Too Many Cooks by Dana Bate

asking me to taste samples of cat food to make sure they were suitable for her cat, Elizabeth Taylor. But Natasha isn’t crazy. She is selfish and oblivious, and combined, those traits could be even worse.
    Since Natasha has left me with zero useful information about any of her grandmother’s recipes, I decide to re-create the dish from last night’s dinner based on taste and memory. One of the reasons I’m good at what I do is I have a pretty sensitive palate and can tell when a recipe needs an extra teaspoon of white wine vinegar or another dash of chili pepper. Sam and I used to play a game: He’d cook something and then blindfold me, and I would try to name all of the ingredients in the dish in as few bites as possible. He was always blown away by how quickly I could identify even the subtlest flavors—walnut oil, saffron, dried sage. What he found even more impressive was that I’d never tasted most of those ingredients until I was a teenager; my mom only made a handful of dishes, which together didn’t use more than a dozen or so basic components.
    I should probably add that, as a young girl, I didn’t mind my mom’s limited repertoire. By all accounts, until I was about eleven, I was a pretty fussy eater. I wouldn’t touch anything spicy or sharp or “tangy.” I much preferred my mom’s tuna noodle casserole and ham salad to a dish of pasta Bolognese. It wasn’t that I feared foreign foods. It was that my young palate was so sensitive I couldn’t handle an onslaught of complex flavors. For me, eating a bowl of chili was like walking into a crowded party and being able to hear every single conversation at full volume. The cacophony of spices and seasonings was too much. It wasn’t until my taste buds matured and dulled with age that I could not only appreciate the many flavors of the world, but also enjoy them.
    As I sit at Natasha’s kitchen table, I think through last night’s meal. The Cornish hens were filled with a fragrant stuffing that seemed to be laced with mushrooms, celery, and . . . was it sage? I think so. And the bread. It was rich and eggy, like a challah or brioche. The skin on each of the birds was crisp and salty, with pops of . . . garlic, I think. And paprika. The sweet kind, not the spicy one. But how did she get the skin so crispy? And did she brine the birds at all? Did her grandmother have a special trick for getting the meat so juicy? All of this would be a lot simpler if Natasha would bother to answer any of my questions, instead of talking to some stylist on her cell phone while she paces around her garden.
    Rather than wait for her to make herself available, I decide to set off for the grocery store. I let myself out the front door and, using the GPS on my phone, navigate the winding streets of Belsize Park to an ATM, where I withdraw a hundred pounds using the card Natasha gave me. From there, I set out for Barrett’s Butchers on England’s Lane. The neighborhood is a mix of colors and architectural styles—white stucco mansions, Victorian redbrick town houses, squat apartment buildings made of dull gray brick. Almost every block contains one house, if not two or three, whose face is saddled with metal scaffolding and bright blue tarpaulins. I can only imagine what Natasha’s house looked like a year ago. Poppy mentioned that contractors only recently finished what was a two-year renovation.
    I pop into Barrett’s, ducking beneath the bright-red awning into the tiny shop, which is packed with fresh cuts of everything, from delicate lamb chops to meaty pork roasts covered in thick layers of fat. Mountains of fat sausages beckon from within the glass case, in more varieties than I could ever imagine—wild boar and apple, venison, chicken and sage, beef and garlic. A musty funk fills the store, giving the place an air of rustic authenticity.
    I order three Cornish hens (or, as the British call