Flourish and Blotts did not carry cookbooks. This was, on reflection, not surprising — Flourish and Blotts carried what magical students needed, and magical students were fed by house elves who did not require instruction. He needed a Muggle bookshop, which meant London, which meant Hogsmeade first, which meant the question of how.
Third-years were not permitted unsupervised trips to Hogsmeade on non-designated weekends. He had known about the One-Eyed Witch passage since September — it was in the Marauders' notes that Lupin had let slip references to during one of the early Defence sessions, and he had confirmed the entrance on a Tuesday walk in October, the hump of the stone witch on the third floor, the tap sequence. He had not used it. He had been careful, this year, about which rules he bent and which he did not, operating on the logic that a profile kept low in ordinary matters was worth more than any individual shortcut.
This was not an ordinary matter. This was cookbooks.
He left on a Saturday morning at half past six, before the castle properly woke. The corridor on the third floor was empty. He tapped the sequence, heard the soft grind of stone, climbed into the passage with a Lumos at low strength and walked the long descent toward Honeydukes — fifteen minutes in the low dark, the floor uneven, the smell shifting from castle stone to something older and earthier as the passage sloped. He emerged through the trapdoor into the cellar of Honeydukes, which at half past six on a Saturday held no one, the shelves above already stacked for the day's trade, the smell of sugar and chocolate heavy in the low air.
He moved through the shop quietly, out the front — the door unlocked from inside — and into Hogsmeade in the early morning. The village was not yet busy. He walked to the Three Broomsticks, where Madam Rosmerta was polishing glasses at the bar with the efficient economy of someone completing a task she had completed a thousand times, and looked up when he came in without particular surprise.
"Floo?" he said.
"Fireplace is open," she said, and went back to the glasses.
He stepped through to Diagon Alley, walked out the Leaky Cauldron and into the grey December city, and found a bookshop within twenty minutes using the specific purposeful quality of someone who had a list and knew how to navigate a Muggle street.
He came back three hours later with five books instead of three, which was the predictable result of walking into a bookshop with a specific intent and an eidetic memory and genuine curiosity. The additional two were a book on bread — because the French book had a section on bread and the bread section had made him want more depth — and a small, dense volume on fermentation that the shop assistant had mentioned when he asked about Japanese cooking and which covered miso and koji and the specific slow alchemy of things that changed through time and patience into something that had not existed before
He brought them to the kitchen that evening.
The older elf looked at the stack. She picked up the Kerala book first. She opened it to a page he had not yet read and looked at it for a long moment with an expression that was not quite readable but had something in it that was close to recognition.
"Fish curry," she said, looking at the page.
"Yes," he said.
She set the book down on the worksurface with the careful precision of someone placing something where it belonged. "We will start on Saturday," she said. "Not this one. Something simpler first. Something you can do without the history getting in the way."
He looked at her.
"Some recipes," she said, with the specific economy of someone who had cooked for a very long time and had learned things that were not in any book, "you have to earn. You learn the technique first. Then you go back to the thing you came for, and it is different than it would have been if you had started with it."
He thought about that. "That sounds right," he said.
"It is right," she said, with the calm certainty of someone who was not guessing.
He took the Kerala book from the worksurface and put it in his bag. Not away. Present. For later, when he had earned it.
He took out the French book instead.
They began with a beurre blanc.