Chinatown Turnip Cake and Christmas Eve
The Christmas wreath at Leicester Manor had hung crooked three times. Hailey crouched on the carpet, adjusting its ribbons, flour from yesterday's experiment still caught beneath her fingernails. The magical logs in the fireplace were supposed to crackle, but she kept hearing an almost imaginary "click"-nothing to do with the Vibranium bracelet around her wrist, but the sound of some row of gears inside her jamming.
"I should be decorating the fireplace with Muggle Christmas lights, but instead I'm researching how to keep the bulbs lit forever with magic." She sighed at the brass mantelpiece, her seventeen-year-old face scrunched up like a walnut in its reflection. Before she transmigrated, she had imagined Christmas at Hogwarts as a magical scene of Butterbeer and carolers. Reality, however, had been cut to pieces by the surviving pages of a book of prophecies, Professor Quirrell's garlic smell, and her parents' hushed discussions in the study late at night.
Mrs. Leicester came over with hot cocoa, frosting smeared on her apron. "Do you know why Christmas pudding has to mature for twelve days?" She pressed a cup into Hailey's hands. The porcelain cup, decorated with reindeer, had been bought at a Muggle supermarket. "Good flavor takes time, and so does a good frame of mind."
Mr. Leicester came in jingling his car keys, half a "London Chinatown Business Directory" sticking out of his suit pocket. "I just spoke to Eileen's dad on the phone. He said Chen's Spice Shop has just gotten in some cinnamon from Guangxi, China. Want to go have a look? I hear they've added coconut milk to the rice cakes this year." He placed particular emphasis on "coconut milk," as though reciting a spell.
Hailey's eyes brightened, then quickly dimmed. "But what if we run into..."
"Don't worry." Mrs. Leicester wrapped a Muggle cashmere scarf around her. "Today we're just an ordinary family shopping for the New Year." When she winked, her earring flashed with the same silver light as the moon-phase pendant—but it looked like nothing more than an ordinary pearl stud.
The archway in London Chinatown was hung with neon lights for the Christmas season. Beneath an English banner reading "Merry Christmas," the Chinese characters for "good fortune and all the best" shone bright red. Clutching the change purse Mrs. Leicester had given her, Hailey wandered between the wooden shelves of Chen's Spice Shop, her nose leading her after the scents of star anise, dried tangerine peel, and crisply dried shiitake mushrooms.
"Mom, can we use this packet of dried longan to make candied fruit for Christmas?" She held up the wax-paper packet, the traditional Chinese on its label reminding her of her maternal grandmother's kitchen in her previous life. "The Muggle recipe says to soak it in rum, but I think Nini secretly mixed magic syrup into ours."
Mrs. Leicester took the dried longan and pinched it with her Muggle fingernails to test its firmness. "Ordinary vodka will do. The key is getting the heat right-like the last time you baked cookies in the microwave and nearly melted the turntable because you set the temperature wrong." As she spoke, she glanced out of the corner of her eye at the star anise high on the shelf, as though calculating its magical equivalent, but merely reached up and took down a jar of oyster sauce for Hailey.
Meanwhile, Mr. Leicester was haggling with the shopkeeper in the dried-goods section in halting Mandarin. What stuck out of his briefcase was not parchment, but a Muggle notebook. "How about two pounds for this packet of dried shiitake mushrooms? My daughter says we can use them to make chicken soup." What he took out was not Galleons, but neatly folded pound notes. His cufflinks were ordinary silver circles, not Vibranium engraved with magic circles.
Hailey crouched in front of a stall selling cured meats, swallowing as she stared at the glossy Cantonese sausages. The elderly woman running the stall pressed a sample of turnip cake into her hand. As the fragrance of rice and cured meat melted on her tongue, she suddenly remembered a winter solstice night before she transmigrated, when her mother was steaming cakes in the kitchen and the white mist that rose from the lifted steamer lid had fogged her glasses. "Granny, how do you make this?" She carefully wrote down the steps in her notebook. Reflected in the stainless-steel rack in front of the stall, Hailey grinned like a child stealing candy.
Watching their daughter skip about with her phone in her hands, Mr. and Mrs. Leicester exchanged a relieved look. Mr. Leicester whispered to his wife, "Look at her, forgetting all about the book of prophecies. She's just like she was when she went to a Muggle amusement park for the first time at eight." Mrs. Leicester nodded and added ten jin of white radishes to the shopping basket. She knew their daughter's "cross-dimensional cooking experiment" was about to begin again, and this time it had to be done entirely the Muggle way.
The scent of cinnamon filled the car on the way home. Mrs. Leicester polished a newly purchased tin of Tieguanyin tea until it gleamed, and Hailey snatched the tin and some Muggle glass beads. "I'm going to make a snow globe!"
"Using physics or magic?" Mr. Leicester asked with a smile in the rearview mirror.
"Obviously the Muggle way!" As soon as Hailey got home, she dug out some silver powder from the Muggle art supplies. "Dye the glass beads silver for snowflakes, then add a mini Christmas tree-look, doesn't it look like the Chinatown archway at night?" She poured some glycerin into the tin, following a tutorial she had read in a book. "The glycerin makes the 'snowflakes' fall more slowly, just like a Levitation Charm in the magical world... uh, like a feather floating down."
Mrs. Leicester helped her tighten the lid, her moon-phase pendant tapping lightly against the tin. "Your dad said the rice cake shop in Chinatown used Muggle food additives to make the cakes so springy."
"Right!" Hailey's eyes lit up. "Just like we use Vibranium to stabilize magic, they use chemicals to stabilize the structure of food-essentially, it's all about finding the underlying principles!" She shook the tin, and the silver-powder snowflakes drifted slowly down through the glycerin, reflecting the miniature Christmas tree inside and looking just like Lumos in Diagon Alley. But this time, she hadn't recited a single spell. She had simply used Muggle knowledge to build a little world where it snowed.
That afternoon, the kitchen became Hailey's science laboratory. Following the recipe she had written in her notebook, she grated the white radishes, while Mrs. Leicester helped her squeeze out the water with Muggle cheesecloth. "Your grandmother said to pick radishes with root hairs. Those are the sweetest."
"Mom, can butter really replace lard?" Hailey stared at the melting butter, remembering Eileen saying that "fat molecules have similar structures."
Mr. Leicester handed her a Muggle scale. "Accurate to the gram. More reliable than estimating with a wand." He had made a point of setting it to metric, as though conducting some important experiment.
The first four attempts were disasters: the first steamed into a runny batter, the second burned on the surface because the heat was too high, the third used sugar instead of salt, and during the fourth, she dropped her phone into the batter while stirring. Hailey slumped over the counter and sighed. "Muggle cooking is much harder than magic. At least when you get a spell wrong, you can try again."
"Wrong." Mrs. Leicester poured the fifth batch of freshly mixed batter into a mold. "Magic depends on talent; cooking depends on patience. Look at this batter—you have to stir it slowly, just like mixing Potions." She was using a Muggle silicone spatula, but her movements looked as though she were drawing a magic circle.
On the fifth attempt, Hailey stood guard by the electric steamer, watching the stopwatch more closely than she would during an exam. The moment the lid came off, the fragrance of rice and cured meat rushed toward her. The turnip cake's surface was as smooth as jade, and when she poked it with the chopsticks they had bought, it sprang back-exactly as she remembered.
"It worked!" She cut off a piece and popped it into Mr. Leicester's mouth, then fed Mrs. Leicester a bite before finally saving a small piece for herself. The fresh sweetness of the white radish and the savory saltiness of the cured meat melted on her tongue with the creamy fragrance of butter, warmer than any magical dessert.
Nini the House-elf came over carrying a plate, her eyes shining as she looked at the turnip cake on the table. "Miss, this smells even better than the ones you made with magic!" She hadn't said a spell, only offered a compliment the Muggle way, yet it brought tears to Hailey's eyes.
They began opening presents to the crackle of the fireplace. Hailey first took out her gift for her father—a paperweight polished from a pebble, coated with Muggle waterproof paint and engraved with a crooked "DAD."
"It's an ink-proof paperweight!" She demonstrated by placing it on a document. "I looked it up. With waterproof paint and gravity, the ink won't seep underneath!"
Mr. Leicester picked up the paperweight, its weight reminding him of the weights in the laboratory. "More practical than the 'automatic ink diverter' I bought, and the best part is-" He pointed to the bottom of the paperweight. "That's the shape of the mountains at Hogwarts carved there, isn't it?"
Hailey stuck out her tongue and handed her mother a glass jar. "Lavender hand cream! I used essential oil from Eileen's family and added the moisturizer Dad bought. It smells like our garden." A handwritten label was stuck to the lid: "LOVE MOM."
Mrs. Leicester opened the jar. The cream's lavender scent mingled with a faint smell of glycerin. "Silly child, my hands don't need such fancy care. As long as they can hold you, they're moisturized enough."
Finally, Hailey took a box from the back of her wardrobe. Inside was a pair of gloves knitted from Muggle yarn, with a tiny lightning-shaped fabric patch sewn onto the fingertips. "These are for... a friend." She didn't say his name, only put the box away in a drawer. "When he gets them next winter, I hope he'll like them."
Mr. and Mrs. Leicester didn't press her. They simply pressed a beautifully wrapped box into her hands. Hailey opened it to find a Muggle book called Quantum Physics for the Layperson. On the flyleaf, her father had written in fountain pen, "Everything unknown is an equation waiting to be solved, including fate." Her mother had drawn a smiling face beside it, with a Chinatown shopping receipt stuck next to it.
Outside the window, Muggle Christmas lights came on, reflecting the warmth inside the house.
"Dad, let's really set up a stall in Chinatown next Christmas, okay?" she mumbled around a mouthful of cake.
Mr. Leicester burst out laughing, his car keys jingling in his pocket. "Deal! But first you have to learn to use a Muggle oven. Don't burn out the thermostat again by mistaking it for a magic regulator."
Inside the house, the Leicesters' Christmas Eve held no magic spells, only Muggle lights, cross-dimensional turnip cake, and the warm sound of gears beginning to turn again. What was Hailey's Christmas present, you ask? Oh, come and have a guess.