Fiction for Foodies

 There's no coincidence that the expression "Whatcha got cookin'?" is often metaphorical. In literature, as in life, the kitchen is where the action is. Two of my recent reading adventures have centered around the bigger world of cooking. First, I read Delicious! by Ruth Reichl, famous for her food writing. In this story, her main character Billie Breslin gets a job as executive assistant at a food magazine (Think Gourmet or Bon Appetit) whose offices are located in a gorgeous historic home.  For reasons not quite clear at first, readers learn she has culinary talents but she's reluctant to use them. As she works to survive, taking a second job at a local family-owned delicatessen, she sees the owners pull the plug on the magazine production. In order to keep the magazine's long term promise to subscribers, Billie is left to answer the phone for a duration, responding to readers' questions--particularly those of one particularly disagreeable cook who fails to follow recipes then complains about failed results.

Reichl builds a second story line when Billie discovers in a secret compartment in the house a hidden stash of letters between a young girl Lulu and chef James Beard written throughout World War II. An unlikely romance develops between Billie and one of the deli customers (also cantankerous). She submits to a makeover (a plot device that's a little too  soap opera for me). She also discovers underlying truths about her sister's tragic death and goes on a journey to solve the Lulu-Beard mystery as well.

Billie's recipe for her mother's gingerbread, included in the volume, may be worth the price of the book.

In another twist on the culinary world, Laura Dave's protagonist in Hello, Sunshine--whose parents really named her Sunshine--and her sister Rain--is an online sensation celebrity chef with fans, best-selling cookbooks,  and a television show in the works until her online account is hacked and someone starts leaking the truth to her public: she isn't really the cook at all but a front for her producer's wife. The hacker isn't content to stop there, though, and spills the story of Sunshine's one-time indiscretion, costing her marriage as well as her career and sending her back to her childhood home where she must make peace with her sister and land a wait staff job with a demanding chef as she tries to regain her authentic identity.

Both books weave food and family into a plot full of twists. While both are lightweight reads, they're not only entertaining, but they may send readers in to the kitchen to see what they might whip up.

Fiction for Foodies

Blood, Bones, and Butter

Sometimes when I read a book I know others will enjoy, I simultaneously realize there is no way I can explain it in a way that piques their interest as it should. Gabrielle Hamilton's memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter is just such a book. To say the book is about food, while true, is also an understatement.

The author grew up in a family where food was central. She opens with her memories of the book outdoor lamb roast her father organized and carried out each year. Even her accounts of her pure delinquency when her mother left and she and a brother remained behind--basically alone--don't prepare the reader for the woman who develops.

Hamilton didn't end up with her own restaurant Prunes in New York City after going the traditional route--culinary school. In fact, after having to complete high school and college in a nontraditional setting, she earned a MFA in fiction writing from the University of Michigan, "the Harvard of the Midwest." She learned everything she knows about the food industry the hard way, from the bottom up.

She started out waiting tables, prepping for huge generic catered meals, tending bar, even underage, finally landing in her spot as owner and chef by following anything but a logical business plan.

And that is only part of the story. Hamilton married an Italian (an Italian Italian-from Italy), the father of her two sons, and went with him each July for three weeks in Italy with his family, going from Rome to their summer villa in the South, then back. These vacations not only provide rich materials for food writing but such introspection and awareness of family dynamics.

Hamilton's rich use of imagery, of figurative language might slide by a reader not mining for such, but would land smack in the subconscious, prompting one to mull over just why this book is so evocative and provocative. I'll admit that I had to figure out how to add notes and highlights to my eBook so I could return to some of the most powerful passages. For now, though, I think I want to cook some eggplant.

Blood, Bones, and Butter

Girl Uninterrupted

Part of the magic--for me at least--of a summer vacation away from the house is the uninterrupted time in which I feel completely free to read. No laundry beckoning, long-postponed chores awaiting, phones ringing--just time to do what I wish. And I wish to read. In just the last few days, with a friend at her beach house, I've been working through one to-do list--the one I posted earlier.

I first finished my umpteenth re-read of Pride and Prejudice, this time keeping notes as I wrote: chapter summaries, character development, motifs running through the narrative--the kinds of things only my kind (English teachers) actually enjoy.

Next I read The Music Lesson by Victor Wooten, a Nashville bass player. The book is so different from anything I usually read, but it was fascinating. I'm not exactly sure how to classify it: It's a little like a cross between The Alchemist and The Shack--but not like either. The book describes the lessons learned from a very nontraditional man who appears at the narrators home--out of nowhere--and teaches him lessons about Music--or Life. He enlists a smaller faculty to help him--an eleven-year-old boy, a homeless man, and a fortune teller/gift wrapper dressed in purple.

Now I'm almost through Sheila Kay Adams' My Old True Love, set in "Bloody Madison" County North Carolina around the time of the Civil War. The book is written in Southern dialect so true, I can hear my grandmother talking through it. Although I am not reading this book for the same
educational purposes as I read Pride and Prejudice, I am again reading with pen in hand, making notes to myself.

What has happened, as it always does, is that the three vastly different books have common threads. Both Pride and Prejudice and My Old True Love explore the success of "playing hard to get. My Old True Love discussion of the sounds of empty space, building on a concept in The Music Lesson.

In the meantime, I have broken up the fiction with Southern Living--deciding how we'll use the okra, homegrown tomatoes, and fresh seafood in the beachhouse kitchen. No symbolism there--and the only empty space--our stomachs--only temporary.

Girl Uninterrupted