurant he’d only seen from the outside, and not his starving family eating at his Meemaw’s kitchen table almost two hours late.
He served them the rice his Meemaw had made to go with her own étouffée, certain that he was being charitable when he told her that at least she could boil rice well. Meemaw gave him a look that could curdle milk, but didn’t say anything until they had started eating.
“You know, I really don’t know what to make of this boy,” Meemaw said to his Ma. “The attitude. The insolence. He’s lucky he’s such a little charmer, and that his étouffée is so damn good!”
“He is a handful,” his Ma smiled. Kermy just looked exasperated, having made it clear he was tired of Kremy’s antics, but believed himself too mature to properly whine about them.
“How did you learn to cook so well when you’re so young?” Meemaw wondered.
“I don’t know. Did you know Étouffée is actually my middle name?” Kremy picked up his bowl to try and eat directly from it, spilling soupy rice down his shirt.
“It’s your last name, cher,” his Ma corrected, pressing the bowl back onto the table and putting his spoon back into his hand. “This is Meemaw’s house, don’t you mess the floor Kremy!”
Kremy ignored her, humming a song he heard at the equivalent-of-Sunday school as he chewed a crawfish tail and spoke with his mouth full. “What’s my middle name?”
“Trouble!” His Meemaw said pokily, but she finished her bowl regardless, and didn’t force him to do the washing up even though he had somehow used every bowl, plate and cooking utensil she owned.
That had been then. They were happy, and Kremy had gotten away with murder, charming his way around family and his Ma’s friends, causing mischief and sometimes minor kitchen fires, from which all escaped unscathed.