"The House"

She couldn’t think when the subject, or the room, had last actually been called “Home Economics”. Both had certainly undergone a lot of changes over time as people shied away from the rampant un-correctness of it being seen as a “girls only” subject involved with making your own clothes and feeding-and-cleaning-up-after somebody else, usually a husband. These days the class was called “Family and Consumer Science”, and was an elective, taught only for a quarter semester every year because its uptake was just so small. There were usually a few guys who got involved with it, seeing it as a gateway to some kind of career in food service management, and a few girls who either were already excellent cooks and felt like taking a class that would be no effort for easy credit.

“Mrs. B?” Brianna said, standing there and glancing around. The place was empty – there were normally no classes this early in the day. “Mrs. Baldwin?...”

No answer. Brianna was just turning to go when, in the middle of the room, between two of the stainless-steel cooking demo stations, a cloud of black smoke burst up from the floor. Out of it, a moment later, walked Mrs. Baldwin, fanning the air in front of her a little...

She peered at Brianna through the smoke. “…Wilkes, isn’t it?” she said. “Brianna Wilkes.”

“That’s right.” It had been a couple of years since Bri had taken Home Ec, but Mrs. Baldwin was as famous for her memory as for her other oddities, which stuck out somewhat even at Salem. Mrs. Baldwin seemed sometimes to be genuinely rooted in some other century -- only visiting or working in this one because the pay and benefits were better. And if there was a teacher in the place who genuinely looked like a witch, it would have been Mrs. Baldwin – though of course no one would have dared say as much to her, since she also taught the Power Potions class without ever referring to a text, and no sane person was going to get even slightly rude to a person who could keep that kind of dangerous stuff contained in her head. She did, however, wear shawls and strange-looking old gingham dresses; and she had the somewhat wayward white hair, the classic longish nose, the classic “crone’s” narrow chin, those little wrinkled eyes… as well as a complete disdain for the magical “plastic surgery” that could have left any thoughtful witch looking her waist size instead of her age. No one was clear why Mrs. Baldwin was so insistent on letting her body look so traditional, especially in Salem. But anyone who thought about asking her probably also immediately thought about the Power Potions class, and shut up.

“So what brings you in today?” Mrs. Baldwin said, moving over to one of the demo stations to turn on one of the cooking hoods and clear the smoke away a little.

“I need some advice,” Brianna said. “I want to build a classical witch’s gingerbread house. Full size...”

“Why, goodness, Brianna dear,” she said – and Brianna blushed because it was so bizarre to be called “dear” by a teacher – “doesn’t a gingerbread house seem a little…retro?”

The word “retro” itself surprised Brianna, coming from Mrs. Baldwin’s mouth. “Well,” Brianna said, “right out of the box, I guess so. But say ‘witch’ to half the population, at least in the same sentence as ‘fairy tale’, and they’ll say ‘gingerbread house’. Seems like a cultural slamdunk as a Heritage Week project.”

This line had worked as well a few minutes ago with Mr. Johannson, the General Arcana teacher who was coordinating the Parascience Fair entries, as it had with Brianna’s own parascience teacher Miss Levenson. Now Mrs. Baldwin blinked at her thoughtfully. “Unless,” Brianna said hurriedly, “you think it was just a myth…”

“Oh, not at all. Certainly someone would have done it,” Mrs. Baldwin said. “That kind of thing wouldn’t just occur to some 17^th-century peasant out of the air, as a rule. It’s the construction that’s likely to be a problem.” She pulled out a lab stool and sat herself down on it.

“I did some research last night,” Brianna said, “and some of the sources aren’t even sure it was actually made of gingerbread. Some versions of the story just say ‘bread.’”

“I know,” Mrs. Baldwin said, “but there are two reasons for it to be gingerbread. One is that bread was considered holy in those days. For all kinds of reasons – staff of life and all that. But also because you have to put salt in bread, not just to make it palatable, but to stop the yeast from working before you bake.”

“And salt’s one of the antimagic elements,” Brianna said, “like plain cold iron and running water.”

“So there you are,” said Mrs. Baldwin. “You try building a magic house out of bread, you’re going to run into trouble. Early gingerbreads, though, wouldn’t have had salt in them: not just so that the flavor of the ginger wouldn’t be interfered with, but because there was no yeast or other leavening to worry about. Mostly they were baked unleavened by anything but the air beaten into them, and they were more like cookies than cakes. They kept better that way, you see. The cakey gingerbreads decorated with gold leaf and all that fancy whatnot didn’t start turning up until the eighteen hundreds.”

“Oh,” Brianna said, and pulled open her notebook again to start making notes. “Great! So… how do you build a gingerbread house with magic?”

Mrs. Baldwin blinked at her. “One big enough to house an old woman and a couple of kids in a cage,” she said, “and an oven big enough to shove one of the kids into when he gets fat? Brianna dear, I’m a cook, not an architect. I’ve done a lot of regular gingerbread houses at Christmas time, with magic and without… and believe me, even a little one with walls no taller or wider than a cookie sheet can be a real nuisance to keep standing. All of mine needed cardboard reinforcement layers. I don’t even want to think about how much marshmallow fluff I used as mortar last year. Or how long it took me to get it out of my hair.” Mrs. Baldwin actually shuddered. “And as for what they used in the old days, well, I doubt they had marshmallow fluff… so your guess is as good as mine as to what spells or mortar they used. So do tell me what you figure out.”