The Grub-and-Stakers Spin a Yarn by Charlotte MacLeod Read Free Book Online Page B

related, though we never managed to figure out just how. My granny was a McCorquindale before her marriage. But I’m digressing. I don’t know how familiar you two are with the mincemeat business …?”
    “All we know is what it says on the jar,” Dittany replied.
    “Then you at least know that Mother Matilda’s Mincemeat is a subtle blend of chopped beef, suet, apples, sugar, cider, raisins, currants, citron, dried orange peel, and a good many other things I needn’t go into just now. Including a couple I wouldn’t tell you about anyway. But what makes our mincemeat unique isn’t so much the ingredients as the subtle blending. We don’t just scoop up a jugful of this and a handful of that and bung ’em into the cauldrons the way some people seem to think. Every milligram of nutmeg, cinnamon, mace, and several more things I’m sworn to secrecy about is weighed, measured, and sniffed to ensure absolute consistency of taste and quality. Oh, we’re sticklers, I can tell you that.”
    “We believe you,” Dittany replied politely.
    Mother Matilda didn’t seem to hear her. “Yes, it was stickling that got us where we are today, and stickling which I greatly fear has precipitated this awful business.”
    “How’s that?” said Osbert.
    This time Mother Matilda heard. “Well, you see, Deputy, there’s only one person alive in this world today who knows the whole secret recipe and that’s yours truly right here. The paper it’s written on in Granny’s handwriting was handed to me by my mother on her deathbed. I took my oath then and there never to divulge the recipe to anybody until the time came for me to hand over my cap and apron, figuratively speaking, to Matilda the Fourth. Actually my daughter’s Matilda the Fifth because it’s really Great-Granny’s recipe, but it was Granny who first developed the commercial possibilities, so we think of her instead of her mother as Matilda the First. You could argue it either way, though I don’t suppose you’d particularly care to in the present circumstances.”
    Osbert didn’t suppose so, either. “So what that means is that you have to go all over the factory every day telling everybody how much of which ingredient to use, right?”
    Mother Matilda managed a wan smile. “Lord bless you, sonny, how’d a high-powered executive like me have time for all that? Mother Matilda’s Mincemeat is a multimillion dollar operation these days. If I told you what we spend in a year’s time on orange peel alone, you’d think I was having a pipe dream. What we do is, we compartmentalize. That was poor Charles’s word for it. We have a VP Cinnamon, as we call them for short, a VP Mace, a VP Cloves, and so on down through the list. They’re all tried and true veterans, all sworn to secrecy. I’d have trusted any of them with my life. Though of course not with my recipe.”
    The mincemeat magnate appeared for a moment close to tears, but she rallied bravely and went on with her explanation. “I don’t know how much you people here in Lobelia Falls know about the vicious internecine war raging in the mincemeat business today. We’d heard reports of spies infiltrating elsewhere, but never dreamed it could affect us until all of a sudden, things began to happen.”
    “What sort of things?” said Dittany.
    “First it was VP Cider. The cider we use is sweet cider, fresh-squeezed in our own cider press, so naturally you wouldn’t expect there to be anything wrong with it, right?”
    “But there was?”
    “I’ll tell the world there was! You see, one of VP Cider’s functions is to taste each batch of cider and make sure it conforms to our rigid standards. We can’t always get the same variety and quality of apples, needless to say, so this tasting is another extremely important function. Well! VP Cider—Fred Perkins, his name is, Fred and I were in Sunday school together—was down in the cider store by himself, tasting a batch as usual, and he didn’t send