Mrs Bailey’s Chicken Tfaya
baked in Moroccan spices, on a bed of onions and raisins…
Mrs Bailey has learned a lot over time from the girls under her care, both pupils at the Crater School and kitchenmaids belowstairs. Of course not every recipe in her repertoire has come to her that way, though. Many are traditional English fare, handed down within her own family from the earliest Martian settlers, who were obliged to make do with what sparse equipment they had and what limited stores were available.
It was the great nineteenth-century influx of peoples from all across the Empire and further yet that brightened the Martian diet so extremely. They brought the spices and seeds and implements that were familiar to them, and shared them broadly as they spread across the province. Mrs B is far from the only collector whose shelves groan under the weight of recipes from the four corners of the original globe, as well as homegrown favourites.
“If camels are ships of the desert,” Rowany was once heard to remark, “then it follows as the night the day that boats must be camels of the canals.” That innocent observation brought down a deal of trouble on her head, for she was a mischievous Middle at the time and wit is readily misinterpreted as impertinence. In fact there is a great deal of truth in what she said; the vast scope of Charter lands…