The Grill Master, The 3 am Gourmet And The Experimenter
Long before the sugar mill closed and the small yet thriving tourist trap town of Ambrose started to die, Victor Sinclair and a couple of helpful locals would flood the nearby towns and cities with colourful fliers advertising ‘Trudy’s World Famous House Of Wax’ weeks ahead of the busy tourist season.
For some, passing through Ambrose was a traditional once-a-year pilgrimage, a quick detour off the interstate that provided travellers with one last pit-stop before heading out to complete the last leg of their journey to popular lakeside locales and family-oriented campgrounds.
Aside from refuelling their vehicles at the service station, the ice cream parlour drew in excited children all too happy to harass their parents for a sugar cone, the sporting good store provided avid anglers with a diverse selection of rods, reels and lures and the last stop most people made before heading out on the road again was, more often than not, a tour of ‘Trudy’s.’
Understandably, with Victor busy with his medical practice and Trudy preoccupied with playing tour guide to the influx of paying customers, they couldn’t very well leave a ‘problem child’ like Bo unsupervised, especially around his twin, their ‘pride and joy’, and a precocious mischief-maker of a toddler like Lester, so they came up with a rather ingenious solution.
For three months during the peak of tourist season, Victor’s parents, Grandpa Walter and Grandma Evelyn, or ‘Gramma Evie’ as the boys called her, would move into the family home and play babysitter while Victor and Trudy focused on their work, an arrangement that proved to have rather unexpected and long-lasting side effects, especially when it came to ‘the boys’ and their cooking skills…
Bo - The ‘Grill Master’
Grandpa Walter was your stereotypically charming, smooth-talking ‘Southern Gentleman’, but to Bo, he was a absolute godsend.
Where his parents only saw a ‘monster’, something that needed to be strapped down to a highchair, screamed at and begrudgingly ‘dealt with’, all Grandpa Walter ever saw was a deeply misunderstood boy that lashed out at whatever hurt and frightened him, so he dedicated every waking moment during those brief three months attempting to undo at least some of the damage his misguided son and daughter-in-law had inflicted upon him.
It was Grandpa Walter that sent Bo his treasured model car and truck kits for birthdays and Christmas, taught him how to fish, shoot and hunt in and around the woods surrounding Ambrose, how to drive a car and, when he was old enough, gave him his first taste of Kentucky bourbon.
It was from watching Grandpa Walter sweet-talk Gramma Evie and beguile any other woman he came across that a troubled teenage Bo first learned how to charm women, and it was Grandpa Walter that taught him how to use a barbeque, something his father, as a surgeon, understandably never dared touch for fear of injuring his hands, his livelihood.
When it came to barbequing, Grandpa Walter was a true master, turning even the toughest and cheapest cuts of meat into a culinary masterpiece with time-honed skills and techniques, carefully crafted hand-made sauces, marinades and glazes, and he lovingly taught Bo everything he knew.
The only compliment Bo can ever remember his father giving him was when he overheard him saying to his mother, after he skilfully barbecued an entire meal by himself for the first time, was “Trudy, the boy’s a natural.”
To this day, there isn’t a single piece of meat Lester can bring to him that Bo can’t turn into a gourmet meal with enough time, effort and patience, and Vincent and Lester eagerly look forward to Bo’s ’Sunday BBQ dinners’ with great anticipation.
(Just don’t ask him to make you anything dessert-related as this man can’t handle anything more complex than Jello, much to his twin’s everlasting shame and disappointment. Do NOT ask about the ‘apple pie incident.’ Just...don’t...)
Vincent - ‘The 3am Gourmet’
With Grandpa Walter preoccupied with Bo and Lester being too young to go outside and play with, Vincent was left to the tender mercies of Gramma Evie, who, after graduating from culinary school after college, spent most of her life working in a number of restaurants as both a line cook and a sous chef.
It was Gramma Evie that first noticed how enraptured shy, quiet and observant Vincent was when she cooked the family’s breakfast, lunch and dinner every day during those summer months, and, to her immense delight, Vincent soon proved to be the ideal candidate for whom she could pass her impressive cooking skills to.
Under Gramma Evie’s patient tutelage, Vincent soon learned how to bake, fry, poach, sauté and braise with confidence and very quickly learned, after an embarrassingly unfortunate accident, the hazards of pressing his wax mask covered face too close to the open door of a 400° degree oven…
Even after continuing to complete his mother’s vision of a ‘Perfect Ambrose’, Vincent frequently gets random bursts of creativity where nothing else matters save for what he wants to create in the kitchen at the time, no matter the hour, and it’s Lester that provides him with all the raw materials to create it with.
Whenever he passes through a small town or city on a grocery run, Lester will obligingly stop at any small delicatessens and gourmet food shops he comes across and pick up the most random assortment of ingredients he thinks are either unusual or interesting enough to pique his brother’s interest.
Black garlic, white truffles, juniper berries, agave syrup, tamarind paste and all manner of eclectic ingredients have made it into Vincent’s eager hands to be thoroughly inspected, smelled, tasted and summarily put aside until he thinks of a way to incorporate them into a new recipe.
(All with the exception of Marmite, however, whose aroma caused Vincent to violently retch and forced him to make Lester swear on his LIFE to never again bring it anywhere near Ambrose for as long as either of them lives...)
Marmite-related incidents aside, when summoned, both Bo and Lester have gleefully partaken in sumptuous homemade meals such as brioche french toast, duck legs confit, maple pudding chômeur, crawfish gumbo, homemade beignets and anything else that’s within Vincent’s ability to cook, and quite a few evenings have seen all three brothers sprawled out on the couch in the living room with matching ‘food comas.’
And yes, Bo has had his twin poke him awake in the middle of the night for some ’lightly fried fish filets’.
Lester - The ‘Experimenter’
With the passing of Grandpa Walter and Gramma Evie within a few weeks of each other when he was still a child, Lester never got the chance to benefit from their years of experience, and only after being reunited with his brothers, getting a job with the county as a roadkill operator and moving into a place of his own did Lester learn that a steady diet of microwaveable frozen meals and cheap greasy take-out eventually looses its appeal.
However, with Bo and Vincent busy turning the dead town into an altogether different kind of ‘tourist trap’ than it was before, Lester knew that he was on his own when it came to teaching himself how to cook, but, in a stroke of luck, soon realized that the deserted town provided him with the perfect opportunity with which to do so.
Scavenging the abandoned homes of the former residents for every cookbook he could get his hands on, Lester soon dedicated every spare moment he could to a slow painful process of ‘trial and error’, picking up basic skills in remarkable time and swiftly moving onto ever more daring gastronomic experimentation, combining flavours and ingredients he knew tasted good on their own into both brilliant and downright vile concoctions.
Even as an adult, with his salary affording him the equipment to dry, cure and preserve his own meat, Lester still loves to create unique, one-of-a-kind dishes, and his hapless brothers, whom Lester views as little more than ’guinea pigs’, have come to view his hit and miss ‘experiments’ with a mixture of anticipation and dread.
The grilled pheasant with a sweet and sticky caramel sauce went over surprisingly well, but the alligator and grape jelly stew? Not even Lester managed to keep that particular dish down and the whole mess, pot and all, was promptly buried in the woods by candlelight with all three brothers eagerly agreeing to never mention it ever again.
(In Lester’s defence, he well and truly believed that adding a bit of grape jelly to the stew would add just a ‘hint of sweetness’, and it might’ve worked if not for the fact that he casually dumped in the entire 12 ounce jar...)
