The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

On entry to the doctor’s home, I was momentarily stunned by the profusion of wonders within. These included the cabinet itself: a room of what had been handsome walnut wainscott and elaborately worked moulding (French rosettes and Egyptian cartouches, of all the mad combinations), though the lingering evidence of half-finished reorganization obscured the best of it. What remained of the chamber’s treasures had been tossed, with no apparent regard for further cataloguing or even convenience, onto bookshelves, plinths, and racks, which quite crowded the space. Someone, however, had at least made an effort to group the items by purpose, so after some searching, I discovered the relevant rack. This was a baker’s rack, naturally: three shelves of well-made ironwork fashioned into the most peculiar decorative geometries—what might have been lettering in some tongue of the far Orient, or the lost Toltec. But I will admit I spared less attention for the rack itself than for what it held.

All of the items were cooking implements of some sort: tongs for cooks lacking thumbs; an exceptionally large corkscrew; a strainer that, to all appearances, was solid but whose label indicated it could sift out bacterial particulates if given several days to work. There was also a fine Dutch oven, rather plainly enameled in white, whose lid had been securely tied with twine, then glued-and-papered over at each knot, then clamped with three vices, each of which appeared to have been welded so as not to turn. Like all the scions of Pandora who encompass my sex, I was most tempted to peel back at least one of the taped-over bits. My hand was stayed not by prudence, however, but by greed and impatience; the oven was not what I had come for.

At last I found it, behind a half-melted waffle iron: the Singular Taffy Puller.

Not much to look at, after all the effort I’d expended! The thing resembled nothing so much as an old-fashioned box iron of the sort my mother used when she took to laundering, after my father grew tired of keeping a placée. But where irons had a flat, tapered plate on the business end, this device had an irising cover that could be retracted by means of a clever mechanism on the handle. With the iris closed, the device was inert. When I opened it, however, and looked within the Puller, I beheld . . . nothing. No surface. Nothing that I could see, as I turned it to the light, save an unblemished, undifferentiated deepness of black. It was rather like a yawning, shadowless hole—but as I brought my free hand near it, I felt the powerful tug of the Puller’s force. It was, for one moment, as though the Puller, not the ground beneath my feet, exerted the greater force of gravity. . . . Per my researches, I knew better than to move my hand much closer. And every journal I’d read on the object contained large-writ, dire warnings against ever breaching the horizon of its opening.

You may ask: of what use is such an item in taffy pulling? Well, as any confectioner can tell you, taffy must be pulled to achieve its proper consistency. When air bubbles are incorporated into the sugar matrix—yes, yes, science is of great relevance to cooking, but let us return to the matter of taste—the taffy becomes lighter, softer, chewable rather than a jawbreaking knot. Unfortunately, when one pulls taffy with hands or even a standard machine, it is almost impossible to keep contaminants from affecting the resulting substance. One of my best batches of Atlantic City Strawberry was utterly ruined when the stupid young potager of that damnable restaurant next door made a batch of gumbo with too much garlic. Just the scent of the stuff invaded my shop, but that was enough: invisible particulates of garlic worked their way into my candy, which I had flavored with real dried strawberries, and . . . Well, preventing such disasters was precisely why I had come all this way.

The Puller was capable of removing such particulates from the air. It would remove the air itself, if one pressed a different button on the handle, but as I fancied breathing, I resolved to test that one later. More important, my researches intimated that the Puller might improve my taffy in other ways. For the Puller did not just draw in. As I tilted the device, I noted a small glowing light near its tip. This was not part of the device, strictly speaking; rather, it was a sort of vent, covered over with leaded glass for safety’s sake. However the Puller worked—and the books I’d found were as vague on its mechanics as they were regarding its origins—the by-products of its internal processes were said to include a peculiar form of emission, which appeared here as radiant light. If one could remove the glass and find a way to safely harness the emitted energy . . .