The Taste of Home - Part One
By Deborah L. Davitt
Happy New Story Sunday, Daily Tomorrow readers! I hope you have enjoyed the seven (!) stories we’ve published so far, and we’re looking forward to showing you the twelve more we have lined up. Which one has been your favorite? Let us know in the comments to this post! (Once we have enough out, we might even do an official award.)
It has been immensely exciting to see our reader count gradually ticking up over the weeks. None of us are quitting our day jobs, but knowing that we have this going on in the background certainly adds a sparkle to the more humdrum workdays. You might have noticed that none of us have put our names on the website or promotional materials — suffice it to say that we are basically cowards who don’t want to explain to our bosses that our compensated attentions have been at all divided these past months.
Anyway, if you have any suggestions for the magazine or comments about how it’s going, please let us know! We really appreciate you giving our wonderful writers a look and hope that we are adding something pleasant to your daily routine. This week, we have a truly lovely story about everyday things (though, perhaps, not narrated in a day-by-day fashion). We think it’s delicious.
- The Editor
The Taste of Home
By Deborah L. Davitt
Aboard the Epsilon Pegasus, the colony ship still accelerating in the blackness of space between Sol and Barnard’s Star, Erica stared at her mother. “You want to make what now?”
“Lebkuchen. It’s a German Christmas cookie my grandmother used to make on Earth every year when I was a girl.”
“But it’s not Christmas.” Privately, sixteen-year-old Erica thought it was silly of the older folk to celebrate seasonal events, from Eid to Purim. They were relics of a planet they’d left behind for a ship that knew no seasons, but she was old enough now to know when not to say things out loud.
“I know, but I woke up this morning with a craving for it—that, stollen, and strong coffee.” A faint shrug. “We’ve got bees in hydroponics, though they get confused in the center of the ship where the spin gravity leaves a void, so I can try lebkuchen. Come on, what else do you have to do today?”
Erica scuffed the deck with a toe. She had schoolwork, sure, and her apprenticeship in the engineering section, but to be honest, the next two hours were open. “I thought I’d hang with my friends,” she ventured.
“You can put your daily gripe session with Hakim and Antonia and everyone else on hold,” her mom said gently. “Come do this with me. Please.”
Fifteen minutes later, Erica stared at the recipe, scanned from someone’s handwritten notes in a script and a language she couldn’t read. “Please tell me you have this typed up somewhere—oh, there we go.” She squinted at the new screen. “What’s Hirschornsalz?”
“A leavening agent. We’ll substitute baking powder; it’s fine.”
“And, um. Almonds?” Erica had misgivings. “Those grow on trees, right? We don’t have those.”
Her mother sighed. “Part of cooking is overcoming adversity,” she counseled. “We have peanuts, right? Hydroponics loves those for their nitrogen-fixing properties. They’re used in the actual beds to improve the soil for that reason.” She smiled. “It won’t taste exactly the same, but it’ll be our variation.”
“And the… candied peel?”
“There’s some in ship’s stores. It’s practically immortal, don’t worry.”
Erica eyed the obviously-dyed glacéed peels in their tubs dubiously, and then leaned in to sniff them. “Oh,” she said, blinking. “Those smell nice! Like the canned orange slices from the galley.”
“Exactly. We’ll grind them up in the processor once the peanuts are done, and mix them into the warmed honey.”
“This says Kirschwasser. Um. Cherry-water? Like, juice?”
“Cherry brandy. Which we don’t have. We’ll use a little cherry extract, but just a few drops. It’ll all blend in together, trust me.”
The mixture was so stiff that her mom had to hold the pot in place while Erica stirred the hot honey into the flour, nuts, and spices. Those spices still came from Earth, which her mother mixed in liberally, turning the mixture a dark brown with cinnamon, clove, cardamom, and allspice. Erica discreetly sniffed at her hands after handling everything, feeling a warm glow inside. Serotonin, she thought, remembering her physiology lessons. It’s a release of pleasure hormones, right?
“Now we pour it onto the parchment-covered pan while it’s still warm, spread it out, and bake it all together. We’ll cut it after it bakes, not before, unlike other cookies.” Her mother brushed flour off her hands briskly.
“More like a brownie?”
“Similar in concept, not in outcome.”
Deborah L. Davitt was raised in Nevada, but currently lives in Houston, Texas with her husband and son. Her award-winning poetry and prose has appeared in over seventy journals, including F&SF, Asimov’s, Analog, and Lightspeed. For more about her work, including her Elgin-placing poetry collections, Bounded by Eternity and From Voyages Unreturning, see www.deborahldavitt.com. She also has a new poetry chapbook out in 2024 (Xenoforming), as well as a TTRPG and novel: Mists & Memory and In Memory’s Shadow.
Copyright © 2025 Deborah L. Davitt