The dressing table was cluttered with recipe books mixed with mascara, hairbrushes, and her favorite razor-sharp vegetable knife. Down she sat, sweeping the debris to one side and pulling out her notebook.

“I need a plan,” she murmured, finding a clean page; and then, carefully, she made a list of her competition.

Lady Strickland: Probably a half-decent cook but good enough to win? She knows Ambrose well, and he’ll give her an advantage, especially since her husband is a bigwig.

Audrey Landon: Isn’t this a competition for serious cooks? What’s that scruffy housewife doing here? Probably no need to worry about her, though it is said that her berry pies are quite good. Could be a problem in Round 3.

Mrs. Quince and Nell: This team will be hard to beat. The woman is a renowned manor-house cook, although the maid is a clumsy mouse of a girl.

How was she going to stop Mrs. Quince? Even in London, Zelda had come across her name. Her reputation for big banquet British and French cuisine was legendary.

    If only I were in London. Then I could pull in some favors and have someone else get rid of her for me.

“That’s it!” she shrieked. “That’s precisely it!”

She would tempt Mrs. Quince away from Fenley.

With this in mind, she pulled some writing paper out of a drawer and began to write to a former work colleague. He owed her a good turn after she covered for him when he was caught with that parlor maid.

    My dearest Claude,

If my memory serves me correctly, you owe me a favor. I warned you I never forget, and lucky for you it’s an easy task. As you are now the head butler at Rathdown Palace, I want you to urge Lord Morton to consider a new head cook. Mrs. Quince is considered the finest cook in Kent. Currently working in Fenley Hall, she may well be looking for a different place of employment soon and would be open to a good opportunity.

Any offers should be addressed directly to her, Mrs. Quince, at Fenley Hall. Don’t mention my name. It’ll be our little secret.

Yours,

Zelda Dupont

“Let’s test her loyalty to the Stricklands, shall we?” Zelda muttered happily as she sealed the letter and two others of a similar nature.

Next, she turned her attention to the competition itself. She had to show initiative, ingenuity, and skill. The winner would produce the best-tasting food—the dish that played to Ambrose’s favorites.

“He’s a man who dines in the top London restaurants, so fine dining must be what he expects,” she mused.

A list of ideas came to mind, but each was dismissed as it was deemed too bland, too simple, too obscure. Some needed ingredients that would be impossible to get with all the shortages and rationing—her job meant that she couldn’t queue at the butcher’s all morning, as seemed to have become necessary if you wanted good meat. It didn’t help that she wasn’t a local. Butchers enjoyed power these days, and building a rapport with one paid off, especially if you had favors or goods to swap. Even then, often all he had were sausages, scraps of offal, or horsemeat. Before the war, the latter had been dog food; now it was deemed good enough for human consumption. The dogs had to do without.

    People were cooking anything it seemed these days. Only yesterday in the paper she’d read about women collecting mussels and seaweed from rocky coastlines, searching for gulls’ eggs to use in place of hens’, and making snail havens in their gardens.

She shook herself, murmuring, “No, I have to come up with something so good that it can’t possibly lose.”

It had to stand out.

It had to be brave.

It had to be sophisticated, with bold flavors, unlike anything the other contestants would produce.

“Coquilles St. Jacques,” she murmured under her breath, as if it were an incantation or a magical spell.

The words echoed through her heart, and her mind reeled back to that evening, only three years ago, when Jim Denton had shown her how to create the famous French dish in the deserted Chelsea hotel kitchen in the dark hours of morning. Perhaps one of the most handsome men she’d ever met, his charm was magnetic, his daring legendary. At once he was a gentleman, a culinary genius, and a Casanova.

She forced him out of her head.

“I need to focus on the contest. Now, do I have some scallop shells somewhere in my boxes that I can use? And where on earth am I to get scallops?”

A frown creased her brow.

Fish and seafood weren’t rationed, but there wasn’t much of them around. The Royal Navy had commandeered the fishing fleet at the start of the war, along with their crews. Most of the boats were now minesweepers or used for ferrying the military around the coast. Local fishermen and anyone trying to find extra food by scavenging on beaches for shellfish often found barbed wire, land mines, and massive beach defenses lined up to stop or stall a Nazi invasion.

    “I’ll have to find myself a black-market spiv,” she said with relish. It was bound to be against the rules of the contest, but who was to know she hadn’t come by her ingredients in a moment of luck? Many scarce items could be found randomly in shops from time to time. She could have been in the right fishmonger, queuing for hours, to get those perfect scallops.

A lot of the top chefs were working the black market to source good ingredients. In London, these little men were easy to find. But here, in this backwater? She would have to see what she could do. If necessary, she could replace the scallops with circles of cod—she’d heard of restaurants doing that. It wasn’t ideal, but it would do.

After asking the factory girls, she located the whereabouts of the local black marketeer in Middleton. Frank Fisk was a scrawny weasel of a man with a thin moustache and oiled hair. She met him in a clothes shop on the high street that had closed down as a result of the clothes rationing.

“Frank Fisk, I presume?” she asked of the man, who was sitting at a table as if in his own office. The place was dark and smelled of mothballs. Empty clothes racks were set to the side, along with the occasional dismembered mannequin, gruesomely armless in the dim light.

He put forth a thin hand, which she ignored.

“I’ve been informed that you can provide foods that are hard to come by. Is that correct?”

His smile displayed a somewhat lax approach to dental health. “You’ve come to the right place, duchess.”

Ignoring his familiarity, she continued. “Seafood. I want scallops preferably, and if not, cod. Can you get it?”

“If you want it, Frank Fisk can get it, sweetheart.” A wink supported this sentiment. “Scallops won’t be cheap, mind you. Two shillings apiece.”

“That’s extortionate, but since I only need two of them, I’ll take them.” She strode to the door. “Get them for me for the second Saturday in July, fresh. If you can’t for some reason, then find me a thick piece of fresh cod.”

    “Right you are, missus.” He darted about her to open the door in a nauseatingly obsequious fashion. “Pleasure to do business.”

“Likewise, I’m sure,” she muttered, wondering if she would indeed get her scallops.

That evening, with her landlady out at her Women’s Institute meeting, Zelda took over the kitchen to try out her recipe. She had pilfered the ingredients from the factory kitchen for the exercise. In place of the scallops, she had a piece of what everyone called “scrod,” which comprised a thin, indeterminate whitefish that may or may not have been cod. These days, it was often the only fresh fish to be found.

Checking that she had everything, she switched on her wireless for a little music. Jazz poured into the room, a female voice singing “Pennies from Heaven.” Zelda’s mind flitted momentarily to another place, another time, before refocusing on the task at hand.

Her Coquilles St. Jacques.

First of all, she had to make the mushroom duxelles, a mushy base of mushrooms and shallots upon which the scallop—or circle of scrod—would sit. Finely shaving a mushroom to wafer-thin papers, she then chopped a small onion—shallots were not a staple in the factory canteen so onion it would have to be. Together she fried them in a little butter, adding garlic, thyme, and a drop of white wine vinegar in place of a nice Chablis. She savored the warm garlicky scent, the mushrooms heady in the background. She hadn’t smelled anything like it since…

And in that strange way that aromas can, she was transported back to the Chelsea hotel kitchen where they worked and lived three years ago. Jim Denton was the first to show her how to prepare Coquilles St. Jacques. He had stood a little too closely beside her, his breath warm and even on her neck.